Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation/Style guide/Layout (Airlines)

Aviation WikiProject
General information
Main project page (talk) Announcements and open tasks (talk) → AfD record (talk) → Article alerts → Maintenance (talk) → New articles (talk) → Resources (talk) Notability and Style guide (talk) Showcase and Popular pages
Departments Assessment (Log) (talk) → B-Class / A-Class → Instructions Collaboration (NB: Inactive) (talk) Outreach department (talk) → Current newsletter → Contest (talk) Peer review (talk) The WikiEagle (talk) → Current issue
Project organization Coordinators (talk) Members (talk) Portals Project banner (talk) Project category (talk)
Templates Infobox templates → Aircraft begin infobox (talk) → Aircraft occurrence infobox (talk) → Airline infobox (talk) → Airport infobox (talk) → Aviator infobox (talk) → Company infobox (talk) Navigation boxes (talk)
Sub-projects Aircraft project (talk) → Engines task force (talk) → Rotorcraft task force (talk) Airlines project (talk) → Defunct Airlines task force (talk) Airports project (talk) Gliding project (talk) Aerospace biography task force (talk) Air sports task force (talk) Aviation accident task force (talk) Military aviation task force (talk) Soviet aviation task force (talk)
v t e

Style and formatting
Style Subpages Abbreviations Accessibility Biographies Capital letters Dates and numbers Disambiguation pages Icons (e.g., flags, logos, etc.) Infoboxes Aviation infoboxes Links Lists of works Military history Pronunciation Spelling Text formatting Titles
Policies & Guidelines Alternative text for images Captions Categorization Aviation categories Categorization of people Citing sources Explain jargon External links Footnotes Aviation citations Layout Lead section Lists Aviation lists Make technical articles accessible Naming conventions Aircraft names Airport names Proper names Stubs Summary style Technical terms Trivia sections Writing better articles Wikimedia sister projects Words to avoid
Help FAQ Glossary How to edit a page Picture tutorial Sections
Project specific Aircraft articles Aircraft engine articles
v t e

Note: These guidelines are not complete and could use some general comments on what should be provided.

This is a set of suggested guidelines for articles on specific airline. Some Wikipedians prefer a standardised look and feel to articles on closely-related subjects and these guidelines exist to facilitate achieving that goal for articles about aircraft.

For general guidelines about writing and editing Wikipedia articles, see Category:Wikipedia style guidelines.

Remember that you're in no way obliged to follow all, or even any, of these guidelines to contribute an article.

Structure

Highlighted suggested heading are links to the specific project discussion page.The basic Wiki guidelines should be followed with the following comments:

Introduction and infobox

The introduction should include the owner of the airline and some general comments about the airline. Once the airline is created as a company, it can be included as an article. Information about an owning company should be included in the article for that company. The IATA and ICAO codes should be checked to see that they are redirects to the airline or that a disambiguation page exists that includes the airline. The codes should also be added to IATA airline designator and ICAO airline designator lists.

The {{Infobox airline}} template should be added to all articles for the basic information. Please see the template documentation for more information on what should be included and what parameters to use. Unnecessary repeating of this information in the body of the article is discouraged.

History

Care should be taken in the structure so that different versions of the airline are clearly marked.

• Slogans list by date with the oldest first-slogan (from-to)
• Notable advertising campaigns
• Livery

Destinations

• WP:ALD
• WP:AIRLINE-DEST-CONTENT
• WP:AIRLINE-DEST-LIST

Wikipedia:WikiProject Airlines/AfD record contains a list of past AfDs on this topic.

Destinations can be either used as the word-based format shown in articles like Air Berlin destinations, in a table & referenced format with start/end dates like List of Braathens destinations & List of Cathay Dragon destinations, or in a table without start/end dates such as List of British Airways destinations and American Airlines destinations.

Only list destinations. Flight schedules or routing should not be included in this section. Code share destinations should not be listed for the secondary carrier. For airlines with limited destinations, the information can be included in line. Also, flags are not to be used in any destination list. This is in accordance with MOS:FLAGS, which states that flags should only be used when a subject actually represents a country, which is usually not the case for an airport.

Once an airline has enough destinations, they could be listed as a collapsible table, or in a stand alone article.^[1]

One way of listing destinations is with a bulleted list. Destinations should be listed in alphabetical order by country like this:

• Country
  • City – Airport

If more than one airport is served them list as:

• Country
  • City
    • Airport1
    • Airport2

If needed the list can be sorted by continent and region in stand alone articles only. It is suggested that regions are only used if the number of countries in a continent exceeds ten.

Destinations for other than passenger service should be included as a heading to describe the type of scheduled service such as:

• Cargo
• Charter
• Military

Here are some guidelines on how to format a table destination list with start and end dates.^[2] It is your choice to use the word based format or the table based format, but many members of this project would recommend using the table-based format because it was used in two featured lists, List of Braathens destinations and List of Cathay Dragon destinations.

• In accordance with MOS:FLAGS do not add country flags to the table based format because airports do not really represent a particular country, which is required for flags to be added.
• As per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking#What generally should not be linked countries should not be linked. Although the MoS also says that major cities should not be linked most airline articles will link them.
• Destination lists should always be sorted by country, not by city. They should also have the ability to be sorted by the reader.
• Country subdivisions (such as states, provinces, or counties) can be added in parentheses in the country column or a separate column can be added. Not every country has subdivisions so do not create a separate column for these as it may be blank in many cases.
• Do not use colors to identify certain types of destinations as this makes the table harder to edit, even by experienced editors. Instead state whether the destination is terminated, a hub, seasonal, etc., using words not colors. They should be listed in a separate "Notes" column (see second example below) if the table does not have start/ end dates.
• Destination lists should always include some general info about the airline in addition to the list of destinations. It should include a short description (1–2 paragraphs) with general info about the airline such as a little history of the airline and how its destinations have changed over the years.
• Information about routing and cities served from a particular destination should not be included (Wikipedia is not a travel guide), unless a certain route is particularly notable (for example Singapore Airlines' Newark–Singapore route is the longest in the world).
• Do not add IATA/ICAO airport codes as these are not widely used outside the aviation industry and can be easily found by clicking on the link to the airport's article.
• Adding start/end dates is strongly encouraged but in many cases the information may be unavailable or hard to find. Even if the information on start/end dates is unavailable, terminated destinations should still be present in the table. And they should be marked as "Terminated" in order to differentiate from destinations currently served by the airline.
• And of course, destinations should always be suitably referenced by adding a ref to the "Ref" column in the table. Ideally, all rows of the ref column should be filled with refs.

The following are examples of what the table format should look like. This does not represent service of any real airline, and is purely for demonstration purposes only.Foo Airlines [this should be linked to the airline's article] flies to the following destinations as of March 2012:

This is an example of a destination table without start and end dates.^[2] While it is highly recommended to use start and end dates, in many cases these may be very hard to find references stating when service began or ended, especially for established airlines. This table is just an example and does not represent service of any real airline.

In order to easily add the color-coded cells in the "Notes" column, there are some templates you can use. To mark terminated destinations, add {{Terminated}} into the cell. Use the template {{Airline hub}} to mark hubs, the template {{Airline focus}} for focus cities, template {{Airline seasonal}} for seasonal destinations and {{Coming soon}} for a destination which is about to begin in near future (along with a particular first flight date).^[3]