Note: Ballotpedia will be read-only from 9pm CST on February 25-March 5 while Judgepedia is merged into Ballotpedia.
For status updates, visit lucyburns.org.
Ballotpedia's coverage of elections held on March 3, 2015, was limited. Select races were covered live, and all results will be added once the merger is complete.

Help:Starting a page

From Ballotpedia
(Redirected from Help:How to start a page)
Jump to: navigation, search
Editing Help
1328101905 Help.png
Index
Editing guide
Cheatsheet
Policies
Copyright
Textual standards
Visual standards
Glossary of terms
Edit review process

Once you are comfortable editing existing pages, you may want to begin a new page. There are three methods for creating new pages: enter the title in our tool below, click a red link or modify the url. Information on how to use these methods is presented in the following sections.

Start a page

Enter a title below to start an article. From more information, see our introductory tutorial.



Red links

The first possible method to create a new page is to follow a red link you find or create on a pre-existing page. A red link is a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. It is a word or words placed in the double brackets that indicate an internal link ( [[ ]] ), meant to encourage people to follow up on that subject.

If you find a red link in an existing page that you wish to create a page for, simply follow the red link and begin to type. Once you have added text to this new page, save your edit, and you will have created a new page. The red link that you originally followed to create the page will now be blue or purple, indicating that a page exists. Once you have saved your edit on your new page, don't forget to create a talk page for your new content.

A slight variation on this method of page creation involves first creating a red link on an existing page, then following that link to create your new page. An example of when you might choose to do this would be browsing a congressperson's profile page on Ballotpedia. On that person's page, you may see references to the member of congress who preceded them in office, but we may not yet have a page for that person. If you wish to create that page, you could link one or more instances of the preceding member's name, save your edit, then follow one of those red links to create that page.

When using the red links method, as when using the URL method, you may first want to perform one or more searches to ensure that a similar or duplicate page for that content does not already exist. For example, you may see a red link to John Dingell, Jr. on a page, but if you performed a quick search, you would see that a page already exists for John D. Dingell, Jr. under the page name John Dingell. In that case, you should correct the red link, directing it to the proper page name instead of creating a new page with duplicate content.

Changing the URL

The second method to create a new page is to modify the URL in your browser to take you to the page that you wish to create. To do this, simply change the extension following the / in the Ballotpedia URL. For example, if I was on the Ballotpedia homepage, my URL would read as follows: http://web1.ballotpedia.org/Main_Page. To create the page Example page, I would simply delete Main_Page from the URL and replace it with Example_page. The URL would then look like this: http://web1.ballotpedia.org/Example_page (dead link).

Once you have modified the URL, hit enter to navigate to that page, and then click "Create" in the upper right hand corner. The edit box will then open, and you can add your content. Remember to save your edits and create a talk page for your new content.

When using the URL method, as when using the red links method, you may first want to perform one or more searches to ensure that a similar or duplicate page for that content does not already exist. For example, you may change the URL to create a page for John Dingell, Jr., which would look like this in your URL bar: http://web1.ballotpedia.org/John_Dingell,_Jr (dead link).. However, if you performed a quick search, you would see that a page already exists for John D. Dingell, Jr. under the page name John Dingell. In that case, you should not create a new page, which would only have duplicate content to a pre-existing page.

Naming conventions

Before creating any new page for Ballotpedia, make sure you are familiar with the established page naming conventions.

See also
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Help:How_to_start_a_page
ballotpedia.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-11
68098
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:UWZERY7KAZQZFLQACO4JXHBHUJJMKE3V
<urn:uuid:53f788e2-2a69-490d-8fff-57087dbbdbce>
2015-03-05T16:34:35Z
54.88.87.147
sha1:WMDEVEL774TP6XJ5WOCYRDRT2TKG5XDF
<urn:uuid:19c95ff9-4c03-4885-8373-0584891e3348>
http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Help:How_to_start_a_page
response
<urn:uuid:ec2be395-58b4-4a17-a8a5-3073aeebc9cd>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-28-5-156.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-11
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for February 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf