This pages provides some basic information about writing articles. To return to the "About Anabaptistwiki" page click here.
What is an Article?
Article pages are the primary content pages on the Global Anabaptist Wiki. They include encyclopedic information about Anabaptist-related groups and organizations, as well as more informal, personal stories about the life of Anabaptist-related groups. They occupy the "main" namespace of the Global Anabaptist Wiki. The main namespace does not include pages that are used for organization and policy. In other words, pages like category, special, or file pages, are not places where you should insert important informative content. For example, the article page entitled Paraguay will contain general information about Anabaptist-related groups in Paraguay, while the Paraguay category page will include a list of all the articles that fall under the Paraguay category.
If you would like to see some examples of articles, follow these links:
Meserete Kristos Church, Ethiopia
Jesus Village Church, South Korea
Article Titles
Article titles should be in the native language of the congregation or conference. The name of a group should be followed by a comma and then the country of origin (unless the country appears in the name itself). For example: Iglesia Evangélica Menonita de Guatemala OR Brethren in Christ Church, Botswana.
Article Content
While the Global Anabaptist Wiki structure is flexible, try to use this article template when creating an encyclopedic article. Fill in as many sections as you can, and create new sections if you have pertinent information that does not fall in any of the sections from the template. Remember, incomplete information is better than no information.
Encyclopedic articles should be informative and unbiased. In other words, include information like: who, what, when, where, how, etc.... If there is interpretive analysis you wish to include, please attribute it to the appropriate author in order to recognize the author's work and alert the reader to a possible bias.
"Story" articles on the other hand are much more flexible. They provide descriptive information about the life of a specific Anabaptist-related group that does not fit in that group's encyclopedic article. Click the following link to learn more about story pages on the Global Anabaptist Wiki.
Style
When entering content into the Global Anabaptist Wiki, use the following style guide...
Citations
Always cite the sources you are using to contribute content to the Global Anabaptist Wiki. Use Turabian Style when citing sources. To cite a source enter the following after the piece of information you wish to cite: <ref>Your citation</ref>. Make sure that underneath the "Citations" heading there is a block of text that looks like this: <references/>. This code will collect all the citations underneath the "Citations" section.
Creating an Article
Looking to create an article for the Global Anabaptist Wikipedia? Great, but first there are a few steps you must take before creating your masterpiece.
- Does your proposed article have any connection to the Anabaptist community? If the connection is weak or nonexistant, you might want to take a different approach to the subject that would recognize a stronger connection.
- Is your article going to be a factual account of a congregation, event, person etc.? Articles on Anabaptistwiki present information that can be validated by other sources and are not opinionated in nature. If you are looking to write an opinionated article, you should look into writing a story which can span the entire spectrum of opinion.
- Does your article already exist on the Anabaptistwiki? To find out, do a quick search for your proposed article in the search bar. If your article does not show up in the list of results then you are ready to continue. If it turns out your article has already been created, the majority of your work has already been accomplished. Simply read through the article and add any additional information that hasn't been included already.
- Will you be able to link your new article to another higher level page? For example, you want to create an article named "Anytown Mennonite Church." You should be able to link this page to the country page where it is located, its relevant conference page and maybe some important individual's page who attended that church. In this way, the "Anytown Mennonite Church" article would be connected to three other pages and would be found easily by people using the site. If you cannot find a place to link your article, whether it be another article or category, your article will be orphaned and nobody will be able to access it except through the search bar.
If you answered positively to all of the above questions then the next step is creating your article. To create an article, follow these steps:
- Create your new article page. There are two techniques of accomplishing this.
- First, go to a page that you would like your article to be linked to. Go into edit mode and add a link to your (as of yet nonexistent) article in an appropriate area on the page. Notice that whatever text you type in the link will be the exact title of your article so watch out for spelling mistakes and capitalization. Save the page. The link to your nonexistent article should be red. Clicking on this red link will bring you to an edit page for your new article.
- The second way of creating an article is to type the name of your article in the search bar and click "Go." Notice that whatever you type in the search bar will be the exact title of your article so watch out for spelling mistakes and capitalization. Hitting "Go" should bring you to the search results page. Near the top of the page you should see the following "There is no page titled "Your Article Name". You can create this page." Clicking on "create this page" will bring you to a screen where you can write your article.
- Load the appropriate boilerplate. A boilerplate is a pre-formatted template for you to use which takes some of the work out of formatting and allows the site to be more consistent. Simply choose the language your article will be written in under the "Select Boilerplate" option and click load.
- Edit your page. To edit the article, simply add text to the editor window. If you are a bit more competent with Wikicode, you can experiment with tables, images etc. For help on editing, visit the Mediawiki how to edit page and formatting page.
- Add your new article to the appropriate categories (if applicable). WARNING: Do some previous searching before you select categories for your article. See which categories articles similar to yours have been placed in and then choose appropriate categories for your article. We have added a feature on Anabaptistwiki that allows you to easily select categories for your article. Underneath the editor pane is a "Category Selection" pane. You can either choose appropriate categories from the list of popular categories below or type existing categories in the input box.
- Save your page. When you are done editing, formatting and selecting categories, click the "Save Page" button at the bottom of the page. Your article has now been created and people can start reading it!
- Link your article to other articles. Think about what other articles would be related to your article. If these articles have been created already, add a link to your article somewhere appropriate on that page. The more links there are to your article, the easier it will be for people who are looking for your article to find it.
