Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/How to/Step by step guide

Guild homeHow to copy editTemplatesBarnstarsParticipantsCoordinators

RequestsDrivesBlitzesMailing listNewsletters

• Step-by-step guide

This is a step-by-step reference guide to copy editing prepared by members of the Guild of Copy Editors.

Formatting and wiki mark-up

Important:

1. Divide the material into sections if they are not already present.
2. Add appropriate links and disambiguate if required. Linking should occur only on the first appearance of a term, except in a longer article, where a term will be linked once in the lead and once in the body of the article. An extremely long article may have repeated instances of linking towards the bottom of the page. Avoid overlinking; common words are no longer linked.

Less important:

1. Consider adding an infobox template to the article, if there is enough information present to justify its inclusion.
2. For settlements, see if you can get coordinates from http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html. For US settlements, you could use http://geonames.usgs.gov/pls/gnispublic/f?p=139:1:1478262359279016::NO:::
3. Move images around for an appealing layout where no text is squished between images on opposite sides of the page.

Language

1. Make corrections to grammar and spelling.
2. Simplify the language and make it clearer and more direct.
3. Remove peacock terms and flowery language unless backed up by the sources.
4. Remove superfluous words. The words "also" and "however" can almost always be removed. Phrases like "due to the fact that" or "in the year" can typically be modified or omitted. Sentences using "with" as a conjunction should be refactored.
5. If you see large blocks of unwikified text that seem to be better written than the rest of the article, you might be reading material that is a copyright violation. The Duplication Detector, Earwig's Copyvio Detector, or CorenSearchBot can check articles for you and determine whether they, or a portion of their text, contain copyright violations (copyvios). Copyright material must be removed. If the entire article is copyvio, it should be nominated for deletion; place the template {{db-copyvio}} at the top of the article. Further details are available at Wikipedia:Copyright violations and simple instructions are available at Wikipedia:Text copyright violations 101.

Punctuation

1. Names of record albums, books, and magazines go in italics. Names of songs and short poems go in quotation marks.
2. Choose whether or not you wish to use serial commas for the article, and stick with that choice throughout.
3. Make corrections to punctuation.

Compliance with WP:Manual of Style

Important:

1. Wikipedia headings begin with a single capital letter, i.e., they use sentence case. The only other capital letters in headings are in proper nouns and acronyms.
2. Numbers from zero to nine are spelled out as words; larger than nine are usually expressed as numerals. There are many exceptions. More details on this topic are at WP:NUMERAL.
3. Photo captions do not end with a period unless the caption is a complete sentence.

Less important:

1. The list of sources, if the article has one, should be sorted in alphabetical order by the last name of the author.
2. The titles of any books used as sources need to be properly capitalized, not in lower case.

Higher level editing (WP:GA, WP:FA)

1. Do all of the things in the above list, including those listed as "less important."
2. Positioning of commas is important at the GA and FA level, and at the FA level can even cause an article to fail to be promoted. You may need to consult a style guide such as The Chicago Manual of Style if you wish to edit at this level.
3. There are variations in spelling and formatting of dates between British and American usage. Canada and Australia use a mixture of both, but tend to favour the British style. A quick reference is available at American and British English spelling differences. Before beginning edits on an article, you should first determine which style is being used, and then ensure all material complies with that variant. Date formats need to match the variant used in the article as well.
4. You can go to http://www.worldcat.org/ to obtain information on sources. Typical tasks include correcting the formatting of book titles so that each appropriate word begins with an upper-case letter; adding ISBN numbers or OCLC numbers to each book; and adding the publisher location. All this information can be obtained from Worldcat, where you can search for books and other documents using several parameters.
5. Several wikiprojects have their own style guides, in addition to the site-wide Manual of Style. When editing film articles, please refer to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Film (MOS:FILM); when editing military history articles, please refer to the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Military history (MILMOS). There is additional information in these guides specific to the article being edited which is not covered in the main MOS. For example, WP:MILMOS has details on how battles should be named, while MOS:FILM includes guidelines on awards and accolades.