Style guide

Titles

We have standardized on using either the "City, Country" or "Region, Country" of the location of the monolith. Having titles/URLs formatted like this helps people find the monolith via search. The title should be as concise as possible. The word "Monolith" in any language should not be in the title.

Body

The body field should contain full sentences, originally written in your own words about the monoliths. Aim to keep your first sentence under 100 characters, as that is the trim point for search results when we can't display the entire body. If you want to customize the trimmed result, in the upper right of the body text field click [Edit summary].

Company Involvement

In cases where the monolith story interacts with a company, we try to emphasize the monolith by only referring to the industry of the business. (ie. "This monolith at a local bar ...", rather than " This monolith at Joe's, Dirty, Rusty Crab Shack ...") We always provide sources for verified monoliths, so people can access that company information. If that company information is not available in the source, do provide it, and add the company name to the 'Notes' section as it's critical to knowing the location of the monolith.

Copyright Text vs. Creative Commons

We are trying to make this project freely distributable and available for other projects to use and build upon. To accomplish this we have put the written portion of this site under a Creative Commons license.

However, to maintain this we need to work to make sure that copyrighted text from news outlets do not pollute our Creative Commons license. If you can't write a body, it's best to just leave the news source link as the body.

Non-Translatable content

There are times when we do not want to translate sections of the body text. This most often occurs when we want to preserve the original text on a monolith, but have the rest of the description translated. For this we can use a <span class="notranslate">Text not to be translated/ Texto no traducido/翻訳されないテキスト<span>

Photos

Photos from Copyrighted sources

Credit photos respectfully. The Photo credit should apear in both the Alt and Title feilds. If a photo credit is missing, check the news reports and see if you are able to add a photo credit. After the photo credit can be a short description of the photo.

Your Photos

If you took the photo, if possible add 'CC 4.0-by' and your name, or online nickname so we can have it under a creative commons license.

Links & Media

URL

The URL should start with http:// or https:// and link directly to the article or page about the monolith. In addition, avoid AMP or mobile urls when possible

Link text

This should start with the name of the news outlet or the domain of the page. (ie. Local10News) Followed by a dash and a three word or less description. Link text that include more than four words( including news agency name) should be avoided as on the timeline these long link titles cause display issues.

When there's more than one link to the same source, or if the link is relevant append it to the source For example for two links of the same source:" Local10News - Spotting ", " Local10News - Vanishing". Or as a link description: "MonolithAnalyzerBlog - Translation analysis".

Revision log message

We do read each of these, and they are very helpful. In just a few words describe your edit. For example: "added links", or "fixed title". Revision notes are extremely useful, and will always be reviewed when your edit is in moderation. If left empty, revision notes will be automatically created based on the fields you edited.

Revision notes require being logged into MonolithTracker to view, as revisions are not viewable by anonymous. Because of this keep the notes related to the edit. For example: "Added News source, please review classification", or "Added additional photos from LocalNewsTv.com" as these comments are about the change in the monolith content and not about the monolith itself. The revision field can be seen by any user that is registered on MonolithTracker, and as such should not be considered a way to privately comment.