Help:Editing

Overall aim

Newgon's aim is to provide concise and easy-to-deploy material for activists roughly aligned to our ethos.

In other words, we are seeking to compile only the useful and accessible information, making it easy to retrieve and re-use in online guerilla activism/the real world. We will avoid excessive self-reference and jargon, aiming to make ourselves accessible to both the public and sympathetic individuals who wish to act as public educators.

Ask yourself - "on a scale of 1-5", what is the risk of censorship for this information? Censorship can be erasure or distortion on a resource such as Wikipedia. If it's a 4 or 5, let's write a nice, clean article about it. If it's 1 or 2, let's write a stub if it's important to us, and link to Wikipedia, etc. Also ask yourself - on a scale of 1-5 what is the strategic alignment of a person or organization with our ethos? 1s and 5s are important topics, as are many 2s and 4s. Let's get ROC and SA scores uploaded to the articles in a pretty template!

What does NewgonWiki do?

We host lots of things. Here are some examples of ongoing work:

Project topics such as - Debate, Research, Testimony, Legal Information (much of this doubles as encyclopedic - just look at the articles/categories to see how), Important texts (archives) and materials used to promote this site.

Encyclopedic topics such as Personal and Organization Profiles, Terminology, Important texts (about) and much more.

You are also free, to provide the following:

Relevant book reviews - within a categorised encyclopedic/stub-encyclopedic article on the topic (please).

Personal experimental/essay content. Essay/Experimental/Creative writing are other potential uses of NewgonWiki, and are openly encouraged. It won't get you a link on the front page, but all content should be added to Category:Essays so it can be read by those casting around for new ideas.

How does NewgonWiki organise this material?

All public material barring personal essay and user-page content is classified as Encyclopedia and/or Project - oriented. Some project material such as Research and Debate Guide can be accessed via the navigation panel/homepage, but also enters a limited number of Encyclopedia categories. Pure Encyclopedia material is put into multiple encyclopedia categories as demanded by Help:Categories. All public material barring user-page content is categorised in some way, even if it is an essay in a non-encyclopedia author category as above.

For help categorising material (vital for new encyclopedia content, see Help:Categories.

Working standards

Do not feel afraid to ask about working standards. Many of the accepted standards may not be written into this document.

• NewgonWiki avoids unnecessary capitalisation in titles and subsections. For example, titles may read "National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" for the NSPCC, and "List of organisations supporting child advocacy" for a list article. Some of our material still uses unnecessary capitalisation.

• Project page formats are decided on a per-project basis, and can be observed in the uniformity of project content concerned. Open an edit window to see how the wiki-code translates to this formatted style, using (if required), the highlight-rightclick-copy function to clipboard the material and the rightclick-paste function to place it in the edit window, ready for modification.

• Encyclopedia article formats are almost identical to Wikipedia's, but with extra checks in place to avoid the ugliness associated with some Wikipedia articles. For an example article, see Jack McClellan, and click "edit" (or "view source" if you have no account) to see the wikitext.

• Order of content: Introductory sections (and if required, the disclaimers or hatnotes before them) should have no heading, and should mention the name of the article in bold, somewhere near the start of the passage. They should avoid using references, and should, in the case of larger articles, simply sum up the topic and what the rest of the article elaborates. The order of the following, headed sections may then progress roughly in the following fashion: 1. Any historical information 2. Any organisational, personal, conceptual features. The meat of the article. 3. Any scrutiny, praise or criticism. 4. Any commentaries, quoted for convenience. 5. Any "see also" list. 6. Any references (see below) 7. Any internal links list, and then external links list if either is required. 8. List of categories (trivial, as categories always migrate to the end, but best kept in one place).

• Basic aesthetic/format controls: Do not let Tables of Contents act as pillars for wasteful and ugly white space at the head of articles. For example, to remove a ToC, insert __NOTOC__ at the start of an article. To wrap text around a left-floating ToC, for example, insert <div style="margin-right: 25px; float: left;">__TOC__</div>. Illustrate articles by uploading and then formatting images left or right with captions, for example, inserting [[Image:Imagename.fileextension|thumb|Caption for image]], replacing "thumb" with "frame" for the fullsize image. Reference lists are made easy by wrapping the material (URLs, Book refs, etc) in ref tags, i.e. <ref>Full book ref</ref>. Then place a references list at the end of the article, but before any internal or external link lists by inserting the following below the full title "References": {{reflist}}. Other useful formatting codes include :text goes here to indent a paragraph, and *text goes here to bullet a paragraph.

Remember to make use of the formatting buttons above the edit window, hovering to reveal each button's function.

Where to start

Here are some user-generated projects and "special pages" for aiding the development of NewgonWiki:

Noticeboard

In-house discussion about NewgonWiki.

Articles in progress

A list of incomplete articles that cannot yet be categorised (added to the encyclopedia).

Mirror Project

Using other wikis to duplicate content and add to ours (with some cautions).

Potential project content

Ideas for new projects, and the content that may go into forming them.

Wanted pages

Wanted pages is a list of articles proposed, but not yet created on NewgonWiki.

Develop one of these or generate a listing by editing this page or an encyclopedia article (lists are particularly useful), making sure to [[wikilink]].

Special pages

Browse this index for novel stuff that will help build the wiki.

To-do list

Find something on our to-do list.

Resources

These may be used to supplement new content and expand reading.

Research Resources

Literature reviews.

Linkblog

For listing links of interest to Newgon.com editors.