Help:Wiki Contribution Policies and Guidelines

The following is an Intellogist Help Topic

Thank you for visiting Intellogist and becoming part of our community! To maintain an atmosphere of trust on the site, and to ensure that our site remains a haven for objective content and thoughtful user feedback related to patent search tools and systems, the following guidelines are provided for user contributions. If you are planning to make a contribution to our Community Reports, please keep these guidelines in mind. If the content you submit falls outside of these guidelines, our moderators will likely edit your post to help it conform to these standards. The Intellogist moderators are available to help, so if you have any questions, feel free to contact us!

Both objective and subjective content can be submitted when editing an Intellogist Community Report. Please observe the following guidelines:

Objective Content (Factual Information)

One of the major purposes of the Intellogist Community Reports is to help other users get a factual overview of the capabilities of various search tools and systems. This could include facts about the tool taken from help materials, but it could also include information from other sources, such as a review of the tool published in a journal or trade magazine.

When including material from any outside source, please attribute it by explicitly stating the source, and pasting the URL for the source into the wiki. For instructions on how to quote entire passages of text from another website, please see the section below on content that is copied from another website.

For further instructions on formatting citations, including material from a book, journal, or other non-web resource, we abide by Wikipedia standards, which can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#How_to_format_citations. To sum up the policy, various citation formats are allowed as long as they are internally consistent to the wiki page you are editing. The format of a citation is secondary to its content; it is important that others are able to find the cited materials.

Content that is copied from a another website (such as a vendor website)

When you quote information from a vendor website, it is okay if that information is somewhat subjective in nature. The important thing is that it must be very clear that you are quoting someone else's words, and you must attribute the quote.

When including material from any outside source, please attribute it by explicitly stating the source, and pasting the URL for the source into the wiki. You do not need to use any brackets when including a URL, as it is best if everyone can see the full URL before they click on it.

Format Guidelines: When including quotes from outside websites, make the text italic by using the wiki editor bar or enclosing it in two single quotes ''like this''. Place the copied text in between <blockquote> and </blockquote> tags to indent the quotation on the page.

This contribution is an example of including information sourced from a website. It appears with wiki code intact. As you can see from this example, quoting subjective information from a vendor website is appropriate to show the vendor's assertions about the product in question. However, proper formatting must be used to make it clear that the material is a quote.

The following information is provided on the website's FAQ page, available at http://www.sitename.com/FAQ:

<blockquote>''Our product has been developed as the result of an intensive human-computer interaction study, and it has been optimized for the particular needs of patent searchers.''</blockquote>

After entering the code above into the wiki page, it will look like this:

The following information is provided on the website's FAQ page, available at http://www.sitename.com/FAQ:

Our product has been developed as the result of an intensive human-computer interaction study, and it has been optimized for the particular needs of patent searchers.

There are also more advanced methods of adding references to Community Reports, including the use of footnotes (<ref> tags). To learn more, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Footnote_summary.

Subjective Content (User Opinion)

Subjective content, such as user thoughts and experiences about a search tool, can be shared on Community Reports pages. When contributing this content, it is very important that it is clearly marked and separated from objective contributions.

Formatting: Please use the ==User Experiences== tag when including user experiences and opinions in a Community Report. At the bottom of your contribution, be sure to "sign" your post by selecting the appropriate icon from the wiki editing menu, shown in the figure below (alternatively, you can type --~~~~). The icon looks a bit like a handwritten signature. Doing this will ensure your username will be associated with the contribution, as well as a date and time stamp.

The signature icon should be used to sign a user's own feedback when editing an Intellogist Community Report.

For example, the following formatting could be used to add subjective material to a Community Report:

==User Experiences==

During the initial few days of public use the system returned over four hundred interesting patents on my keywords quickly. However, personally, I felt that the advanced algorithmic search benefits were difficult to assess without an existing well understood corpus of results to compare with other vendors.

--~~~~

And the example would appear to look like this:

User Experiences

During the initial few days of public use the system returned over four hundred interesting patents on my keywords quickly. However, personally, I felt that the advanced algorithmic search benefits were difficult to assess without an existing well understood corpus of results to compare with other vendors.

--KWhitman 21:18, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

For Additional Guidance

Thanks for taking a look at our contribution policies and guidelines. As always, feel free to contact us if you need the help of one of the Intellogist staff!