The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Remediating Articles: Difference between revisions

{{Large|A Guide for Volunteer Digital Editors}}

{{shortcut|PM:RA}}

{{TOC right}}

Welcome, volunteer, or Assistant Digital Editor. We’re glad you decided to lend your expertise and time in helping to grow our Digital Humanities project. This guide is written specifically for volunteer digital editors who want to help in moving, or “remediating,” our print version of ''{{MR}}'' to the digital version here on Project Mailer. Please read this document in for specific directions on remediating your article to be used on the screen.

If you clicked on the red link to begin creating the article, the title has been chosen for you. However, we want to tweak the display title, so we have to use a code called <code><nowiki>{{DISPLAYTITLE}}</nowiki></code>. With this element, you can insert necessary text formatting, like [[w:MOS:ITALIC|italics]]:

The <code><nowiki><span></nowiki></code> tag shrinks the root page names to highlight the title of the page. The code above will work for most article titles. However, if the title contains italicized elements, like the title of a novel, you must replace <code><nowiki>{{SUBPAGENAME}}</nowiki></code> with the actual title, so you can include the italics. For example:

Putting two apostrophes (<code><nowiki>''</nowiki></code>) on both sides of <code><nowiki>An American Dream</nowiki></code> will italicize the novel’s name in the published document (see [[mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting|Help:Formatting]]); check out the [[The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare|published article]]. Once you’ve entered your title, click the “Show preview” button under the editor window to see the results.{{efn|Get into the habit of clicking this button with every bit that you add to the article. It allows you to quickly see if you’ve made a mistake, so you can fix it before saving.}} Note that the title must otherwise be exactly the same, or the system will ignore the code and spit out an error. If it does, just review your code carefully and fix what’s needed.

The byline template <code>{{tl|byline}}</code> should come next. It will include the writer’s or editor’s name, an abstract (if applicable), a note(s) (if applicable), and a short url. Here’s an example of the <code>byline</code> code:

For an explanation of all the variables, see <code>{{tl|byline}}</code>. You needn’t worry about the “abstract,” “note,” or “url” variables; I’ll fill those in later, if necessary.

== Body ==

[[File:Mr-orig.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 3'''. Original PDF. Copy the paragraph.]] [[File:Mr-errors.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 4'''. Errors indicated.]] [[File:Mr-corrected.jpg|thumb|400px|'''Fig 5'''. Errors Fixed.]]

Open the PDF, highlight and copy a paragraph, paste the paragraph into the editing window, and proofread for errors (see '''Figs. 3–5'''; click the images to enlarge). Common errors include hyphenated words (these will be broken words with a hypen and space), numbers, lack of necessary text decoration like italics, missing spaces, and superfluous print information like page numbers. All of these must be corrected. Use the original PDF as your guide. All text needs to be verbatim and look as much like the original document as possible.

Many articles use block quotation when quoting longer passages of primary texts. Just paste in the quotation like you would a paragraph, then surround it with the <code><nowiki><blockqoute> . . . </blockquote></nowiki></code> tags, for example:

Note this quotation contains a citation—as all quotations should; see [[#Sourcing|Sourcing]] below for an explanation.

=== Images ===

Most articles will not contain images. However, for those that do, see [[The Mailer Review/Volunteer/Advanced Editing|Advanced Editing]].

== Endnotes ==

This section houses an author’s explanatory endnotes or footnotes, like the “Notes” section at the bottom of this page. Notes may be inserted in the body of the text, using <code>{{tl|efn}}</code>, for example:

This note will be indicated by a superscript, small letter, like ^[a] —except it will be a hyperlink. Now, you must have place for these notes to be listed near the end of the document, just above the Citations section:

See [[The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/“Up to the Nostrils in Anguish”: Mailer and Bellow on Masculine Anxiety and Violent Catharsis|this article]] for another, more complex example. For a more thorough discussion of this function, see [[w:Template:Efn|Template:Efn]] on Wikipedia.

== Sourcing ==

There are two approaches to sourcing, depending on the complexity of the author’s citations. If the article has just a handful of sources that are cited sparingly, you might just include them in the body of the article and just use a “Citations” section at the end of the document. If there are '''many sources''' that are '''cited multiple times''', you should have a “Citations” section and a “Works Cited” section and use the '''shortened footnotes''' approach. Most articles will use the latter approach.

=== Works Cited ===

A list of works cited should be the last section in the document. It is sorted alphabetically by author’s last name and uses [[w:Wikipedia:Citation templates|citation templates]]. This is easier for two reasons: (1) you only need to list the reference '''once''' in the article, and (2) it cleans up your body text of much of the confusing code. This section is created like this:

This might look a bit confusing, but I’ll go through it. The first line adds a new section to the article. All references should appear between <code><nowiki>{{Refbegin}}</nowiki></code> and <code><nowiki>{{Refend}}</nowiki></code> in a bulleted list (notice each reference is on its own line and begins with <code><nowiki>*</nowiki></code>.  

For in-text citations, what will usually appear as MLA-style parenthetical, we use [[w:Template:Sfn|shortened footnotes]] <code><nowiki>{{sfn}}</nowiki></code>. First, add a section where your citations will appear, just above your works cited section:

Here’s an example of the shortened footnote at work in the body of the article:

See the [[w:Template:Sfn|Template:Sfn]] on Wikipedia for more options and explanation.