Site Guidelines

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This page discusses editorial policies and best practices to follow when updating or creating content in the GMOD web site.


Introduction

The GMOD web site editorial policies and best practices are defined here. Consistent use of these policies and practices will hopefully lead to a consistent and readable web site.

This page first introduces meta-guidelines. These are guidelines about these guidelines and cover things like how to update the guidelines, and when you can ignore them. These are followed by the actual guidelines, describing how content should be created.


Meta-Guidelines

Or, Guidelines about Guidelines.


Ignoring

The first question that comes to most contributor's minds is

Q: Can I ignore these guidelines?

And the response is

A: Of course you can.

This is for pragmatic reasons. The whole goal of a wiki is to encourage people to contribute and maintain content. Site guidelines encourage a clean and well organized web site, but if the guidelines discourage people from contributing in the first place, then they have defaeated the whole purpose.

We would much rather have a contribution that completely ignores these guidelines than not have the contribution at all.

It also takes some time to become proficient at MediaWiki (the wiki package behind this web site), and it can be a challenge to learn MediaWiki details and site policies at the same time.

However, once you get comfortable with MediaWiki, please think about writing your content so it does conform to these standards.

Updating

These guidelines are a work in progress and you are encouraged to suggest additions, deletions or revisions to them. The best way to do this is to send your comments to the GMOD Help Desk. Alternatively, you can post them to this page (or to this page's discussion/talk page, but unless you notify the help desk it may be a while before anyone notices.

Enforcing

Q: Is there any enforcement of these guidelines?

A: Not really.

Beyond the usual wiki practices, there is no enforcement of these guidelines. This means that any non-conforming material you write won't be deleted, but it might be modified to follow the guidelines if and when somebody notices.


Guidelines

This section contains guidelines for creating content in the GMOD web site. Some guidelines are accompanied by discussion that explains them.

Guidelines are shown like this.

Discussion is shown as regular text.


Page Names

Capitalization

Use Generous Capitalization instead of Parsimonious capitalization.

For example, use "Site Guidelines" instead of "Site guidelines".

It looks better.

Redirects

Use of MediaWiki redirects for page name synonyms is encouraged.

This means that if a user types "editing guidelines" in the "Go/Search" box and you have a redirect defined for "Editing Guidelines" then they will go directly to this page, instead of the search results page.

A slight downside of this is that the Special:Allpages view now displays lots of pages that are only redirects to other pages.

Facts about "Site Guidelines"RDF feed
Date published2013 + and 2011 +
Has DOI10.1186/1471-2164-14-741 + and 10.1093/database/bar044 +
Has PMCIDPMC3263599 +
Has PMID21959868 +
Has authorLeite RB +, Milan M +, Coppe A +, Bortoluzzi S +, dos Anjos Aón +, Reinhardt R +, Saavedra C +, Patarnello T +, Cancela M +, Bargelloni L +, Ficklin SP +, Sanderson LA +, Cheng CH +, Staton ME +, Lee T +, Cho IH +, Jung S +, Bett KE + and Main D +
Has publication detailsBMC Genomics 14:1 741 + and Database : the journal of biological databases and curation 2011: bar044 +
Has titlemRNA-Seq and microarray development for the Grooved carpet shell clam, Ruditapes decussatus: a functional approach to unravel host -parasite interaction + and Tripal: a construction toolkit for online genome databases. +
Published inBMC Genomics + and Database : the journal of biological databases and curation +