AtoM wiki style guide

Main Page > Unification

This page is a style guide for community users and Artefactual staff who intend to contribute content to the Access to Memory wiki. In 2015, we began a project of consolidation and reorganization, moving content from several different out-of-date wikis (Qubit-Toolkit, DCB, Artefactual Wiki, ICA-AtoM wiki), reorganizing it to make it more accessible, and updating it so it was still relevant to the project. We hope to keep this new wiki well organized with a consistent hierarchical structure to the pages, to make end user navigation much easier. The following guide will offer tips and suggestions on how to create pages for the wiki, in line with how other pages have been migrated thus far.

Tip

This page has also been created following the recommendations found in this style guide. You can look at the raw text of the page to see how we've created it if you'd like an example.

Categories and page hierarchies

Overview

Every new page should be added as a child of one of the existing 5 sections
Every page should be given one of the 5 existing categories at the botttom
Pages in a sub-section should be listed, or accessible, from the section landing page
If there are multiple-subsections, those too should act as landing pages listing their children
Users should be able to click through from the Main page to any lower-level page, regardless of how deep in the hierarchy

Explanation

This wiki has been organized into 5 main sections - each section has been given a landing page. These sections are:

Each of these landing pages should give the user a sense of what they will find - a brief description of what the section comprises should be included at the top. If there are further subsections in the hierarchy, then the page should be broken up into sections with the title of the section acting as a link, and including a brief description of what the user can expect to find in each subsection below.

Tip

See the Releases page for a good, simple example of this practice.

You can also see how this structure is outlined on the [Main Page], in the following diagram:

An overview of the AtoM wiki's organization, with examples of what is found in each section. Found on the AtoM wiki's main page to help orient new users.

Important

Make sure that if you create sub-pages in a section, you list them somehow on the landing page above in the hierarchy. Users should be able to click through to any page from the main page, no matter how deep in the hierarchy of a section - they should not have to search for a page to find it if they know what section it should be in.

The wiki has also been given 5 corresponding categories:

Every page should be tagged at the bottom with a corresponding category.This is important so that the category can act as an index for all pages in a section. This also allows us to review the organization and see if we have forgotten to list a sub-page on its corresponding section landing page.

Page names vs page titles

Overview

Page names are used to create and maintain the desired page hierarchy and permalink
Page titles are used for display purposes
Every page should be given a display title
Every new page name should begin with one of the 5 sections, and proceed accordingly so the page hierarchy is maintained
page names can be simplified for the sake of a better permalink

Explanation

With Mediawiki (the kind of wiki we're using), the only way to create a proper hierarchy is to name the page the way you want the URL to look. So: Let's say you've created the page Community, and now you want to create a sub-page, Community events.

To nest this new page properly under the Community page, you will need to create a new page entitled Community/Events. You could name it Community/Community_events, but in terms of the permalink URL for the page, that would be redundant - the page is already in the Community section. This page name, used to maintain the hierarchy, is different from the display page title you can give the page after.

Once you have created your page, you can now add a title, by adding a line of code at the top of the edit page, demonstrated below. So, if you want to name your page "Community events," and you don't wan it to display as "Community/Events" as you've created it, you can add the following:

{{#pagetitle:Community events}}

Every page should have a display title, and the actual page name should be constructed consistently depending on the section hierarchy. The page name should be economical, avoiding repetition - think of it as your chance to create a simple URL, more than a page name. The page title is where you handle the display.

So for example - let's say you wanted to organize your new Community events page into sub-sections, first by year, then by month. That would mean that to create a new landing page for events taking place in October of 2015, the page name might be:

Community/Events/2015/10

but the page title added to this page might be:

{{#pagetitle:Community events - October 2015}}

Tip

You can also give links to pages that same clean display title look, like this:

[[Community/Users|Users]]

Will display as: Users

SUGGESTION:

I've noted that changing the page title display does not actually change the page name - so searching for "Users" will not bring up a result in the autocomplete for search (only searching for Community/Users will).

My suggestion, to at least try to make this more clear, is to keep the original page name in the breadcrumb - i.e. since the page you are on is not actually entered as a hyperlink when manually creating the breadcrumb, we might as well leave it as the full page name.

So.... NOT LIKE THIS:

[[Main Page]] > [[Community]] > Users

BUT LIKE THIS:

[[Main Page]] > [[Community]] > Community/Users

AtoM wiki style guide

Categories and page hierarchies

Page names vs page titles

Account

Page

Search