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How to create a great person article

From ICANNWiki
Revision as of 18:37, 9 February 2011 by Caterina (talk | contribs)

Here at ICANNWiki we are trying to build a encyclopedia of wiki articles written about people, companies and other items that are or were related to ICANN and the Domain industry. This article is specifically about creating people articles.

Steps

  1. Chose an article you would like to work on from ICANNWiki.org, there are currently over 1,500 that need to be moved, which can be found here people articles on ICANNWiki.org. We'd first move people that have:
    1. Both a portrait picture and a caricature.
    2. We can find at least a one paragraph bio either from ICANNWiki.org or other source.
    3. We can find at least one contact point (Twitter, FB, e-mail, etc.).
    4. We can verify that they are still actively involved within the world of ICANN or the IT community (Via LinkedIn, ICANN.org, etc).
  2. Create a new page with the name of the person and start writing the article. Keep in mind that our priority is provide as much information about the person as possible, in a clear and consistent format. Sometimes you will be able to find a decent amount of information in the old article and you can simply copy and paste the text with images and other information in the correct new format. In other cases there will be little or no information on the existing article and you will need to search for more information.
  3. Search for Profile pages and other information out on the web:
    1. Twitter (get the person's @___ handle)
    2. Facebook (get the URL for the person's public Facebook page)
    3. LinkedIn (get the URL for the person's public LinkedIn page)
    4. Look for the person's e-mail address
    5. Look to see if the person has a personal website or blog, etc. (other than their main company website)
    6. Try to determine the person's current country of residence
  4. Download the person's portait and caricature from ICANNWiki.org. Click on the the images(s) in ICANNWiki.org first, doing so will expand the image to it's full resolution. Download the maximum resolution image, then upload those images to ICANNWiki.com using the upload file menu option.
  5. Create a page on ICANNWiki.com, use the People Template
  6. Migrate and update the person's bio, reading what's on Linked in may help here
  7. Replace the original article on ICANNWiki.org with a redirect (you can see redirected articles here)

Extra Credit

  1. Resize the portrait and caricature so that they match in height when presented in the infobox. I think this may require some adjustment before they are uploaded.

Keep in mind

  • When uploading images, make sure they have the person's name as in "JohnDoePortrait.JPG" or "JohnDoeCaricature.JPG". If you just upload "Portrait.JPG", then we will be overwriting each other soon. Other image file types such as .PNG are fine.
    • If there is a portrait but no caricature, please use the caricature coming soon tag (we will show an example of it later). If there is no picture, please move on to the next person in the list.
    • If there is both a portrait and a caricature but no information, do not skip to the next person just yet. Search for information first.
  • When entering an e-mail address, replace the "@" with "_[at]_". This is to thwart e-mail spammers.
  • When doing research to make sure you have the right person, look for company associations, pictures which you can match, etc. to make sure you have the right person
  • Be sure to include citations (external references), and when doing so use the ref tags (look at finished articles to see how this works, or ask an admin like Ray or Andrew).
  • Write your own content based off your research, which should be cited. Do not copy and paste.

Research Examples

Here are three examples to show how to write informative people articles with these scenarios: Frederick Schiwek, Victoria Fava and Vinton Cerf.

Frederick Schiwek

Lets take the example of Frederick Schiwek first. If you check the ICANNWiki.org-article on Frederick Schiwek, you can see there are the pictures and some summarized information.

  • Search for information about this person with his name, for example: "Frederick Schiwek". (Remember to use quotation marks so that the search result does not return people named only Frederick or only Schiwek). Also, different people may have the same name so if you want to have more specific results you can search with keywords such as name and country (example of this search is "Frederick Schiwek" Luxembourg) or name and affiliation ( example of this search is "Frederick Schiwek" EuroDNS )
  • Be sure to go through at least first 50 results and if there is not enough information in these page, all of them combined, that can help you write at least one paragraph about the people, go to the next person. But in this case, if you visit the search results you can see there is plenty of information to write an organized article about Frederick Schiwek.
  • After you find enough sources of information, first step is to create a page in Create a page on ICANNWiki.com. Simply adding the name to the URL will create a new page. For example, to create a new page for Frederick Schiwek, we will simply use "Frederick_Schiwek" in "http://icannwiki.com/index.php" to change "http://icannwiki.com/index.php/Frederick_Schiwek" and go to that address. (Initially the page will not exist and you can use "edit this page" link to edit, add information and save the page).
  • Use the People Template as the basis for the article. From the search results you should find enough information to fill in the people template. Don’t worry if you can not find all of them, just add the ones you can find. Please follow the correct format for links, email address etc (mentioned in People Template). For example, from the search results we found the country, email address Facebook and LinkedIn link of Frederick Schiwek.
  • If there was no caricature (for example, Zoe Baird) you can use caricature = CaricatureComing.jpg.
  • Write the content. Also from the search results, you gather important information on the person you are writing and write it in an organized manner. Do not copy or paste anything, create your own content based on the information. Use the proper method to refer the original source of these information.
  • You can start with giving the simplest introduction of the person mentioning his current employment and affiliation. For example, "Frederick Schiwek (Freddy) is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Domain Invest and Co-Founder of voipGATE ". This information was gathered from his LinkedIn profile which is completely rewritten and properly referred.
  • You can mention what the person is currently doing, his important roles and achievements or any interesting facts you have read when you browsed your search result. This is why it is important to go through the initial search result before you start writing an article, so that you can have an idea about what you are going to write.
  • It is good to put all of the employment information as a separate section called career history. Sometimes, you only find information in a form of experience and employment records (such as websites like LinkedIn) and you can rewrite them as a career history.
  • For Frederick Schiwek, we have collected some of his information from his LinkedIn page and you can see how we have simply use these information as a source to create our own content.
  • Notice one of the links is an interview. Interviews are an important source for information, so do not simply search for biographies, read all the interviews or anything else you can find on someone in order to write an article about him or her.

Victoria Fava

Let's take the example of Victoria Fava next. Once again, If you check the ICANNWiki.org-article on Victoria Fava, there are also the pictures and some information such as affiliation and country but once again no details.

  • So we searched with different combinations of her name and her affiliation and came up with some results. Now if you check these result, you can see some of these results are not in English. This is a very common scenario for people who are from a country where English is not a native language.
  • Always remember to check these pages too as there can be important information you can use in your article. You can use Google translation or any other online translation to translate the content. You can now use the translated information if appropriate. Do refer the source of the content.
  • For example, we found a page written in Spanish from the search results. Google translate auto-detects the source language, so the translation process was easy and the result presented us with important informtion for the article.

Vinton Cerf

If you visit the ICANNWiki.org-article on Vinton Cerf, you see its an well written article with enough information. You can simply use these information to create a new article. But it would be better if you can use some additional information along the way, with citations as to where you found the information.

So even if there is a lot of information, we still searched for "Vinton Cerf" and gathered additional information supporting some of the facts of the article. In this way your article will be more precise and references will provided to the readers who wish to learn more about the information presented in the article.

And feel free to browse through the already completed articles for more ideas.


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