Help:Editing/Basic structure

The basic structure of an IntactiWiki article is simple - it is built of various components:

1. Heading
2. Sections
3. External links
4. References
5. Categories

The very first paragraph of an article is the heading. The Heading has no headline, because the title of the article itself is the heading's headline. Here you should place a brief description. The description should be no shorter than two sentences, and no longer than six sentences. If you can, cite where the information for this description came from. If the information in the description is absolute common knowledge, that is the only time you may omit a citation. If the information could be considered biased (or difficult to believe), a citation must be added.

Note: You find a copy template here.

Contents

First section

Here's where you start placing content that isn't part of the heading. Make a section headline by placing equals signs on both sides of the title of this new section. Only information related to this section is to be placed here. If you have other information, make a new section below. All information placed in these sections must be sourced (a citation must be added).

Note: By convention the headline should be capitalized in sentence-style capitalization, where the first word is capitalized and the rest of the words are lowercase, unless they are proper nouns or proper adjectives. Please don't use title-style capitalization here.

Second section

This is a new section, for new information not related to the above section. Make as many sections as needed (the more the better). Please avoid combining a lot of content into a single section, and split it up into more than one section, organized by the content.

Multiple sources

In this section, we'll add more than one citation. The first citation will be for this claim. The second citation will be for another claim.

How many sections?

There should be at least 4 sections for every article (whenever possible). Even more sections are encouraged. Once you've created at least 4 sections, a section list will appear at the top of the article (under the heading).

Sub section

As an example, we'll place a sub section here. If you click edit (next to this section), you'll notice that sub categories have three equals signs on each side of the sub section title. You'll also notice that not only does the title of a sub section look somewhat different (smaller font), but the sub section index at the top of the page also reflects the new hierarchy.

A sub sub section

You can create a deeper hierarchy by adding even more equals symbols. You'll notice that with every level, the title looks a bit different. At this level the horizontal line disappears.

External links

This is a special section which should always be the last but one section in an article, if used at all. Here you collect links to external information, which is not part of the IntactiWiki. In the IntactiWiki, please use the Template:LINKS instead, which simply outputs the required section headline (External links) (which avoids variants of the spelling and wording). So you just type {{LINKS}} at the beginning of a line.

• Link to the English Wikipedia which is an external link for IntactiWiki
• Google

References

This special section should always be the very last section of an article. It automatically collects and formats all references noted in the article. Therefore, the References section needs a special tag <references/>. In the IntactiWiki, please use the Template:REF instead, which simply outputs the two required lines: the section headline (References) plus the references tag. So you just type {{REF}} at the beginning of a line.

Categories

Note: In general, the References section is the very last section of each article. This is an exception to the rule, because the categories are shown below the article itself. You simply assign categories to your article by using the same formatting as with normal internal article links, using double square brackets. Here is an example:

[[Category:MyTest]]

You can create any category as you like to, but you may want to check out existing categories first, to avoid duplicates and nonsense categories. If a category has no category heading text already, it will be shown in red, like our example does.

Category names

Category names should be as short as possible (without using abbreviations, if possible). If a category represents an attribute (like e.g. "Physicians"), please use a singular category name, like "Physician", not the plural "Physicians". If a category represents a group of attributes, stop to think (or check out existing categories) whether it is better to use single subcategories for each attribute and assign these subcategories to another grouping category. Example: The category "Person by gender" groups categories like "Female", "Male", "Gender unknown", etc.

Category hierarchies

Each article may use any number of categories, but the Wiki engine doesn't sort them in any way but the given order in the article's source text. The Wiki engine only merges duplicate entries when parsing the source.

We recommend to use a contributor-defined hierarchy when assigning categories to articles.

Source-related categories like Category:From IntactWiki should always be placed at the very bottom of the list of categories, sorted alphabetically.

Here is a first category hierarchy definition:

Biographic articles

All articles about persons are biographic articles by definition. The assigned categories should reflect the following hierarchy:

1. Personal categories (sorted from general to special, like "Person" before "Male")
2. Activity/engagement/position/point of view categories (sorted alphabetically)
3. Geographical categories (sorted alphabetically)
4. Date/time related categories (sorted chronologically)
5. Source related categories (sorted chronologically)
6. Admin/error related categories

Here is an example group of categories for an intactivist article:

[[Category:Person]]
[[Category:Male]]

[[Category:Intactivist]]

[[Category:Italy]]
[[Category:USA]]

[[Category:Victorian doctor]]

[[Category:From IntactWiki]]

[[Category:ERROR URL]]