Electowiki:The electowiki handbook

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

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.

The rest of this page is for help with Electowiki-specific features (or lack thereof).

Automatic citations

Wikipedia has the ability to automatically generate a citation from a unique identifier. While we've enabled this functionality, it doesn't work for all sources yet, so you may have to use 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

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".

• 

  A file uploaded locally to Electowiki

• 

  A file from Wikimedia Commons

• 

  A file from Miraheze Commons

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:

<youtube width="200" height="120">orybDrUj4vA</youtube>

produces this video:

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:

<DPL>
  category = **Cardinal voting methods
  category = **Proportional voting methods
</DPL>

Extension:DynamicPageList3 (DPL3), version 3.5.3: Error: Too many categories! Maximum: 4. Help: increase $wgDplSettings['maxCategoryCount'] to specify more categories or set $wgDplSettings['allowUnlimitedCategories'] = true; for no limitation. (Set the variable in the wiki's LocalSettings.php configuration file.)

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.

Election-related templates

When writing an official definition of a voting method, place it in a definition template:

{{definition|
If every voter's preference between X and Y remains unchanged, then the group's preference between X and Y will also remain unchanged with the addition of a new candidate
}}

(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 on Template talk:Definition.)