Topic Editor

Resources for Topic Editors

Author: Jen Hammock

As of this writing, all our documentation is still in development. If you have feedback, you'd like to be a guinea pig, or you'd like to help develop this documentation, please email editors@eoearth.org.

Our new home differs functionally from the original EoE platform in several important ways.

• The edit interfaces in the MediaWiki platform are somewhat different
• The editorial review workflow embedded in the old platform is not similarly formalized herein
• The existing content migrated from the original site into this one is riddled with curious artifacts, which you may encounter while editing migrated articles

Editing

You can edit any article from the Edit tab, which has a wysiwyg editor, or from the Edit Source tab, if you are comfortable with wiki markup and html and would like to manipulate them directly. There's some basic detail about these edit tools in the instructions for authors.

Editorial Review Process, new articles

A newborn article on this site is by default placed in the "Template" space. It is invisible except to the author and anyone with Topic Editor status. We will ask new authors to contact the editorial board when their articles are ready for review, at which point we will ask one of you to review the article, make edits, and communicate with the author. When you are satisfied with the article, you can move it into a published state.

Reviewing changes

In the View History tab, you can go back in time through various date-stamped versions of the article to see changes you and the author have made. Click on any date-stamp in the list to visit an older version and begin scrolling back and forth. If for some reason some recent changes simply won't do, you can undo them using the "undo" links, starting at the top, the most recent history, and proceeding down until you've undone everything you didn't want.

Communication

The easiest way to chat with an author or co-authors about their work is in the Discussion tab of the article page. You can find this in the upper left corner of any article page. If you check the "Watch this page" box at the bottom of the Discussion tab, you will be informed when the author responds. You can treat this page as a notepad where you and the author leave each other messages. Use it however you like, but see MediaWiki's help page if you'd like some guidance. If you prefer, you can email the author. To do this, visit their user page (clicking on their username anywhere in the View History tab will work) and then click "Email this user" near the bottom of the lefthand margin menu, under Tools. This will take your discussion off the wiki into your and the author's email boxes.

Publishing

When you are satisfied with the article under review, you should first append your name. Just underneath the author name, add a line reading "Topic Editor: Jen Hammock" (or whomever.)

Then, go to the "More" menu in the upper right corner and select "Move". In the Move Page form, under "To new title", select "(Main)" and uncheck the box below for "Leave a redirect behind". You will not need a redirect for a newly published article. Please leave "Watch source page and target page", checked. This will ensure you receive updates about any future changes to the article. Click the Move Page button below and your article will be published.

Editing original, migrated content *****THIS IS IMPORTANT*****

Many of our original articles have been untouched for several years and need updates now. This will be our most important immediate editorial work and will only be slightly trickier than other editing tasks. There are three main things to watch out for:

Duplicate articles

Before you start working on an article, do a search for its title in the search box. You may find several articles by the same title, with similar or identical content. Do not delete any of the duplicates. They exist because somewhere there are links leading to each of them; deleting them will break those links. If you find duplicates, please notify Jen Hammock using the "email this user" link from her user page, and tell her, "I'm working on this article (insert the link to the version you have decided to work on). Duplicates exist." Jen will track down the duplicates and fit them with redirects so that visitors there will be sent to your version. (example)

Datestamps

Most migrated articles will be headed by author and topic editor information, plus a datestamp or sometimes two, eg:

Published: December 4, 2011 Updated: September 27, 2012 Author: Central Intelligence Agency Topic Editor: Peter Saundry

When you have finished your revision, please convert this two a plural topic editor credit, if you were not the original editor, and remove the datestamps. The platform provides automatic datestamping; the most recent update is noted in the upper right hand corner and the bottom of the page, and all versions can be freely browsed in the "view history" tab. An updated header section might read:

Author: Central Intelligence Agency Topic Editors: Peter Saundry, Jen Hammock

HTML Artifacts

Because of the method with which we salvaged the content from the old site, a fair amount of extraneous html is hidden in some of the articles. If you work in the Edit interface rather than Edit source, you will probably never notice this and that's fine. If you prefer to work in Edit source, be advised that most of the html you see can safely be removed without affecting the visible content. Common exceptions include tables and line breaks used for extra spacing. If you want to work in that interface, and the html is driving you batty, you are advised to go ahead and rip it all out, secure in the knowledge that if you accidentally delete something you wanted to keep, you can get it all back using those handy "undo" links in the View history tab.

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