Ballotpedia:Tutorial (Discuss)

From Ballotpedia

About	Contribute	Format	Discuss	Join

We discuss Ballotpedia articles on talk pages. If you have a question, concern, or comment on an article, add a note in the article's talk page and instead of in the article itself. You do that by clicking the Discussion tab at the top of the page.

Every contributor also has a user talk page on which other contributors can leave messages. To say something to someone, write on their talk page. They'll reply by writing on yours, and so on.

You should sign your comments by typing ~~~~ to add your username and a time signature (see the example discussion below). Your signature will be inserted automatically. For your convenience, there is a button at the top of the edit box with a signature icon which automatically inserts "--~~~~". You can get a username by creating an account (it's 100% free!).

Indenting

Indenting improves the readability of a discussion. Each reply should be one level deeper than the first statement.

Plain indentations

The simplest way of indenting is to place a colon (:) at the beginning of a line. The more colons, the more indentation. A new line (pressing Enter or Return) ends the indented paragraph.

Example: This is aligned all the way to the left. : This is indented slightly. :: This is indented more.

Shown: This is aligned all the way to the left. This is indented slightly. This is indented more.

Bullet points

You can also indent using bullets for lists. To insert a bullet, use an asterisk (*). Similar to indentation, more asterisks means more indentation.

Example: * First list item * Second list item ** Sub-list item under second * Third list item

Shown: First list item Second list item Sub-list item under second Third list item

Numbered items

You can also create numbered lists using the number sign (#). Again, you can affect the indent of the number by the number of #s you use.

Example: # First item # Second item ## Sub-item under second item # Third item

Shown: First item Second item Sub-item under second item Third item

Other project pages

In addition to Talk pages, we use a few other pages to talk with each other. These different areas are often referred to as namespaces — as in, "the Talk namespace."Pages in the Ballotpedia namespace (like this one!) provide information about Ballotpedia and how to use it.

Content written in a Template page will be displayed in articles that contain the template reference. For example, the content written in Template:Protected will appear in any article that contains the {{protected}} tag.