Help:Best Practices

This is a list of best practices to use when editing articles on this wiki. Note that although this blog uses MediaWiki, some of the advice here runs counter to current WikiPedia practices. The goal behind these best practices is that members of this wiki spend more time creating content than fixing mistakes.

• Learn how the wiki software (MediaWiki) here works. A good place to start is the "Help Pages".
• Read and adhere to the style guide.
• If there is a talk page for an article, read it before editing the page.
• If you have questions or comments about an article, always ask them on the talk page, not in the body of the article itself.
• If you comment on a talk page, sign it with your signature and timestamp.
• It should go without saying, but before creating a new article, be sure to search thoroughly to make sure it doesn't already exist. If something similar already exists, consider carefully whether your proposed content should go into a new article or be added to an existing article.
• Avoid creating orphan pages—pages that no other article links to. Such pages can only be found through a search. The easiest way to avoid creating orphan pages is to create new articles by creating links to them. (It is preferable to have links to non-existent articles than to have orphan pages.)
• Always add an edit summary. Yes, we can always see what you did by reviewing changes, but if you tell us up front, we may not need to review changes. At the very worst, we know what to look for.
• Always mark minor edits as "minor edits". To know what constitutes a minor edit, see the minor edits section of the style guide.