<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

20060420:

General Business

It has been a busy few days doing last-minute fixes, proofing and checking text and articles and formatting and trying to get SCIFIPEDIA ready for the world. It boggles my mind how many things a proofreader can find that I've looked at more than once and haven’t noticed as being wrong. I calm myself down by thinking that once many, many sets of eyes are looking at anything and everything on the site that there are likely to be many more mistakes found and fixed. Of course, some of those visitors might introduce new mistakes as they add new material but there will still be lots of people looking over the shoulders of the ones making the mistakes and correcting as they go. It's always worth trying to remember that this will be a perpetual work-in-progress, always growing, always less than perfect but always getting better – particularly if everybody pitches in and helps. If you find something you don't know how to fix, let us know by hitting that "Contact" button.

Formatting

What did I use most today? That's often the spur for my lessons in wiki formatting and today is no exception. I did a lot of Category correction and I thought a few words on the subject would be worth passing along.

Categories are an important way to organize and centralize information groupings and they can be a very handy way to make sure that things that belong together are found together. When you're writing an Article that dips into more than one Category, it's important that you finish the piece with a full list of Category links and that you "pipe" each one so that the alphabetical sorting is keyed to the most important part of the listing, namely, where someone would most naturally look to find a reference. At the same time, if something fits quite nicely in the subcategory of TV Series, then how necessary is it to also include the Category of TV as well. With most Articles, the right subcategory is probably more important than the topline category which will, if everything is listed in it, become very busy and full of entries and maybe less useful as a result. It's probably more important to reference across topline Category designations than it is to reference a subcategory and the higher Category into which it falls.

Today's shout-out

Blaise S. A very acute and assiduous proofreader, among her many talents. I always thought I had a good eye for errors but Blaise reminds me that just like someone who defends himself has a fool for a client, someone who relies on proofreading his own writing is very likely to look like an idiot in print (electronically or otherwise). Thanks for that extra set of sharp eyes.

Thought for the day

As a writer, you're only really as good as the person who looks over your shoulder and points at the dumb mistake you don't want the world to see.