Style Guide
From Global Voices Wiki
GV Style Guide (preliminary):
Contents |
[edit] INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the evolving GV Wiki style guide. For more information about GV's mission, author guidelines (both technical and substantive), an explanation of our editorial structure, plus a list of links to other how-to's please see our Author Resource Page.
[edit] Post Types
GV has two primary kinds of post,
Weblogs are displayed on the left section of most pages on Global Voices. We show a short excerpt on the listing and the full article on its own page. Any author at GV can post a weblog article. Typically, the weblog entries are detailed explanations of one big idea or several related ideas. They generally make use of links to and quotes from many different blogs.
Roundups are what we call short link posts that basically just link to an article that an editor thought was interesting. Only Regional Editors post to this section. Usually the roundups are a line or two long commentary on a post/ blog/ project with a link to the the same. Roundups appear in the right column of most pages and their title, author and comments are not normally displayed.
NOTE: The rest of this document will discuss the WEBLOG type of post. For guidelines and advice about the short Roundup posts see this page: Style Guide Roundups
[edit] Categories
Within the WordPress interface, on the left side there are a bunch of categories sorted into sections based on their parents. For each post you write, please take a second to go through the list and make sure all appliccable categories are checked. Our category system is detailed and time-consuming, but it will help more readers find your articles when they are interested in its subjects.
[edit] TYPE Categories
Select kind of Post - Weblog, Roundups or Podcast.
- 'Weblog' means a long article with many links on a given subject.
- 'Roundup' means a short link article (only editors should create these)
[edit] Region and Country Categories
Select geographical region and country. In case your post concerns more than one region/ country, please feel free to select more than one region/ country. You should select the actual region (as opposed to just the specific countries) only if your post is relevant to the region as a whole.
[edit] Topic Categories
If the post is specific to certain other categories (such as Books, Photos, Ideas etc.), select these categories as well. It's good to quickly look through the topic categories after your article is done to make sure you aren't forgetting an applicable topic that you didn't think of at first.
[edit] Language Categories
GV also has many language categories. We use these to define what languages are used in the posts that we link to. So if you post has links to Chinese and Spanish posts, add the Chinese and Spanish categories (remember, these are not the same as the country categories for China and Spain, especially since Spanish is used in many other countries).
Note especially that English should be used in the same way. Any time you link to an English post you should add this English category. This is important for the Lingua translations as well as to keep everything organized.
[edit] Post Title
It's a good idea to provide an overall idea of the post in the title itself.
It's generally a good idea to provide a little geographical context to the entry. Not everyone knows that Blog X covers country Y. So you could say "the Scotland-based blog What's Up, Pussycat points out that ..." Also, please remember that not everyone reading your writing will be as familiar with the geography that you're covering as you are. For example, "There was celebration in Vaduz, the capital city of Liechtenstein, as..." is far better than "There was celebration in Vaduz, as..." Likewise, "Reports out of the tiny Italian city-state of San Marino indicate..." is preferable to "Reports from San Marino say that..."
[edit] Text styles in Posts
[edit] Marking Dead/Inactive Links
Links on the internet die sometimes. On GV we do a lot of linking and sometimes you will notice that a link has stopped working on an old post. If you can find the same article at a new link, then replace the old link with the new one and resave your post. If you can't find the original post you should mark the link as dead with the <del> html tag (which is in the editing buttons in Wordpress) and add a brief note about the dead link.:
<a href="http://url.com/postlocation/">
becomes
<del><a href="http://url.com/postlocation/"></del> [dead link]
Which will show the link with a line through the middle of it, like this.
[edit] Listing Contributors (other than the author)
We use the 'contributors' class to denote people who helped create a post but aren't the main author (because there can only be one author in Wordpress). This could be someone who helped translate the post for you, did a lot of editing, or anything else.
You should always put the 'contributors' paragraph at the end of the post so that it will match the author credit just below it and make them look similar. '
You can use the 'contrib' button in the editor to make some text into the contributor paragaph or you can type in the code yourself, it looks like this:
<p class="contributors"> TEXT HERE </p>
If you are listing the name of someone who is part of Global Voices, as always please link to their GV profile page (like this one) so that people can find their posts and bio information easily.
[edit] Extra Notes
To add some visually distinguished notes at the beginning or end of a post please use the "notes" class in a div around your content. Translation notes can be used to add necessary context or information for your linguistic audience:
<div class="notes">Notes: This post is being ironic.</div>
[edit] Site Names
Site names should be in italics; e.g. "I think that Global Voices is a really interesting blog" or "There was a really funny podcast on Global Voices yesterday."
In the unusual case where a blog or a site appears to be unnamed, use the the domain name or the blogger's name e.g. "Over at www.wrycatcher.com, Holden Caufield writes that..." or, alternatively, "Holden Caufield, on his blog, writes that..."
The names--or nom de blogs--of bloggers should be in normal type. This also applies to bloggers who are not anonymous but are commonly known by their nom de blog, e.g. Instapundit or Atrios or mr.brown. When a nom de blog is synonymous with the site itself--again, e.g. Instapundit--there's no need to italicize the name. The only exceptions are if
1. you're specifically writing about the site itself and need to distinguish it from its creator. E.g. "Is Instapundit the site more important than Instapundit the man?" or
2. the post you're linking to was written by a guest blogger: "Jane Smith, guest-blogging on Instapundit, writes that...". Even then, you can get around it by writing something like "Jane Smith, who's guestblogging for the Instapundit this week, says that..."
[edit] Titles of Individual Posts
Titles of individual posts should be in "quotes". E.g. "in a post titled 'Why Whales?' in his blog The Pequod, blogger Ishmael explains why he decided to go to sea."
[edit] NO UNDERLINES!!
Feel free to use Italic text or Bold text to create emphasis in posts. However, please do not use underlines, as that usually indicates a link and could be confusing for readers.
[edit] Picture Posts
For the title, use "Images from Countryname: Short Descriptive Slug". For example, "Images from Canada: Pancake Factory" or "Images from Hong Kong: Dim Sum Palace".
Make sure that the image you want to post has a Creative Commons license. This is very, very, very important. In case the image doesn't have a CC license and you are very keen to use it, you could email the owner of the picture and get permission as well.
A short caption at the bottom of the image, after the byline, can be very useful in providing clarifying context, particularly if the subject matter of the image isn't self-evident.
Download the images from Flickr/ Any other site that hosts the photo: click on the 'All Sizes' button above the image to get the largest, highest quality images. Resize the image to no more than 350 pixels wide, then upload it to GV.
Here's some sample HTML you can use:
<div align="center"><a href="LINK TO ORIGINAL PICTURE"><img border="0" src="FULL PATH TO IMAGE" style="padding: 10px;" /></a></div>
<i>"TITLE OF PICTURE" by <a href="LINK TO PHOTOGRAPHER'S PHOTOSTREAM">PHOTOGRAPHER'S NAME</a></i>
