Issuepedia:Page Structure
Introduction
Issuepedia is a great idea (with an excellent domain name), and there is a lot of potential here. One of the chief difficulties in starting any contributor-based project is the need for a basic structure; without this structure, it is difficult to attract contributors, as most people find it difficult to begin when faced with a blank slate.
In order to draw in more contributors -- and to provide a useful and consistent set of navigation links, reference points, and metadata regarding pages -- a strong set of community standards is necessary, embodied in templates and categories.
Templates
Templates provide page structure and help organize standard information and notices. See Wikipedia:Help:Template and Wikipedia:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Templates for more information on template usage at Wikipedia. Wikipedia has an excellent set of templates that Issuepedia could use as a base set.
Suggested templates
Standard sidebar for individual issues
Each issue page should have a descriptive sidebar that helps categorize the issue (using one or more categories), provides a map of where the issue fits within its category, and provides a short description of how well-developed the issue page is.
"Well-developed" will require some definition and consensus. Some suggested axes:
- Number of sources cited
- Quality of sources cited (difficult to measure!)
- Quality of analysis (also difficult to measure)
- Stylistic quality (writing, links to other pages, images, etc)
It would also be beneficial to create a template for the citations themselves, again with some kind of "quality" rating, as well as a category (opinion/primary source/secondary/etc) and links to pages about the authors and publications involved. These pages could be used to discuss any perceived bias in the source authors or publications.
This text is just a placeholder, and discussions on this topic should probably take place on the discussion page. Eventually this should be replaced once there is a strong initial approach.
Categories
Categories group related items and assist with navigation between pages.