Help:Cleaning up Ballotpedia articles
From Ballotpedia
This article walks through the steps needed to clean up articles like this one.
Contents |
What needs to be cleaned up?
The Brian Dubie article on Ballotpedia looks the way it looks because much of the text on it was transferred from Wikipedia's entry on Brian Dubie.
Note: Don't clean up the Brian Dubie article on Ballotpedia until after August 2.
Note: All text on Wikipedia is freely available for transfer and use on other websites.
However, when the article was transferred from Wikipedia to Ballotpedia, a number of internal editing tags were kept with the article that need to be removed in the clean-up process.
Remove unnecessary red links
The Ballotpedia article on Brian Dubie as it stands has a number of red links that need to be removed. These include:
- The hyperlink to "March 9, 1959"
- The hyperlink to "Essex Junction High School"
- And many more.
- Basically, any hyperlinks in the article where it is not reasonable to believe that Ballotpedia itself will ever require an article on that subject should be removed.
- This includes terms, like "Republican", that we can assume Ballotpedia readers are sufficiently familiar with
- The Wikipedia article for "Brian Dubie" contains all those hyperlinks to other pages on Wikipedia because Wikipedia strives to be comprehensive.
- In contrast, Ballotpedia does not need to generate articles on items of common knowledge--our task is to create comprehensive, interlinking, articles that really get into the heart of ballot initiatives.
In order to remove unnecessary red links from an article:
- Click "edit" in the horizontal menu bar at the top of the article.
- Find the double square brackets (they look like "[[" and "]]") that are creating the unnecessary red links.
- Delete them
- Click "save page"
Transfer Wikipedia acknowledgement from top to bottom of article
In the current Brian Dubie article on Ballotpedia, there's a Wikipedia acknowledgment at the top of the article:
"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia on 06/13/07"
It should instead appear at the bottom, as in this Ballotpedia article.
In order to accomplish this clean-up:
- Click "edit" in the horizontal menu bar at the top of the article.
- That should take you to a screen that looks like this
- Delete the Wikipedia acknowledgement from the top of the page
- Copy this text:
Portions of this article have been adapted from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Wikipedia], the free encyclopedia. Copyright Notice can be found [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights here].
- Paste it into the bottom of the article you're cleaning up
- Click "Save Page"
Finally, insert a link under the "External links" section of the article to the corresponding Wikipedia entry. Doing this allows a Ballotpedia reader to easily click over to the corresponding article on Wikipedia which might have improved and evolved in the meantime.
Here is what that link should look like:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Dubie Brian Dubie entry on Wikipedia]
Adjust category tags at end of article
The Brian Dubie article as it stands has tags at the end to two categories, "1959 births" and "living people" that are Wikipedia categories. When the Ballotpedia editor who started the article transferred the content from Wikipedia, they brought with it those category tags. It is unlikely that Ballotpedia will want or need those categories. However, Ballotpedia users may want to insert some category tags that are more appropriate for Ballotpedia.
In order to adjust the category tags:
- Click "edit" in the horizontal menu bar at the top of the article.
- Review the text on the edit screen until you find the inappropriate tags.
- Delete them
- Add category tags that might be valuable on Ballotpedia.
- Click "save page"
This is what the inappropriate category tags look like in the current Brian Dubie edit screen:
[[Category:1959 births]] [[Category:Living people]]
So, in this example, you'd find those tags and then delete them.
Note: No matter where on the editing page you place a category tag, the tag itself will always show up at the bottom of the article page.
Rename the article so it does not include an abbreviation
Ballotpedia is moving toward a naming convention that discourages the use of state abbreviations in the title of articles. At present, the article uses an abbreviation: "VT" instead of "Vermont".
Ballotpedia's guide to moving and renaming articles explains how to re-title this article so that the title in the future will say "Vermont" where it currently says "VT".
Note that subheads are not in all capitals
Capitalize the first word in a subhead or sub-subhead (delimited by pairs of two or three equal signs). The other words should be in all lower case, unless an acronym or proper noun.
Finally, add references
Many articles include references to articles and books and reports, in the course of a passage of prose. The way to cite on Ballotpedia might as well be the way to cite in scholarly articles: with footnotes.
And it is very easy to do. After the passage needing a reference, add this language (without the extra line breaks within the tags, included here only for formatting purposes):
<ref>''[http://books.google.com/books?id=I3mal2inJQgC&dq= lomasky+democracy+and+decision&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots= lsqIY4Moic&sig=lrtppVyjbakW5v_Ky97pEkq6ZIc#PPP1,M1 Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference]'', Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Cambridge University Press, 1995</ref>
and then, at the bottom of the page, add this:
==References== <references />
In this way, a discussion will look like this:
It appears that voters do, for the most part, vote their conscience,
as philosopher Lomasky, and economists Brennan[1] and Caplan[2], have demonstrated.
References
- ↑ [http://books.google.com/books?id=I3mal2inJQgC&dq= lomasky+democracy+and+decision&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots= lsqIY4Moic&sig=lrtppVyjbakW5v_Ky97pEkq6ZIc#PPP1,M1 Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference], Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, Cambridge University Press, 1995
- ↑ [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691129428/ wirkman-20/ The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies], Bryan Caplan, Princeton University Press, 2007
