Content and Formatting Guidelines

Topic Guidelines

YIMBYwiki encompasses issues of land-use, housing, transportation, development, and policy, with particular interest on:

Questions of how communities can be more inclusive, equitable, liveable, and adaptable.
Gathering resources on existing and new responses to these issues, e.g. legislation,case studies.
Developing a "pattern language" of core questions and issues in this field. I.e. "factoring" proposals and discussions into key distinguishable components, e.g. "Value capture," "local control".
Finding key arguments, evidence, data, and citeable research / case-studies around core questions/issues identified in (3).

Align articles with Wikipedia, by default

Our default suggested procedure is to check for and use the same article titles as Wikipedia uses, for any given subject, unless there is some considered reason do to otherwise. This is for several reasons:

To recognize and use the prior work the Wikipedia community has done in discovering or asserting more established conventional terms, arriving at a common usage, and particularly, in maintaining disambiguation between it and related topics.
To facilitate cross-referencing between YIMBYwiki, Wikipedia, and other sources on the same topic.
To facilitate the potential promotion of material from YIMBYwiki into Wikipedia or other resources. Wikipedia has, obviously, vastly greater visibility and impact globally, and so one strategic goal for YIMBYwiki may be, to serve as a sort of development lab for materials to eventually propose for and merge into Wikipedia.
[the scope and content guidelines of Wikipedia are different than YIMBYwiki's, e.g. requiring "Neutral point of view" and basis in previously published work, which means no "original research" or new proposals; whereas we do invite new research and proposals, etc. However, we think there is still a large overlap in the approaches, and ways YIMBYwiki material might migrated into Wikipedia].

Relatedly, in general a strategic guideline for YIMBYwiki is to not put effort into articles unless they may provide something not already provided elsewhere, particularly at Wikipedia. If Wikipedia has a usable page already on a topic, just link to it, unless we're going to provide a different point of view or more material. In that case, incidentally, starting out by copying or summarizing the existing Wikipedia page may often be an helpful way to start -- just note the source, and build on it.

Format Guidelines / Tips

how to stop text flow around an image

to stop text flow (e.g. prevent it from flowing around an image, a common case).
in Source view, put enter this at the point where you want text to start at beginning of new line, i.e. not flowing around preceding object/image:

<div style="clear: both"></div>

how to embed a tweet

This wiki has Widgets plug-in installed, which allows any online tweet to be embedded into any page. To do so, in Source view of a page, enter a text block like this:

{{#widget:Tweet
|id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
|conversation=none
}}

where 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' is the Tweet (Status) ID. You can you get for any tweet by selecting the "Copy link to tweet" button at bottom of a tweet, which will copy into clipboard a URL of form

https://twitter.com/StreetRoots/status/1165727139552886789?s=20.

The digits between 'status/' and 's=20' are the Status ID.

the line

 |conversation=none

causes non-display of tweet to which this tweet is replying to, if any. Leave this line off if you want that to appear.

[deprecated / no longer applies]:

Main Page - has separate desktop & mobile sections

On the main page, we have separate content specific to mobile view, because the MobileFrontend extension used on site gives a stripped-down view without a logo otherwise, and it's not very welcome.

To make this work, the lower section of the page source code, containing the moble view, needs to be preceded by a blank line (for some reason?!) and then:

Due to editor problems noted below, unfortunately the necessary blank line sometimes disappears, in which case it needs to be put back in manually in Source view.

Page status labeling

[suggestion. -admin]. Pages should be labeled "Status: draft" until reaching a state of minimal completeness, then changed to "Status: published].

Use Wikipedia conventions by default

article names / URLS are made with initial word capitalized, subsequent words all-lower-case, unless the title is a proper noun commonly written capitalized.

display text for a link is usually the same as the target page name (eg "Inclusionary_zoning") except without the underscore characters.