NOTE: These are all early recommendations and we welcome your input. Current pages (unfortunately) do not follow these guidelines and are inconsistent. We'll update all pages once this is nailed down.
Short, declarative sentences with a crisp, active voice directed at the designer or developer who will be using our tools. View Apple's interface guidelines for a good example of the tone we'd like to follow in this wiki. Try to cross-link related plugins whenever possible.
The project name should always be written 'jQuery UI', never just 'UI'. Also we never expand to the full-length jQuery User Interface. Finally, no other forms (whether abbreviations, hyphenations, or capitaliztion) should be used, such as: JQUI, jQui, jquery.ui, jQuery.UI, jQuery-UI, jQuery UI Library, jQuery UI Framework, etc. Sentences like "Use the jQuery UI framework to get the job done" can be easily rewritten to "Use jQuery UI, the rich jQuery powered UI framework, to get the job done". This helps to focus on the branding.
Plugins should be named as briefly and unambiguously as possible and in the singular. Ideally, these should be a single word like "tree" or "sortable" but for longer names, we should separate words with spaces which is different than the current jQuery system. For example, we use "Progressbar" in the current documentation but "progress bar" is probably a more common way to write this. In a quick Google search, you find 3.5M results for "progressbar" and 12.3M results for "progress bar". This trend is consistent across all widget searches so it seems to be a better way to name components.
There are exceptions where the use of the singular for plugin names is insufficient. If the term in singular isn't applicable for the widget, the plural has to be used instead. A good example is the "tabs" plugin. Since instantiating a single tab would not highlight the plugin itself and is useless, "tab" does not describe semantically what the plugin does.
NOTE: this is a potentially big decision that could have ripples beyond this wiki so we need to discuss.
Plugin, page and section titles all use sentence capitalization. Only the first word is capitalized in a title, not each word.
Ex. "Language styleguide", not "Language Styleguide".
You can use spaces in wiki page titles -- these will appear in the URL as a "+" separator.
Ex. This page's URL is "http://jqueryui.pbwiki.com/Language+styleguide".
In the running text, plugins should be written in lower case with spaces.
Ex. "a select box is used...", not "a Select Box is used...".
plugin - any jQuery widget or component
widget - a plugin that is a complete UI element that a user would interact with like a tab strip or calendar and will be styled in ThemeRoller
effect - a plugin that provides a visual effect like animation and easing
interaction - a plugin that adds user interaction behavior to an element like draggable or resizable
utility - a plugin that adds a low-level capability or tool to the library like positioning or collision detection