Ballotpedia:Ways you can help
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You can help Ballotpedia in two main ways:
1. Adding content
2. Cleaning up through "wiki-gardening"
Adding content
Adding to Ballotpedia is exciting because it helps your neighbors learn about their elections. You could take one ballot measure and become its expert, sharing with others everything you learn. Because it's a living archive, Ballotpedia is a move away from sound bites toward reasoned discussion and debate. Our "What people are saying" page is a testimony to the value readers find here.
Where to start
Here are some ways you can get involved:
- Look at the list of current projects for a project that interests you.
- Choose a stub article and expand on it.
- Visit your state page and expand on one of the articles listed there.
- Find a portal that interests you and start working on those articles. Each portal has a to-do list with suggested areas for expansion and improvement.
What to add
What should you add once you find an interesting article?
- References to source material
- Historical details
- Links within Ballotpedia to other relevant articles
- Links to relevant external pages
Wiki-gardening
Wiki-gardening refers to a variety of small article adjustments that make them easier to read or navigate, such as adding useful category tags. There's always a lot of wiki-gardening to be done.
Here are some areas that usually need help:
- Check the Ballotpedia:To do list for general maintenance tasks.
- Look at Categories for red-linked categories. Then add a link on that category page to a relevant article.
- Look at Categories for two categories that are basically the same, but are typographically different. Eliminate one of the categories by putting all of its articles into the other category.
- Look in Broken re-directs and fix any that are broken.
- Review a set of ballot measures and add additional topic category tags to the article after reviewing this list of ballot measure topics. Most ballot initiatives fall into more than one category. (Read up on how to add category tags to articles.)
