Help:Best Practices

From CharlestonWiki

This page contains general wiki guidelines. Kind of a "how to place nice" document.

Contents 1 Articles as Advertisements 2 Colloquialisms 3 Inevitable Bias 4 Controversial Topics 5 Articles With Questionable Information 6 Talk Pages 7 Images 8 Naming 9 Categorizing 9.1 Guidelines 10 Copying from other Wikis 10.1 Wikipedia 10.2 Other Wikis 11 Linking to Other Wikis 12 User Signatures

Articles as Advertisements

Spam is inevitable and can come in many forms. Some people will attempt to create entries that are pure advertisements for their businesses. Others will edit / create entries that have a definite slant intending to increase business. Articles about businesses are alright, as long as they are not glowing tributes meant as a clever hook to pull in customers. If the article simple stays as close to the bare facts as possible, then it should be alright. If you have a specific experience with a company and feel that it must be made known, put something on a talk page. Some information that could be on a business page would be:

• parking information
• a menu
• average price

Articles about businesses should contain the following banner:

Colloquialisms

This wiki serves to record the collective knowledge of the Charleston area. Some of this is knowledge is essentially living; it changes over time. For instance, see the article on Charleston Place. You should notice that the article entitled The Omni redirects you there. Many old Charlestonians still call it The Omni. This is, however seemingly irrelavent, an example of local nomenclature and worth recording. Another example is the Cuz-Way redirection to the Arthur Ravenel Bridge. Common colloquialisms will generally show up in a list at the bottom of the page, like this:

Inevitable Bias

Bias will necessarily arise. If you suspect bias in an article, bring it up on the talk page for that article(see Talk Pages). It is important to garner as much community consensus as possible when addressing issues of perspective. Say, for instance, in the article about Joe Riley you come across a sentence stating Joe Riley is an idiot who exercises hegemony and paternalism like no other mayor in the history of Charleston. It's pretty obvious that that sentance needs to go. But what about a sentence that says Joe Riley has proved himself to be the most influential mayor in the area of small business growth Charleston has ever had. This sounds like it could be opinion, but there could be numbers / metrics to back that statement up. That is definitely a time for the community to join in and hopefully come to some sort of resolution.

Controversial Topics

Topics that are considered controversial will generally have a banner like the following at the top:

These topics may require more editorial oversite than other articles. They are either watched by an editor or even sometimes may be protected against editing altogether. The talk page for each of these articles should have an entry describing why they are listed as controversial. See also the page on editorial control.

Articles With Questionable Information

There are a few articles that may contain information that either has not been verified or that cannot be verified. These articles are not so much controversial as they are questionable. They should not be relied upon for accurate information. They will have a banner at the top that looks like this:

Talk Pages

Every article has a talk page associated with it and can be accessed via a tab at the top labeled discussion. The comments on these pages discuss various issues, suggestions, and comments associated with the article. The comments will not be erased (unless a clear example of spam).

Images

Images can be uploaded using the Upload file link found in the box titled toolbox in the lower left hand corner of the page. When setting the Destination filename please choose a meaningful name that relates specifically to the image you are uploading. For instance, on the Arthur Ravenel Bridge page there is a picture called Ravenelbridge.jpg. A name like bridge.jpg would be inappropriate; there are many bridges that could be on this wiki. Titles like Image 036.jpg are certainly incorrect. A title like Hominy_Grill.jpg for a picture of a typical dish at the Hominy Grill is borderline because there are many possible pictures relating to that location that could have that title. A more prudent name would be Hominy_Grill_typical_dish.jpg.

Images that have large amounts of space dedicated to superfluous imagery should be cropped (a picture of a statue should not contain mostly grass in the image). Low resolution images are generally a bad idea, unless they are small and the subject matter can be easily discerned.

Licensing information must be included at the bottom of each image. From the Copyright information page:

All uploaded material(images, sounds, music, etc...) must have an explicit license and permission granted for the Charleston Wiki Project usage. This should be part of the contents page. An official license tag should be used. If a tag isn't available for the content you wish to post, please contact a Charleston Wiki administrator. The Charleston Wiki prefers Creative Commons-ShareAlike licensed material.

Naming

Some wikis require that article titles that contain more than one word be created without spaces. Some examples follow:

• FoodAndBeverage
• LocalParks
• UnitedStatesOfAmerica

The type of wiki that the Charleston Wiki Project uses (mediawiki) does not, however, and can handle spaces. For instance, the following are correct:

• Joe Riley
• Possible Topics

These titles can be typed in to the url after the domain name, like this: http://charlestonwiki.org/Possible Topics.

Categorizing

Categories (along with other features like cross-references, lists, and infoboxes) help users find information, even if they don't know that it exists or what it's called.

Every page in the article namespace should belong to at least one category. Categories should be major topics that are likely to be useful to someone reading the article.

Article: w:Michael Jackson

Useful category: w::Category:Pop singers

Not useful: Category:Musicians whose first name starts with M

Questions to ask to determine whether it is appropriate to add an article to a category:

• If the category does not already exist, is it possible to write a few paragraphs or more on the subject of the category, explaining it?
• If you go to the article from the category, will it be obvious why the article was put in the category? Is the category subject prominently discussed in the article?

If the answer to either of these questions is no, then the category is probably inappropriate. Note that it is always appropriate to add articles to categories that fit into well established taxonomies. For example, every article about a musical album is categorized in some [[Category:Artistname albums]] category, which is in turn categorized in w::Category:Albums by artist.

Guidelines

1. Categories are mainly used to browse through similar articles. Make decisions about the structure of categories and subcategories that make it easy for users to browse through similar articles.
2. An article will often be in several categories. Restraint should be used as categories become less effective the more there are on any given article.
3. Categories should never be redirects.
4. Articles should not usually be in both a category and its subcategory. For example w:Golden Gate Bridge is in w::Category:Suspension bridges, so it should not also be in w::Category:Bridges. However there are occasions when this guideline can and should be ignored. For example, w:Robert Duvall is in w::Category:Film actors as well as its subcategory w::Category:Best Actor Oscar. See #5 for another exception. For more about this see w:Categorization/Categories and subcategories
5. Check to see where siblings of the article reside. If there are few if any articles in a category, the article probably belongs in one of the subcategories.
6. Articles should be placed in categories with the same name. However, the article and the category do not have to be categorized the same way. The article can also be placed in categories populated with similar articles. The category can be put into categories populated with similar subcategories. For an example of this see w:George W. Bush and w::Category:George W. Bush.
7. There are often occasions when articles might ideally be moved from a category to two or more of its subcategories, but not all of the subcategories exist. In such cases consider creating the additional subcategories, but if you decide not to do so, leave the articles in the parent category for the time being.
8. Bend the rules above when it makes sense, but only if no other solution can be found.
9. Categories appear without annotations, so be careful of w:NPOV when creating or filling categories. Unless it is self-evident and uncontroversial that something belongs in a category, it should not be put into a category.
10. Category names should be plural, e.g. [[Category:Artists]] versus [[Category:Artist]]

Copying from other Wikis

Wikipedia

From the Wikipedia copyright page:

The license Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Wikipedia articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom.

To fulfill the above goals, the text contained in Wikipedia is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The full text of this license is at Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License.

The Charleston Wiki Project uses a similar license known as the Creative Commons license (see CharlestonWiki:Copyrights). It does fulfill the requirements of the GFDL. What this means is that content you post can be dually licensed under the GFDL and the Charleston Wiki Project standard Creative Commons license. You are therefore free to copy verbatim from Wikipedia as long as you acknowledge the authors of the Wikipedia article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies their author credit requirement) and release the content under the GFDL. These requirements still apply even if you are simply posting modified content. The easiest way to fulfill this requirement is to add the Wikipedia copy template at the end of your article. Just add the following line:

{{Wikipedia_copy|LINK}}

Where LINK is the url of the article on wikipedia. It then looks like this:

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Users.27_rights_and_obligations for more information.

Other Wikis

If the wiki you are copying from releases their content under either the GFDL or a comparable version of the Creative Commons license then you can use the content as described above. Be careful with the Creative Commons license, though: some versions may not allow you to modify the content.

If the wiki you wish to copy from has a different license or no licensing information is listed, it is a good idea to contact the maintainers and ask about their copying restrictions.

Linking to Other Wikis

There are a few shortcuts built in to link to other Wikis. For instance, to easily link to an article on Wikipedia use the following syntax:

[[w:Article]]

which produces w:Article. You can provide a different title for the link using the following syntax:

[[w:Article|This is a link to the wikipedia article on articles]]

which produces This is a link to the wikipedia article on articles. If you leave the default representation, however, the w: preceding the article title makes it clear that you are linking to a different wiki.

The syntax will always be the name of the wiki, followed by a colon, followed by the name of the article. You can find a list of Interwiki links at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Interwiki_linking. Not all of the links on this list are supported on the Charleston Wiki Project, but most should be. Contact one of the administrators if you find one missing that you think should be here.

User Signatures

User signatures should only be used when posting comments on talk pages. There is no need to sign article pages; the history tab at the top contains the entire history of changes, when they were made, and who made them. To automatically add your signature to the end of a comment, use:

-- ~~~~

This produces two dashes, followed by a link to your user page, followed by the date. It looks like this:

-- Brian Muller 12:32, 24 May 2006 (EDT)