User:Merhawie/WP:ERI Guidelines

These guidelines are under development. You are encouraged to discuss and improve it.

To write and edit Eritrea-related articles, please follow the conventions below. It is important to remember that any topic that is not covered in the remainder of this document is likely covered elsewhere. The following conventions are helpful:

see Wikipedia:Manual of Style for general information
see Wikipedia:WikiProject Ethnic groups for notes on the style of articles related to ethnic groups
see Wikipedia:History for notes on the style of history articles

Use of non-Latin scripts

It should be remembered that using italics or bolding names in either Ge'ez or Arabic scripts is not recomended as it tends to make them less legible. It is also important to remember that in the English Wikipedia that the editor is writing primarily for a reader of English. This means that articles should not be littered with Ge'ez and Arabic, instead they should only be used for proper nouns.

Remember that the inclusion of the Arabic or Ge'ez is to disambiguate articles, to reduce confusion.

Romanization systems

Arabic Tigrinya

Introductions

All encyclopedic articles whose title's include a name of either Arabic or Ge'ez descent should have the name written out in both scripts. A template can be used to simplify this system.

Before adding Ge'ez or Arabic script for any other reason than for proper nouns, make sure to consider whether or not it adds to the English article.

Naming convention

If an article already exists and you are to wiki-link to it from another article, do not provide the translation. The reasoning for this is that it is redundant, on the linked page, the same translation will appear and so is quite unnecessary. For example:

...the Habesha (Ge'ez: ሐበሻ, Arabic: حبشا) people are a grouping of...

compared to:

...the Habesha people are a grouping of...

When the user links to the page Habesha they will be presented with the translation, making the former redundant in this example.

Numerals

In Eritrea Western numerals are used in nearly every function, and so as a matter of style (and uniformity with the rest of the English Wikipedia) the WikiProject Eritrea recommends its usage. True (Eastern or Modern) Arabic numerals as well as Ge'ez numerals are not to be used. If either is used in a source text it should be converted to Western numerals.

Dates

As a continuation of the policy in the previous section (Numerals), it should be remembered that Eritrea uses the Gregorian calendar. To this end all dates, especially the more recent dates (since 19th century) should use this calendar system. Dates from the Julian or Ethiopian calendars should be converted to the Gregorian system.

When reporting full dates it is important to wikilink these dates. If the complete date is known it should be presented in the ISO 8601 standard and wikilinked (enclosed in brackets, [[XXXX-XX-XX]]). Using this method will allow the dates to be presented according to the individual user preferences. For more information regarding this please refer to WP:DATE.

References

Editors are always encouraged to use references. To add uniformity to this endeveour various wikipedians have created templates to encourage referencing. In Eritrea-related articles there is not a necessity to use only English sources, any credible source can be used.

It is especially important to use references with direct quotes, or information that is likely to be disputed or challenged.

Sources

Templates

The WikiProject Eritrea encourages the use of Templates to cite your sources. This is quite important in maintaining uniformity and organizing information. When using these templates (in fact for any application on Wikipedia) please use the ISO 8601 standard, YYYY-MM-DD. In the text of an article this should be wikilinked (enclosed in brackets, [[XXXX-XX-XX]]).

Presented below are two of the most commonly used templates in the WikiProject Eritrea.

To reference books you may use the following template: {{cite book}}

{{cite book
|last= 
|first= 
|title= 
|year= 
|id=ISBN  
|publisher= 
}}

To reference websites you should use the following template: {{cite web}}

{{cite web
|title= 
|url= 
|accessdate= 
}}

For a much more extensive collection of citation templates, and their uses please go to Wikipedia:Citation templates.