Mechanics of Authoring
As an author wanting to add new content to FEN, please be sure that you done all of the necessary preliminary work described in First Steps to Authoring. If not, please click the adjacent link and go through that section.
Its time to learn how to make a contribution to FEN. Encyclopedia content is constructed using one of four (4) different types of "objects" that can be created and edited: encyclopedia pages, images, tables, and citations. The entire encyclopedia network system is composed of one or a combination of these 4 object types.
- Encyclopedia Pages: The most fundamental of the 4 object types is the encyclopedia page. An encyclopedia page contains text related to the content. In addition, an encyclopedia page may contain hypertext links to other objects, such as other pages, images, tables, or citations. These links may point to pages inside the encyclopedia system but also may point to other sites on the Internet. There are two types of encyclopedia pages. An organizational page (the link takes you to an example of an organizational page) serves to orient the user to the content contained in the set of children of this page which constitutes a section. Organizational pages typically provide one paragraph summarizing the knowledge in that section of the encyclopedia and provide links to the pages contained within the section, ie the child pages. The second type of encyclopedia page is the content page (this link takes you to an example of a content page). Content pages synthesize scientific knowledge for a clearly defined topic. Content pages integrate other FEN object types such as citations, images, and tables to enhance the users' understanding of the material.
- Images: Images are figures or photographs that support the text in the page by illustrating things that are not suited to a textual description alone. Images appear as thumbnails such as the one embedded in this paragraph. Clicking on the thumbnail brings up a full screen-sized view of the image contained in its own window. The encyclopedia supports .GIF, .JPG, and .PNG image file types.
- Tables: Tables present tabular data that can be more succinctly summarized in this format rather than merely discussed within the text of the page. A table appears as a link within the text (for example: (Table:Upland White Oak) ). The table object then opens in its own window and displays the data about the table as well as the table contents.
- Citations: The encyclopedia network contains an extensive and continously growing collection of citations (for example: Smith 1996. Authors can reference citations that already exist in the network or create new citations if the work they are citing has not yet been uploaded. Citations are shown as links using the usual and customary scientific citation format. The citations show up in their own window and will eventually lead to an abstract or,full text article if one is available electronically.
Subsections found in Mechanics of Authoring
- Creating a Starting Point : To contribute new content to the encyclopedia network, an author write new encyclopedia pages in his/her own workspace. To make new pages, one must always define them in terms of a parent page. So how does the author get the first parent page to which t
- Creating Citations : Citations can appear within encyclopedia pages in many different ways. In the encyclopedia network, it does not matter how an author refers to a reference in their text.
- Creating Encyclopedia Pages : Creating encyclopedia pages is the backbone of the FEN authoring process.
- Using Images : Before you can use an image in an encyclopedia page, it needs to already exist either online somewhere in the encyclopedia network or offline somewhere on your personal computer. Once an image exists, it is easy to use it on an encyclopedia page.
- Using Tables : Before you can use a table in an encyclopedia page, it needs to already exist either online somewhere in the encyclopedia network or offline somewhere on your personal computer. Once a table exists, it is easy to use it on an encyclopedia page.
- Efficient Authoring Methods : It is important for authors to use efficient methods to produce new content. Experience has shown that by following a certain sequence of methods, authors can improve their production rate quite dramatically.
- Checking Sections for Unlinked Citation Text : This page describes how to use the administrative tool to find and correct text such as (Someauthor, 1997) which is not linked to a citation.
