Wiki Style Guide, Editing Standards and Tips

Wiki Ownership

Keep in mind that the wiki belongs to the Digital Library Federation proper. The left-hand menus direct users to resources of the broader organization rather than the Government Records Transparency and Accountability Interest Group portion of the wiki.

For instance, the DLF logo to the upper left of every wiki page is linked to the DLF wiki homepage: Main_Page

Government Records Transparency and Accountability Interest Group Homepage

The effective wiki homepage for the Government Records Transparency and Accountability Interest Group is Transparency-Accountability. The 'external' url of this page, https://wiki.diglib.org/Transparency-Accountability is inextricably linked to the decision to name the page Transparency-Accountability. The choice of page names and resulting urls are directly linked, and therefore page naming conventions are useful in creating attractive and logical urls.

Page Creation, Naming Conventions and Indexing

Page Creation

To create a page in the Transparency-Accountability portion of the wiki, you must search for a non-existant page. All pages should include Transparency-Accountability/ in their names as is explained below in the section on Page Naming Conventions. The wiki, upon a search that fails to locate a page with a searched for name, will allow the user to create a page with that name by providing a link.

Naming Conventions

There are three important conventions when naming pages

Begin the page name with Transparency-Accountability/
- The slash in the page name appears in the url like a directory, and Transparency-Accountability indicates our groups' "ownership" of the page
Use dashes rather than spaces to separate words in page names
- Spaces appear as underscores in links and urls such as with Main_Page, the aforementioned DLF wiki homepage. The dashes create more attractive and intuitive urls and internal links
Try to minimize the number of words in the page name.
- The longer the page name, the longer the url. A good example is Transparency-Accountability/Minutes, where Minutes was chosen over Meeting-Minutes.

Additionally, the Transparency-Accountability/Page-Index is a great resource for reviewing previous page name choices, and may inform decisions as to whether a new page is even necessary

Page Indexing

Each newly created page should be indexed alphabetically at Transparency-Accountability/Page-Index. This page index is useful for determining where information ought to be located, in determining whether a new page ought to be created, and as a resource for page naming.

Example

As an example, let us say we want to create a page called My New Page. The approach would be as follows:

Check the Transparency-Accountability/Page-Index page to see whether a page already exists that fills the role of my desired page
- We want to avoid creating 'duplicate' pages that could result information being inconsistently dispersed.
Confirming the need for My New Page, we search for it in the upper right wiki search box as follows: Transparency-Accountability/My-New-Page
- Note the dashes between words and the clear group ownership indicated by Transparency-Accountability/