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» Home » Weekly Activities » Week 4 » Reformat

Reformat

Fix formatting or structural issues within an article.

While editors are eager to contribute and write articles on Wikipedia, sometimes their structural or formatting choices don’t conform to the Wikipedia Manual of Style or can be confusing to read. Without editing the content itself, fixing these issues makes the article look better, be easier to read, and is helpful for improving the overall quality of the article.


Instructions

Find an Indigenous writer’s article that could use restructuring

  • Go to the Writer draft template
  • Go to Edit Source
  • Copy all of the text
    • Do not make any changes to the template
  • Go to edit the article that you are working on
  • Place your cursor at the beginning of the editing box and paste the source text copied from the draft template.
    • Do not replace what is already written
  • Copy and paste already-written sections into the appropriate place in the new layout. If needed, change the section titles so that they match the content
    • For example, the draft template Bibliography section has sub-sections for Books and Poetry but you might need to change Poetry to Essays because the author does not write poetry.
  • Fill out the Infobox (See: Activity: Infoboxes)
  • Fix any minor formatting issues
  • Publish Changes

Resources

  • Article Template
  • WP: Content Assessment
  • WP: Manual of Style (full)

Examples

  • Billy-Ray Belcourt’s article is well-structured.

Complete this Activity

Let us know which article you reformatted by tweeting out a link with the hashtag #HonouringIndigenousWriters


Image Attribution: Featured photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

Posted in Level 3, Week 4 | Tagged with Editing, Organizing

Honouring Indigenous Writers
The UBC Vancouver campus is situated within the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam).
The UBC Okanagan campus is situated on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.,
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