Indic Wiki TOR for Content Creation (OPS Guide) BHU
Terms of Reference
Guidelines for Content Creation for Wikipedia Articles
The given specifications are minimum requirements and subject to vary as per the context.
1) While selecting the topic following guidelines should be followed :
Wikipedia encyclopedia combines many features of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers.
a) Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view: The articles should have an impartial tone that document and explain major points of view, giving due weight with respect to their prominence. It should avoid advocacy, and characterize information and issues rather than debate them. In some areas there may be just one well-recognized point of view; in others, describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context rather than as "the truth" or "the best view". All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources, especially when the topic is controversial or is on living persons. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions should not be included.
b) Notability: Article and list topics must be notable, or "worthy of notice". Determining notability does not necessarily depend on things such as fame, importance, or popularity— although those may enhance the acceptability of a subject that meets the Wikipedia guidelines.
Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable; if no reliable third-party sources can be found on a topic, then one should not create article. This will help to avoid indiscriminate inclusion of topics.
c) Verifiability: Articles should contain only material that has been published by reliable sources. These are sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, like newspapers, academic journals, and books. Even if something is true our standards require it be published in a reliable source before it can be included. Editors should cite reliable sources for any material that is controversial or challenged.
d) No original research: Articles may not contain previously unpublished arguments, concepts, data, or theories, nor any new analysis or synthesis of them if it advances a position. In other words, you can't make a point that hasn't already been directly made somewhere else in a reliable source.
e) Do not include content like, a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory.
f) The content created should sound organically developed and not a template based machine generated one as expected by the community. The machine generated content should not sound monotonous and recitative.
2) Images: Every article should have minimum two images with following guidelines
a. The images uploaded should fall in one of the categories: Own work, freely licensed, public domain images. The Wikipedia image upload policy should be followed.
b. Captions: Every image should be given appropriate captions. Captions are the most commonly read words in an article, so they should be succinct and informative.
c. Icons: The use of icons should be done in addition to images whenever necessary in content – mainly lists, tables, infoboxes, and navboxes – to provide useful visual cues.
d. Gallery: A gallery section may be appropriate in some articles if a collection of images can illustrate aspects of a subject that cannot be easily or adequately described by text or individual images.
e. Alternative text: In addition to a caption, alt text—for visually impaired readers—should be added to images.
3) Formatting articles: All the articles follow the following Wikipedia formatting guidelines.
a. Title: Naming conventions and guidelines, on which choices of article titles are based. The ideal article title precisely identifies the subject; it is short, natural, distinguishable and recognizable; and resembles titles for similar articles. Follow the Wikipedia guideline for the same.
b. Dates and Numbers: Wikipedia guides for the presentation of numbers, dates, times, measurements, currencies, coordinates, and similar material in articles should be followed.
c. Abbreviations: Avoid making up new abbreviations, especially acronyms. If it is necessary to abbreviate in small spaces (infoboxes, navboxes and tables), use widely recognized abbreviations.
d. Topic of content: Every article should have a topic of content list in the beginning.
e. The article should be constructed as per the Wikipedia style and sections.
4) Templates: Every article must have templates which should also include an image, a map, or both as per need of topic. Every article should have one Infobox and minimum one navigation template.
a) Infobox: Every article must include a panel, usually in the top right of an article, next to the lead section, that summarizes key features of the page's subject.
b) Navigation template: It is a grouping of links used in multiple related articles to facilitate navigation between those articles.
c) Other templates: As per the requirement other templates may be incorporated as per need of the topics.
5) Hyper linking: To seamlessly navigate among information the articles content should be hyperlinked with relevant information within and outside Wikipedia.
a. There should be a minimum of 5 internal hyperlinks per article.
b. There should be a minimum of 2 external hyperlinks for an article page.
6) Classification: To access articles by subject the categorization is necessary. Categories are intended to group together pages on similar subjects. An article can have multiple categories or subcategories. Every article should be categorized in minimum 4 categories.
7) Citation: Article should follow the standard citation style of Wikipedia. Inline citations, which link specific reliable sources with specific pieces of information in the article, provide practical support for these policies by making it possible for readers to verify the article content.
References: provide a list of references without any inline citations. This can satisfy the sourcing policies when the entire contents of the article can be verified from the sources listed.
The article should follow the Wikipedia citation style and every article should have minimum 4 citation/references.
8) Further reading: The article should have a section see also/further reading which gives link for further related topic.
9) Adding location information: Based on the demand of the topic the article may include the location parameters, maps to visualize Geo information.
10) Adding Media: Based on demand of the topic the article should incorporate video, animation or audio in the articles. All the copyright and related norms mention for images are applicable to media embedding.
11) Disambiguation: Disambiguation pages help readers find the particular article they want when there is topic ambiguity. They are non-article pages designed to help a reader find the right Wikipedia article when different topics could be referred to by the same search term. The disambiguation entry for the article should be made in cases it is needed.
12) Redirects: A redirect is a page created so that navigation to a given title takes the reader directly to a different page. For the article the redirects should be created for alternative names people may search the information.
13) Portals: Portal serves as enhanced "Main Pages" for specific broad subjects. Portals complement main topics in Wikipedia, and expound upon topics by introducing the reader to key articles, images, and categories that further describe the subject and its related topics. For each sub-knowledge board a separate portal should be constructed.
14) Quality: To ensure the quality of the content every article should pass the two reviews as follows. The reviewer’s comments and corrections should be reflected on the discussion page.
a. Technical review: This must be done by a subject matter expert in that area to check the accuracy of the topic.
b. The language review: Should be done by language experts for linguistic and grammatical accuracy.
15) The content creation process should follow the namespaces structure and all the guidelines of Wikipedia article writing policies.
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