User talk:Darragoldstein/sandbox

Hi Darra,

Sorry to have been slow in picking up your email. This is starting to look really good!

A couple of points of house style. In the email, I have mentioned how to mark up italic and bold. We generally put the subject of the article in bold the first time they are presented, so in this case Phyllis C. Richman, and also other names the subject was known by, eg Phyllis Chasanow, again the first time that name is presented. If the latter name is something that should be found by searches, and should point to this article, we discuss how to make that so. The italic markup can be placed outside the link markup, eg New York Times.

References should usually come directly after punctuation, without a space. (Hit the edit link on this page to look at how the formatting has been achieved.) It's incredibly tempting to put another full stop after the footnote text, but that is not appropriate because the stop is already in place.

The house rule is to use British style for quotations (even for articles on American subjects) -- ie punctuation outside the quotation marks, unless (i) there was punctuation at this point in the original sentence, and (ii) the quotation represents a substantial sentence fragment -- ie at least a verb and words to the end of the clause or sentence. So we would name her "the most feared woman in Washington". And not "the most feared woman in Washington." Wikipedia justifies this style under the name WP:Logical quotation; but it is something that I appreciate you may find really goes against the grain, having done so much editing for American publication.

If there is something that you really expect to have an article, and you are surprised has a redlink, it is well worth using searching for it using the Wikipedia search box. So The Godfather: Part Three gives a redlink, but you should be able to find an article for it under a slightly different spelling.

Lists of works are usually presented as bullet lists, which can indicated by starting each new line with a '*', eg

• Her first book
• Her follow-up second book

Awards are usually written into continuous prose, otherwise the piece can start to read a little bit too much like a resumé rather than an article. (Long bullet lists of awards also tend to be a giveaway for a subject-penned article).

Referencing. URL references are good, especially for building an article quickly. But more descriptive referencing is better, such as is better. This formatting can be generated automatically using a template, which should be available if you hit a link marked "Cite" at the right-hand end of a bar just above the edit window, that then causes a line with a "Templates" button to come up, which if you press it gives a choice of media to make the citation to. Using one of these citation templates is best practice, but putting the formatting in by hand (ie as per "better" above) is still acceptable.

The references section can be introduced with the word "Notes" as section header, but it is more usual to use the word "References". There are various other standard end-matter items, but we can come to those later.

This is then followed by the word <references />, which should make the references appear. Like this.

Hope these suggestions are useful. All best, Jheald (talk) 19:45, 19 November 2014 (UTC)