Creating New Articles
From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
When creating a new article in the Thomas Jefferson Wiki, please follow the steps outlined below.
Before You Begin
- Do a search to make sure the article you want to create does not already exist. Another option is to incorporate your content into an article that already exists. Please consider carefully before choosing whether to create an entirely new article or not.
- Consider what you would like to name your article. It should be as clear and concise as possible; if it involves more than one word, separate them with underscores (e.g. Jefferson_Cups).
Creating the New Article
- To create a new article, type http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Article_Title into the address bar of your browser.
- You will see a page that says, "There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page." Click on "edit this page."
- You will now see a page with your new article title at the top and an editing box underneath. At this point you may wish to paste in the Article Template to help guide you in formatting the article; it provides
- If you have a pre-existing text that is already in electronic form, you can paste it into the editing box; otherwise, start typing! If you are pasting formatted text in, keep in mind that your formatting (italics, etc.) will not transfer. If you have used the Article Template, you will need to incorporate your text around it, deleting any elements of the template you don't need.
Formatting Your Article
This is a good point at which to click the "Show Preview" button below the editing box. You will see what your article will look like and can more easily identify any areas that need formatting. The following are the most common formatting fixes you may need to attend to.
- Be sure to make the first occurrence of the subject of your article bold.
- If your article is long enough, consider breaking it up into sections. To create a subheading, type the name of your subheading, highlight it, then click the Heading shortcut button above the editing box (it has a large black letter "A" on it).
- If you like, you can make certain words, phrases or sections bold or italic the same way you would on a word processing application; highlight the desired text and then click either the bold or italic shortcut button above your editing box.
- At the end of the article text, be sure to make a note if it is based on a pre-existing article or research report. (See the Style Manual for formatting conventions.)
There are some standard elements you may like to include at the end of your article. You may use any or all of them, depending on your article.
- Footnotes. If you would like to include footnotes in your article, here is how:
- At each point in the article where you want to insert a footnote, type the following text: <ref>Text of footnote reference.</ref> Remember to adhere to Chicago format for your footnote reference.
- Do the above as many times as you need to. You do not need to worry about numbering your footnotes; the wiki software does this for you.
- At the end of the article, create a subheading called Footnotes (see above for instructions on how to create a subheading).
- Underneath the Footnotes subheading, simply type <references/>.
- See Also. Use this section to link to other wiki articles that may be of interest to someone reading your article, and which have not already been linked in the text of the article itself.
- Create a subheading as with Footnotes.
- For each article you want to link to, start with a bullet; in wiki formatting, this is done by typing an asterisk (*) at the beginning of each line.
- After the asterisk, simply type the title of the article you would like to link to, highlight it, and click the "internal link" shortcut button above your editing box (it has a blue underlined "Ab" on it).
- Further Sources. This is where you may refer to any other source of any format that hasn't already been referred to in the article and which may be of interest to someone reading your article.
See the Style Manual for more information about formatting your end matter.
- Assign your article to one of the categories listed on the Main Page by typing Category:X (where "x" is the name of the category you want to assign the article to). Example: Category:Food and Drink Then highlight that text and click the "internal link" shortcut button on your editing bar to link it back to the category page.
- You may assign an article to more than one category. To add a second (third, fourth, etc.) category, simply repeat #1 on the next line below.
- You can include images in your article if you like. See our instructions on how to do this.
- Take a look through your article and, if you encounter any words or phrases that would be useful to link to other wiki articles, do so (the word or phrase does not have to be exactly the same as the title of the article you link it to; for instructions on internal linking, see the Links page of the Tutorial.
- Be sure to save the page when you are done!
If you have questions or problems with entering your article, contact the Jefferson Library.