Electowiki:The electowiki handbook


 * ''parent: Help:Contents

This page is "The electowiki handbook" (Electowiki:The electowiki handbook). If you are new here, and you don't understand terms like "MediaWiki", "Wikipedia" or "wiki markup" please see Help:Contents. Once you have done that, then this page might be helpful.

If you have read Help:Contents, and you want to learn more, please keep reading!

About

 * main page: Electowiki:About

electowiki is a wiki which tries to make a plethora of electoral systems more understandable for advocates of electoral reform. It has existed since 2005, and still enjoys frequent updates. We attempt to learn from online discussions in a number of forums, helping new participants more quickly get up to speed, and summarize the conclusions of many different discussions.

electowiki has a long history, divided into two phases: the "Electorama wiki" phase and the electowiki phase. There are wiki pages describing each of them.


 * Project:About Electorama wiki - This page describes the Electorama wiki phase (note the uppercase "E"). It started in 2005 and historians will hopefully say it more-or-less ended in 2018.  It was the phase prior to Miraheze hosting it.  It was an instance of MediaWiki that User:RobLa started hosting as an offshoot of the Electorama project.
 * Project:About electowiki - this was the "electowiki" phase (2018-now) - the current phase as of this writing in June 2020. This started around the time that User:psephomancy migrated the Electorama wiki over to Miraheze (sometime in 2018). See electowiki:About to learn about this phase.

Wiki

 * main: Help

Electowiki runs on the MediaWiki engine, just like Wikipedia and many other wikis, so for help with basic markup and editing, you can consult existing pages on those topics:


 * MediaWiki help contents
 * Wikipedia's Editing tutorial

To practice using wiki markup, please use the sandbox.

Best practices for formatting articles generally follow the same rules as Wikipedia's Manual of style. This covers the rules for bolding key words in article intros, using sentence case for article titles and headings, using written-out titles instead of abbreviations, which order to put article sections, etc. We may make our own amendments to this if necessary, though.

See Help for more about editing a wiki, or for specific information about MediaWiki.

Automatic citations
The Citoid extension is now enabled, and should automatically generate a citation when you give it a unique identifier, such as a URL, ISBN or DOI.

If it doesn't work in some case, you can try one of these other options:


 * 1) Enter your URL or unique identifier into Citer and it will generate wiki markup for a citation that you can copy and paste into the article.
 * 2) Open Wikipedia's Sandbox and use their citation generator tool to create a citation, then copy and paste into the article.  Copying from VisualEditor to VisualEditor works.
 * 3) Fill out the citation template manually

(Note that Citoid generates dates in the form YYYY-MM, but the citation templates can't handle these, because they are ambiguous with week number format. You can convert them to another month format or just add another  to the end, to make it a complete date.)

Images
Images can be included directly from Wikimedia Commons and Miraheze Commons, or uploaded locally. If your image would be useful outside the wiki, too, and is available under a Commons-compatible license, you are encouraged to upload it there instead. Wikimedia Commons' scope is for all "educational media content".

Non-local files have a link at the top of the image description page that will take you to the original upload site.

Annotations
Images can be annotated to highlight specific regions or include links to articles. The annotations are shown when the mouse is hovered over the image:



To add annotations to an image, click the image to view its description page, and then click the "Add a note" button underneath.

Video
YouTube videos can be embedded in a page using their ID. This markup, for instance:

produces this video:

orybDrUj4vA

See mw:Extension:YouTube for more information.

Dynamic page Lists
The mw:Extension:DynamicPageList3 extension is enabled, which can generate lists of pages using many different criteria. One application is to put voting methods into categories according to their properties, and then generate lists of methods that have certain properties. For example, a list of cardinal, proportional voting methods can be generated using this markup:  category = **Cardinal voting methods category = **Proportional voting methods 

 category = **Cardinal voting methods category = **Proportional voting methods 

The two asterisks mean that two levels of subcategories will also be included. It is not possible to include more sub-levels than two, unfortunately.

A complete manual is available with full parameter documentation.

Categories
We have a category hierarchy for articles starting at Category:Contents. Please put new articles in appropriate categories, especially articles about voting methods. If you write an article about a Condorcet-compliant ranked method, put it in Category:Condorcet methods, for instance. Generally an article should be placed in a more-specific child category and not in its parent, even if the parent also applies. So a Condorcet method does not need to be placed in Category:Preferential voting methods, for instance, since that is already implied by being in Category:Condorcet methods.

Templates
Templates are one of the most complicated aspects of MediaWiki. See Special:PrefixIndex/Template: for a full list of templates on this wiki.

Election-related templates
When writing an official definition of a voting method, place it in a definition template:

Currently this just produces a block quote:

but we might make this prettier in the future, which would affect all instances of the template simultaneously. Discuss any formatting suggestions on Template talk:Definition.

Similarly, the usual "list of ranked ballots" format can be placed in a Ballots template:

and likewise, style suggestions can be made on Template talk:Ballots