Guidelines

Guidelines for Editing

Like politics, wikis are a collaborative business, and we welcome (and indeed rely on) contributions from everyone in the fandom. A few things to bear in mind when creating or editing articles:

• Why we're here: The purpose of this wiki is to be a resource for the fandom. Our goals are 1) to provide a guide to fandom in-jokes, memes, and terms of art and 2) to be a repository for information and trivia about our favorite politicians and the British political system. Articles should serve one of those goals.
• Don't be a dick: Absolutely no racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or ageism, or the mods will be forced to go all Bercow on your arse. Also, remember that this wiki is non-partisan and our fandom contains loliticians of all political stripes, and tailor your contributions accordingly. It's fine to gently rib each other- we can all agree that Tony Blair has a messiah complex and Jacob Rees-Mogg appears to be a refugee from the 19th century and the Liberal Democrats' earnestness is inherently hilarious. But don't be a dick about other people's political beliefs or kinks or pairing preferences.
• We're not Wikipedia: Wikipedia is already Wikipedia, and it does a good job of it. We're not subject to the same significance or neutrality requirements, and we're here to have fun, not to be blandly factual and humorless. It's okay to make jokes and editorialize a bit in the articles. Just remember that our ultimate goal is to provide information, not to confuse people further, so don't write anything that would cause a naive reader to conflate fanon and canon.

Wikitext for N00bs

We no longer have a text editor, so unfortunately everyone is going to have to learn the wikitext markup language if they want to edit the wiki.

The good news is:

• It's not hard
• We have a tutorial here
• Once you learn the language, you can put it on your résumé!

Style Guide

Creating New Articles

Article Titles

• Proper nouns are just "Noun", not "The Noun", because otherwise everything gets alphabetised under 'T' in the index pages and we can't find anything. Thus, House of Commons, not "The House of Commons".
• The one exception to this rule is titles of newspapers or fictional works where the complete correct title includes "The", thus The Guardian, The Thick of It.
• Politicians' pages should be titled with the name they're most commonly known by. Thus Tony Blair is "Tony" because no one ever calls him "Anthony", but David Cameron is "David" and not "Dave" or "DCam".

Templates

• Common page types with complicated standard formatting, like profile pages or ship manifestos, have pre-written page templates.

  If there is a template for the type of article you want to write, use it. It gives you a guide to what the article should contain, keeps the style standardized and will spare you lots of annoying formatting. You don't have to include everything in the template; just delete the sections that don't apply. Every article is a work in progress, so don't worry about filling everything in. If there are sections that do apply but you don't know what to write, just leave them blank and others can fill them in later.

• When it comes to profiles, a person's most political career trumps. Thus Michael Gove's article is based on a "politician" template, not a "hack" template, and Charlie Whelan's is based on a 'spad' template, not an "activist" template. Details of their less political careers go in the biography section, not in the infobox or the appointment table.

• Here are all the article types with page templates. Click on the link for more detail about the article type, the name of the appropriate template and an example of the template formatting:

• Shipping Manifestos
• Profile Pages
• Fic or AU Pages

• There's a quick look-up guide for all the page templates here. You can also access it from the Wiki section of the sidebar.

Noindexing

• Every article must contain the magic word __NOINDEX__ so that search engines will not crawl it. The templates already contain this line, but if you're writing an article from scratch please remember to put it in.

Editing Articles

General Good Practice

• If you're making edits that are more than just minor copy-editing corrections, it's good manners to fill in the edit summary so other people will know what you did.
• Use headings sensibly.
• MediaWiki accepts standard html/CSS formatting, which gives you the power to choose fonts, colors, text sizes, etc. Use this power for good, not evil.
• Attribute quotations when you can. Blockquotes are fine in moderation.
• Categories are the wiki equivalent of tags. They are descriptions, not collective nouns. Thus Simon Hughes is categorised as a "Liberal Democrat,' not filed under "Liberal Democrats." Look at similar articles to figure out which categories apply to yours.
• Categories control wiki navigation, so it's fine to add them but don't delete any unless you know what you're doing.
• Categories are for navigation, not commentary. The wiki isn't like Tumblr- don't editorialize in the tags. That's what the articles themselves and the discussion pages are for.

Spelling and Punctuation

• Our fandom is international but our focus is British, which means we default to British spelling and style conventions: punctuation outside quotation marks, s-verbs not z-verbs, and a lot of unnecessary 'u's. If like the author of this article you are used to American spelling and you'll give yourself a brain hemorrhage if you try to use British conventions, you are welcome to use the spelling and punctuation with which you feel most comfortable, but don't go around other people's articles correcting "programme" to "program". It's meant to look like that. (The truly bored are invited to correct the spelling in American articles.)
• We have however adopted the British newspaper/American convention of using double quotes for outer quotes and single quotes for inner ones- it seems more appropriate for an internet resource and it's the more common quotation style on the meme.

Multimedia

• Upload images rather than using external links. External links are unstable- if the website you're linking to deletes the image, your article will wind up with a broken image symbol instead of a picture. Uploading images to the wiki preserves them forever.
• Image files should begin with the name of the article for which they were first uploaded, so that we have some idea from the filename of what they are and why they're here. Thus, an image for this article should have a name like "Guidelines.AnImage.jpg". It should not have a name like "4688065096_5c5809a221_b.jpg". You can click on any of the images on the wiki for an example of how to do this correctly.
• We can embed videos from YouTube and a select group of other video hosting sites. You can find an explanation and example code on the MediaWiki for Beginners page. The formal documentation is here.
• No moving GIFs unless the article you're adding it to is very brief and the GIF is very important. With all the pictures and embedded videos, page load times are long enough as it is. The last thing we want is to add a constantly running script. If there is a GIF connected with a particular politician that is so wonderful it needs to be recorded for posterity, give it its own page so it won't slow down the main article.

Types of Articles

• Shipping Manifestos
• Profile Pages
• Fic or AU Pages

The Wiki Discussion Page

The general discussion page for the wiki as a whole is here. If you want to make a major change (changing the navigational structure, putting a new category on the sidebar, etc) you should propose it there first to see what people think.

It also has a list of wanted pages or page expansions. If you want to contribute but you're not sure where to begin, you can take a look at the wish list and see if anything inspires you.

Troubleshooting

Here are some frequently occurring technical problems, and a guide to how to solve them: Troubleshooting.