Guidelines

Become a Contributor

To become a contributor, click "Create Account" on the upper right hand side of the page, and send an email introducing yourself to webmaster Kevin Robertson including your user ID and real name. Contributors unknown to the webmaster will not be retained. It is suggested that you make the user ID short (e.g., your initials) as it will be used to cite contributions with a link to your contributor page, explained below.

Overview

Contributions to Coastal Plain Plants can be made in various ways:

1) Edit pages directly using the guidelines below.

2) Request a plant species form as a Word (docx) file, edit the form and submit to Kevin Robertson for incorporation into the website.

3) Submit other sources of information, such as notes or spreadsheets containing relevant data about plants, for incorporation into the website.

4) Volunteer to be interviewed about your knowledge on certain plants by contacting Kevin Robertson.

Editing

Coastal Plain Plants uses a Wikimedia platform, the same as used for Wikipedia. To edit pages, login, then click the "Edit" tab or and of the "Edit" hyperlinks on pages. After editing, click the "Save Page" button at the bottom. If you are not familiar with editing in Wikimedia, a good place to start is this tutorial. Many more sophisticated commands can be searched online. Some basic commands are:

''italic'' (use for plant species binomials)

'''bold'''

'''''bold italic'''''

=Heading=

== Subheading ==

=== Sub-subheading ===

pipe "|" divider: SHIFT + BACKSLASH

: single indent

:: double indent, etc.

Adding a thumbnail: [[File:name_of_file|thumb|left|caption text]] The orientation and caption text do not need to be included.

Contributors are encouraged to use the default headings for plant species pages, but additional headings can be added as needed, e.g. Roots and Clonal Reproduction, Allelopathy, Human Uses, etc.

Citing Contributions

Contributions should be cited, but they can be cited in various ways.

Cite by Contributor User Name

To site observations by the contributor, type the user name in double brackets, e.g. [[DDG]]. This will create a link to a page that is not yet created, so it will appear as a red hyperlink after the page is saved and you are in Read view. If you click on this hyperlink, you will be prompted to edit the new page that has your user name as the title. To set up a template for this page, type or paste {{subst:Template:Contributor}} in the editing area. After saving the page, this will create a template where you can fill in with information about yourself so that people may know who made the contribution. This page can include links to a personal or professional web page where contact information may be more secure. After your Contributor page is created, typing your user name in double brackets will create a function link to that page. ==Cite literature using Author-Date form== Simply cite the author(s) and date in parentheses, e.g. (Smith and Blackburn 1994), and write or paste the full reference in alphabetical order under "References and Notes". ==Cite literature using links== As typically done in Wikipedia, citations can be made so that they show only a hyperlinked superscript number linking to a footnote. For a single reference, type <nowiki><ref> followed by the reference text and then </ref>. This will place the reference text at the end of the page in order of citation.