HandWiki:Help/Articles
Article Acceptance Policy
We believe in the original spirit of Wikipedia - any information from scholars must have rights for publication on Wiki-style resources. Therefore, we accept all encyclopedic articles related to science, programming and computers. These articles should contain useful information and have at least one reference to an external source that supports the content of this research information. The external sources can journal articles, preprints, arxiv.org, preprints.org, high-quality blogs, web pages and other. However, such articles should not be advertisements for any product, company or service. For advertisements, consider sponsorship opportunities.
HandWiki is better suited for new and original content by professionals since HandWiki editors are researchers with verified credentials, HandWiki's "article notability" concept only requires at least one external reference. HandWiki can also be used for books, manuals etc. where many articles should be grouped under a single namespace to create tables of contents.
How to create a HandWiki article
Registered users can create articles in the usual MediaWiki style. See Special:CreateAccount about how to create a HandWiki account. An easy way to create a new article, manual, monograph and a book is to use the Article creation wizard:
(login required). Select a topic and type the name of the future article. The next page gives some suggestion for similar articles. If you do not see your article among the existing, click the new UR and press "Create".
You can also import the existing Wikipedia articles. Instead typing a name of the new article, copy and paste the full URL of the Wikipedia article. For example, if you write
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShareLaTeX
This will reformat the Wikipedia article and update the internal links. If the Wikipedia article has the prefix "Draft:", this prefix will be removed.
If you have a source code of a Wikipedia article (or article from any MediaWiki), you can use HandWiki conversion tool to transform this article to the HandWiki style. This tool will correct all internal links using HandWiki namespaces.
Using Sandbox
If you cannot register with ORCiD but still want to contribute to HandWiki, use HandWiki sandbox to create draft articles. These articles are monitored and can be moved by registered users to the HandWiki.
If you want to correct the existing HandWiki article, one can copy and paste its wikicode (see the top-right bottom "View source") to SandBox, and make modifications in SandBox.
Manual creation of articles
Alternatively, you can simply add your "article" by entering this URL:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/article
This means you now create an article in the "Main" namespace. As a rule, such articles should be about computing, i.e. mathematical, statistical, computers and programming language terms. Such terms should be sufficiently general and can be shared by many fields of formal and natural sciences. Do not forget to add the corresponding category at the button of the page as seen here:
[[Category:My category]]
All categories can be found in Special:Categories. For example, if you describe a programming language, add this:
[[Category:Programming languages]]
All other articles for a certain topic should be created in a dedicated MediaWiki namespace.
i.e. as "Namespace:article", where "Namespace" refers to a specific topic or "portal".
For example, an article about physics should be posted to the portal Physics as:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Physics:article
The following dedicated namespaces/portal are available to created an articles (100-5000 words):
- Astronomy:
- Biology:
- Biography:
- Chemistry:
- Medicine:
- Philosophy:
- Physics:
- Earth:
- Social:
- Finance:
- Engineering:
- Software:
- Company:
- Organization:
- Religion:
- Places:
- History:
The main page of a portal is indicated at the top menu of HandWiki using capital letters. Note that the column ":" at the end of the namespace is important. It indicates the "namespace (or portal) of the articles. The current number of articles per portal in July 2024 is given below:
| Main Topics | Nr of articles |
|---|---|
| HandWiki main pages | 123 |
| Natural and Formal Sciences | |
| Math, Analysis, Computing | 63991 |
| Astronomy & Space | 53928 |
| Biology | 500832 |
| Chemistry | 38119 |
| Engineering & Technology | 72785 |
| Physics | 20293 |
| Earth studies | 18847 |
| Unsolved problems | 5795 |
| Humanities, Medicine, Finance | |
| History | 2405 |
| Social studies | 24785 |
| Religion | 11403 |
| Philosophy | 9486 |
| Medicine | 15254 |
| Finance/Business | 12089 |
| Auxilary topics: | |
| Software programs & libraries | 47613 |
| Biographies of researches | 39860 |
| Places | 3744 |
| Organizations | 20208 |
| Companies | 21006 |
In addition, HandWiki has books, tutorials, monographs and manuals which are not included in the above summary.
 | Handwiki articles should not include non-research topics related to arts, politics, movies, sport, not-research books, TV-series, music, songs etc. Links that reference such topics (and corresponding biographies) should point to external articles from Wikipedia, Everipedia and Citizendium. |
Books, Manuals and Monographs
There are 3 special namespaces (portals) that should be used to create books and manual. They are not topic specific, so they can be used for any scientific field. These portals are:
- Book: (one book can use several wiki pages)
- Manual: (one manual can use several wiki pages)
- Monograph: (one monograph uses a single wiki page)
A single book typically uses many wiki pages. You can find an example in here. You should contact admin@handwiki.org if you would like to start a new book that uses multiple pages, so an administrator will create a dedicated top-level page. Manuals have a similar structure as the books, but they discuss technical aspects.
A monograph is "a detailed study on a single specialized subject". A monograph should use a single wiki page located inside the namespace "Monograph:". To create a monograph, simply create a page:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Monograph:Title
where "Title" is the title of your monograph. The title will be included to the table of content automatically, as you can see in HandWiki Monographs.
| Unlike Wikipedia/Everipedia, HandWiki uses namespaces for specific fields of studies (in addition to the standard categories for more general articles). In this case, one can create easy-to-use "handbooks" by listing articles that belong to a specific namespace. This can be used to create tables of content, attach a different license to the entire namespace, and make a printed copy. |
Using "underscore (topic)" style for the names of the articles (similar to Wikipedia/Everipedia) is discouraged. Doing so makes the names of the articles too long. If a term belongs to a particular topic, move it under the appropriate namespace, i.e. "Calorimeter_(physics)" should be moved to "Physics:Calorimeter".
In addition, one can create more extended "lectures" or "online books" using this method:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Physics:Title/chapter1 https://handwiki.org/wiki/Physics:Title/chapter2
where "Title" is the name of the book (which is, obviously, about physics since it is located in the "Physics" namespace). In this case, one can create a table of content from chapter1" and "chapter2" automatically.
If manuals or lectures are inside a dedicated namespace (i.e. Physics:Title), it is also possible to protect such material from editing by other users or attaching a more restrictive license. This is especially important for various manuals where editing by other users is not a good option.
Here is an example of creating wiki that represents "manual" or "book" on rare diseases:
You can use this example to create your own wiki with a well-defined topic.
Creating a biography
The namespace "Biography:" is used to document biographies of prominent researches. If a HandWiki article contains a reference to a work of a researcher, than this researcher can be described in the "Biography:" namespace. The entry should be added as:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Biography:FirstName_FamilyName
 | Always add a biography inside the namespace Biography: If this entry is located in a different namespace, it will be deleted automatically without warnings. |
A biography must contain internal links to the HandWiki articles where his/her work is easy to identify (i.e. it should contain a reference on articles in peer-reviewed journals and where your contribution is clearly stated). The reason for this is that the automatic scripts used by HandWiki may remove biographies that do not link any internal articles with your name, or references.
A biography should have the category listed in HandWiki:Biography, otherwise it will be difficult to find it.
Articles based on Wikipedia text
Short encyclopedic HandWiki articles can be sourced from Wikipedia and similar resources. Such articles can be modified and extended. They can be put back to Wikipedia, Everipedia, and other similar public resources.
Articles based on Wikipedia text are allowed to re-post as long as they have external references.
However, such articles should not violate 
Wikipedia:Copyrights.
Most Wikipedia articles are licensed under the CC BY-SA license, meaning that one can re-post and transform the text. But you need to indicate that the article is based on the Wikipedia text, and add a reference to the original Wikipedia article to the end of your new article. You can do this in the following way: after moving the article from Wikipedia, add the following line to the end of this text:
{{Sourceattribution|Zygo Corporation}}
which will show this box:
 |  |
When you import an Wikipedia article automatically using Article Creation Wizard, this box is added automatically. If you post an article which was previously (permanently) removed from Wikipedia, you do not need to add this reference.
Adding author signature
Authors can add their signature / credentials at the bottom each article. To do this, use Author template. The advantage of this approach that the author name is the part of the article. The author name will be scanned by search engines. It will stay under the article even if the article is moved or exported.
For example, this line:
{{Author|David Murkov|username}}
will add the signature:
One can add multiple authors at the bottom of articles.
Protected namespaces
If you would like to create an article that is only visible for registered users, use the namespace called "Private:". For example, this article Private:UploadBibTex can only be seen for the registered users since it is under the "Private" namespace:
https://handwiki.org/wiki/Private:UploadBibTex
Note that such articles are not scanned by external search engines.
