Help:Topics: Difference between revisions

This is a proposed Appropedia guideline.You can edit it, or discuss it on the talk page or at the Appropedia policy discussion page.

For now, this should be considered an essay by one or more Appropedians, and not as a policy or guideline.

Read more...

Appropedia uses "topics" to serve both as a navigational aid, and as way to promote awareness, discourse and content development (i.e. for articles and course textbooks) for important subjects in Appropriate Technology and Sustainable Development. From a navigation perspective, the Topic page is the top of a "subject matter tree", built out of topic category (and subcategory) pages, that helps to organize various project, how-to, thesis and other articles. The topic category pages also serve has overview pages providing context for articles within the categories. Some topic category pages are blank stubs in need of creation, others are being worked on by topic experts (thank you topic experts).

Topic pages on Appropedia usually have the same name as a category, and provide general information about the subject. These help to provide a structure to Appropedia, and help visitors to navigate and find the information that can help them. Please help to develop these pages by sharing your knowledge or finding useful information under an open license.

Information about specific projects or designs may be mentioned in passing, but to explain a project or design in detail, a separate page should be used, with a name that indicates it is a specific project or design - see Help:Page naming. Similarly, "how to" information may be mentioned in brief, but should refer to a separate page.

Table

To take more deliberate approach we might make a manually maintained table, to include non-existent "wished-for" articles and categories (which you can help to develop!) and which will always be open to expansion.

To see pages currently available on Appropedia, you can:

• Start with Category:Topics, or
• Use the search box at left, or
• Browse the category tree (i.e. starting at the broadest category), or
• Browse all categories.

Creating a topic page

You can start with a prefilled page here (REMEMBERING TO DELETE THE PARTS YOU DON'T USE):

Template:Create topic page

...or copy and paste from the following, as needed.

Header

The header templates help with navigation:

• {{topic header}} or {{topic with portal header}} for topic pages.
• {{cat header}} or {{cat with portal header}} for category pages - these also point to the main topic page..

Boilerplate

One way to start editing a new topic page is by copying in this code and saving, to create the initial structure:

{{topic header| default.png | {{subst:PAGENAME}} }} 

INTRODUCTION


== Interwiki links ==

* [[Wikipedia:{{subst:PAGENAME}}]]

{{stub}}

[[Category:{{subst:PAGENAME}}]]

Next steps

An introduction may be paraphrased from the Wikipedia article or other useful resource.

If the category name is different from the topic name, {{subst:PAGENAME}} will create the wrong text - correct where needed.

Add the categories found on the equivalent category (edit the category, copy from the edit box, at bottom).

If there is a portal, change the header to:

{{topic with portal header
| image= default.png
| portal = {{subst:PAGENAME}}
| category = {{subst:PAGENAME}}
}}

Add relevant interwiki links - and note that Wikipedia page names are singular.