Skip to content

Add help articles on referencing and articles #16

New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Merged
merged 3 commits into from
Jun 30, 2020
Merged
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
File filter

Filter by extension

Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
26 changes: 26 additions & 0 deletions User-Help/Articles.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
## Categories and post types

In addition to just Q&A, here on Codidact each site can also add several different categories of posts. This is useful for different types of knowlege sharing, as well as for site activities and community building. These categories can contain different post types.

**Post types**

Currently, we have two main post types: Q&A (questions and answers), and articles.

Q&A is what forms, in most cases, the majority of the content on the site. Both the default Q&A and Meta categories use the Q&A post type.

One of the main technical differences between articles and Q&A is that articles can't be answered, as well as having a `/articles/` path in the post URL. (Q&A uses a `/questions/` path.)

Articles can be used in several different ways. Some sites have a blog, where people can post about topics that are of interest to that community, as well as site updates (and, really, whatever that site decides). Other sites use articles to post information that doesn't quite fit in a Q&A format - such as tutorials, reviews, or recommendations.

**Categories**

By default, all sites start out with two main category types: Main Q&A, which is where the main Q&A content for the site goes; and Meta, where people can discuss the site itself.

In additon, many sites have additional categories. For instance, [Writing](https://writing.codidact.com) has a category for Writing Challenges, [Cooking](https://cooking.codidact.com) has a category for sharing Recipes, and [Codidact Meta](https://meta.codidact.com) has a category for a [site Blog](https://meta.codidact.com/categories/30) (where the Codidact Team shares updates).

A category can use the Q&A post type, such as Writing's writing challenges, where people post entries as answers to a question; or they can use an article post type, such as Cooking's recipes; or they can use both, and have both articles and Q&A allowed in that category.

---


If your site doesn't currently have a blog or another category that you'd like to see, you can post a proposal in your site's Meta category with your arguments for why your community would benefit from adding other categories and what categories you'd like to add.
18 changes: 18 additions & 0 deletions User-Help/ReferencingGuidelines.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
## Guidelines for referencing and quoting on Codidact sites
Copy link
Member

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Looks great!


When you're writing a post, referencing and quoting external material is a great way to back up your posts, provide sources, and increase the quality of what you're writing. There are, however, a few thing to keep in mind when quoting external material.

**Referencing online material**

When you're referencing or quoting material that can be found online (such as [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/ "English Wikipedia") or similar), **please make sure to include a link**.
Pay attention to what license the content is published under - for instance, Wikipedia licenses text under the [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License), which requires attribution and a link back to the original source.


**Referencing offline material**

When quoting from offline material, such as a book, please make sure to always include at a very minimum the **title and author** of the work. Including a chapter number or page number when applicable is ideal.
Be sure to only quote whatever text is relevant. While quoting for knowlege sharing usually falls under [Fair Use rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use), which allows the use of copyrighted material, limiting the sharing of copyrighted works to only what's necessary for your post is in general a good idea.

---

In any case, whether your original source is online or offline, **please *clearly* mark the quoted material as being quoted** from somewhere and is not your original content. This is done simplest with blockquote formatting (see the [formatting help](/help/formatting) for help with formatting).