WWII Archives:WWII Archives Manual of Style

Welcome to the official WWII Archives Editing Guide (formerly called WWII Archives Manual of Style or WAMoS). The WAMoS is divided into different sections, the first being about the proper mentality of historical analysis, the second being about sources and citing them.

For anything that has to do with Multimedia (uploaded files), see the Multimedia Guide.

Principles of the historical process and debating on the WWII Archives

In order to participate on this project, the reader must at least have a basic understanding of the historical method, mindset, and debates. Therefore read and understand this carefully. This applies to writing about and doing anything on the site. Here are the rules:

1 - Keep the conversation civil

Even if you disagree with them, speak and debate peacefully, civilly, and respectfully to one another.

2 - Our understanding of history changes

Through new interpretations, questioning, and new evidence, we have arrived at the current consensuses in history today. However it isn't perfect, so history will keep changing

3 - We are all biased

Every person who has ever lived is biased. Therefore every human record and artifact is biased. So also are interpretations/history books biased. You must also take your own bias into account!

4 - Question things

The best way to find the truth and get around dogmas and such is to ask, is this true? Whenever you hear a claim, interpretation, etc it is good to ask yourself this question to never get stuck in a certain way of thinking.

5 - Be skeptical about sources and interpret them

Following the previous point, you must be skeptical and critical about the sources you read, no matter how true they sound. Ask questions about their origin, motivation for being created, what they don't depict, its context, what was their audience, what was its purpose, what is their bias, etc.

6 - Back up your claim with good evidence, sources, and reasoning

When using sources to back up your claim, it is good to provide reasoning as to why the source supports your claim.

7 - Acknowledge contradictions

You must acknowledge contradictions within what you're reading and what you are saying. Is there evidence against your/their claim? You must acknowledge the contradictions, sources going against your claim, etc and provide why they might be at least somewhat right, or totally wrong, no matter how "bad" the source is.

8 - Be open-minded, willing to listen, and neutral

To not get into dogmas and get stuck on an idea, you have to be willing to be open minded and willing to listen and potentially accept at least some of the opposition's arguments and criticisms.

Therefore the best way to do this is to try and be neutral and mitigate your bias, viewing things from different perspectives and questioning yourself.

9 - Be clear about your argument/message

Try to be clear and concise when making your arguments/claims and citing your sources. Read before you publish

10 - Make sure the sources support your claim

Make sure that the sources themselves that you're citing actually back up your claim and aren't just a bad misinterpretation

11 - Reach a compromise to see which argument is best

The goal of the historical process is to see which interpretation of the historical subject in question is the best. Through these mentioned ideas, analyzing arguments, claims, contradictions, sources, evidence, etc, the people doing such will have to reach a compromise to see the best interpretation with the least contradictions and problems.

Writing articles

This section deals with how articles are to be written.

How to edit an article

In order to start editing, you either need to click "Edit" or "Edit source". "Edit source" will bring you to the wikitext editor to edit the article or page manually. It is suggested not to use this for most cases but instead the "Edit" option. This option brings you to the VisualEditor to edit or create the article, which visually shows how the article looks before publishing.

How articles should be written

1. Write about every detail that could be found about the subject in question.
2. Write in a chronological order kind of matter. Unlike an encyclopedia, articles on the Archives will be written chronologically how the subject of the article existed.
3. Write in an objective manner with the least amount of bias. Also write in a neutral language. That is, do not use "you", "I", "me", etc unless if you are quoting something that uses those kinds of pronouns in reference to you or you and a group. Instead use things such as "He", "she", "they", "It is __ that…", "One might __ that…", etc, or just use names.

General structure of an article

For the general article layout:

1. Summary
2. Index table (automatically created)
3. Main information template box to the right
4. Article content
5. Citations
6. Bibliography
   1. Works Cited
   2. Other Sources (if necessary)

Types of articles

Category Navigation

• Categories
• Category Tree
• Multimedia
• Biographical Articles
• Event Articles
• Geographical Location Articles
• Group Articles
• Technology Articles
• Work Articles
• Idea Articles
• Other Articles

There are eight different article types. Each type has its own category, and each article with a specific article type will go into that category page. For example every "Event" article will go into "Category:Event Articles". To attach an article to a category, you can either add it under the three bars next to the "Save changes..." button, or can go to the top under "More options" and click on "Insert Category". The following are the different types of articles, what they are, and how they are generally structured:

1. Event - Describing historical event
2. Biographical - Biographies of an individual person, animal, etc (note that for the title of the article for people, you must put their full name but not titles. For example John Edward James Doe Jr. If there is part of the name denoted only by a letter that you can't find that full part of the name, then just put the letter and then a "." like John E. Doe. If the letter isn't a shortened thing like "Harry S Truman" then don't put the "."
3. Geographic Location - Describe geographical locations such as a town, city, ocean, mountain, country, house, specific place, etc, explain history in chronological order
4. Group - Broad, about the history of a particular group. It could be a political party, a resistance, music, or ethnic group, government, organization, branch of government, business, military unit, etc.
5. Technology - Something that serves a functionality built by humans like vehicles, machines, tools, weapons, electronics, etc
6. Work - Broad, usually includes a work of art, literature, etc. It could also be a famous scientific publication or some political manifesto. Generally if it is known enough to not just be a Multimedia Page then it deserves to be an article. Generally a Work article should be linked to one or more Multimedia Pages if possible.
7. Idea Articles - The last kind which is also broad. This category fits things such as political, economic, scientific, mathematical, philosophical, religious, etc theories, concepts, ideas, laws, ideologies, beliefs, etc.
8. Other Articles - If the thing you are writing about fits into none of the categories then it could be considered another type of article or miscellaneous.

	Event	Biography	Geographic Location	Group	Technology	Work	Idea	Other
1	Background: Context, what happened before event	Before birth: All these self-explanatory	Background	Background	Background: These can be modified to need	Background	Background
2	Prelude: Just before the event	Childhood	Formation and history	Beginning/creation/formation: One of these	Development:	Creation	Conceptualization
3	Event: Named depending on event	Adulthood		Fall/Dissolution/Destruction: Choose name	Production:	Use	Legacy
4	Aftermath: After event	After death		Aftermath: If group no longer exists	Use:	Reaction/Reception
5	Long term effects: Optional	Legacy		Legacy	Discontiuation:	Legacy
6	Legacy: Optional				Legacy:

Names of people

For Biographical articles, when putting the name in the title of the article as well as the beginning of the summary section, put the full name of the person without their nickname inside quotations in the name. For example, 'John Edward Doe, nicknamed "Bolts", was...' instead of ' John "Bolts" Edward Doe was...'

Units of Measurement

When putting units of measurement, SI (the metric system) is preferred. However, if the sources use a particular measurement system (such as Imperial), then when mentioned that measurement will go first, followed by metric in parenthesis. For example, "Exactly 270 miles (434.5229 km)."

When dealing with time, the same applies as with the metric vs other systems of measurement. This time the 24-hour clock (whether its military or non-military using the : or not) in place of metric and 12-hour clock in place of the imperial system.Other systems of measurement for scientific purposes can also be used.

Using probability

When making assumptions about what happened in a specific event that aren't directly mentioned in the sources, generally use the conditional perfect conjugation or some other indication of probability. For example, if a person was in point A in one source and then at point B in the next, but the only way to get from A to B was to walk (and wasn't directly mentioned how they got there), then you would write, "this person went from point A to point B and would have walked to get there." Then there are words to indicate possibility, such as "probably", "possibly", "likely", "unlikely", etc. A lot of the time you will need to explain why it would have happened or probably or unlikely happened if it isn't absolutely evident.

Sources, citing, quoting, and linking

This section described how to cite, quote, and link.

Types of sources:

There are generally 3 types of sources (only the first two really important). These are:

1. Primary sources: These sources are original sources pertaining to the original event. These include photographs, memoirs, videos, letters, documents, interviews, birth records, reports, etc. Physical objects too would be classed as primary sources that are from the period
2. Secondary sources: These are any sources analyzing primary sources or other secondary sources. These are in the form of history books, published papers, documentaries,

Citing

While creating an article, to have a citation list, put under the "Citation" header a "Reference list", which can be found under the "Insert" dropdown. To cite a source in the article, click "Cite" in the toolbar order to cite a source, you must click on the "Cite" option in the toolbar which will give you a list of options. You will then have to add a new template (the cite templates always start with the word "cite"). When citing any source that has a url, you must always archive that url in an archiving website such as web.archive.org. The archived url will then be added to the "archive" field in the citation options.

Citing claims made by others and ones only made users on the Archives' Discussion Pages

Generally if someone made a claim somewhere about something and is accepted as fact or likely, it should be the thing cited in sections later in the article. If no one can be found anywhere else having made this claim outside the Archives, then if the claim is made on the Archives like a discussion page, then cite it from there. This only really happens on discussion pages for more major stuff that would be debated upon, but can happen for smaller things as well.

Citing other articles

The general idea behind citing other articles is that each article is focused on one subject in particular. Therefore in each article there will be more information pertaining to one article that will be less written about in another related one. For example, if you have an article on a unit that someone served in, you would cite sources that mainly pertain to the unit as a whole. Then if you were writing an article about someone in that unit, you cite specific sections from the unit article to detail what he was doing in the unit or potentially did. You can also cross-cite where there is the same situation but instead the person did an interview that described some general things about the people in the unit, so you would cite that section of the person's article on the unit's article. This would also work for many pieces of data and statistics, such as with casualties for whole divisions and such.

This method organizes things better rather than having to just cite the same source over and over again across articles. It makes things easier by making a "link chain" to the original source with more details than on the article on the end has.

Linking

To make navigation and connecting the whole Archives together, we use linking. To link to another article or page, you click on the chain icon in the toolbar, and then put the name of the page in the box. For wikitext you use [[]] for Archives pages and []for external pages. You will almost always be linking internally. Linking is used for linking to other articles or pages of note, such as any name, place, event, etc, that might be an article. Even if the article doesn't exist for it, link to what its article might be. This is in order for it to make it easier for the person interested in starting the articles on that to start them. For example if a source in your article mentions someone, and you are able to find their full name, then put that in the link, like John E. Doe for example (click on the link). Leave enough information behind for the next person to pick it up and start from there.

Also of note that you put the link once within the summary and then once within the main section, and not again.

Quoting

When quoting something, you are quoting someone or something saying something. Instead of using any kind of quotation marks (" "), you will use a block quote. To do this you go under the drop-down menu for the headings and paragraphs in the toolbar. Select "Block quote", and type your quote. For each quote you must cite where it came from. Before the block quote you will say "this person said this:" and before the colon will insert the citation.

Transcribing

Transcribing is for copying down anything that is written on something. This includes documents, written things on photographs, and even during an interview when the person mentions that there was something written on a sign for example. There are two types of transcribing templates. The first is "Single_language_document_quote", for content only in English, and "Double_language_document_quote", when the document is in another language. To insert these, click the "Insert" dropdown, and then "Template", to search for one of them. Unfortunately you can't use the toolbar, so here are the notable html/wikitext formatting:

• : - indentation (the colon turning into a "tab")
• <b></b> or ''' ''' - Bold
• <i></i> or '' '' - Italic (double apostrophes not quotes)
•  - ^Superscript
•  - _Subscript
• <u></u> - Underline
• <s></s> - Strikethrough

There's other tags you can use as well. You can also combine tags (put one into another) like "<b><s>Hello</s></b>" for Hello.

When transcribing, write out exactly as the original document/written piece is written. Therefore "sic" is already assumed and isn't necessary. For any potential misunderstandings, write in the commentary after transcribing.

Submitting articles

To create an article or submit an edit, click "Save changes..." or "Save page..." Then a prompt will pop up where you can put down notes for modifications. Generally you won't need to select "Minor edit" unless if the edit is fixing grammar, spelling, formatting, or anything that isn't worth dispute, as the name implies.