Wikisource:WikiProject NSRW/Guidelines for editing single articles

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Guidelines for The New Student's Reference Work (NSRW)

Hi, and welcome to the NSRW project. This is a 1914 encyclopedia for young people, and a valuable resource and source of information. Rather than edit it page by page, we have decided to break it up into individual articles, while keeping the original text for proofreading purposes. These articles all follow a similar format and are linked to one another and to the relevant article in Wikipedia. It is recommended that only articles from fully proofread pages be created so that we don't have to correct OCR errors twice.

Here are some guidelines to get you started:


  1. The titles should follow the exact naming convention of the original, such as "Columbus, O." or "York, House of". Note that sometimes small words like "The" appear at the end of the title. These should be included as such.
  2. Accents and ligatures (such as æ) should be used.
  3. The proper article title is "The New Student's Reference Work/Xxx"

General formatting[edit]

  • The articles should be as close to possible as the original articles.
    • bold ( using '''bold''' )
    • italics ( using ''italics'' )
  • Also have the same uses of dashes as the original
  • Proofreading was not a strength of the authors. Egregious spelling and punctuation errors should be corrected.
  • Accents and ligatures (such as æ) should be used.
  • Use paired double quotes like “x” (not typewriter quotes "x").
  • Use the single right quote (x’) instead of typewriter apostrophe (x').
  • In the event where stress is given, it should be highlighted with a single prime character (U+2032, &prime;) as in Abbre′via′tions.
  • Occasionally, pronunciation is given in parentheses beside the title.
    • The parentheses should be neither bold nor italics, but the pronunciation inside them should be in italics.
    • However, the comma after the parentheses where the pronunciation is given should be bolded as well.
Correct  : Byzan′tine (bĭ-zan′ tĭn) Empire,'''Byzan′tine''' (''bĭ-zan′ tĭn'') '''Empire,'''
Incorrect: Byzan′tine (bĭ-zan′ tĭn) Empire, ← '''Byzan′tine''' ''(bĭ-zan′ tĭn)'' '''Empire''',
  • After the stress accent in pronunciations, leave one blank space. If it appears at the end of the word, where the accent would join with the italic accents to make a bold, surround that stress accent with <nowiki> markers.
  • Many unusal diacritics are used. Please try to be as close as possible to the original, though this may be difficult. Various word-processing programs have symbol charts, and many of them can be found here. When in doubt, try to be as close as possible.
    • An a with a single dot over it is ȧ ← &#0551;


  • A cross reference (q. v.) should be italicized and link to the relevant article. Use the {{NSRW-qv}} template.
{{NSRW-qv|Russia, Empire of}} → (q. v.).
  • Some links to other articles will be in the format of "See also." In this case, link name is typed in small caps. Use the {{NSRW-link-sc}} template.
{{NSRW-link-sc|Russia, Empire of}} → Russia, Empire of
{{NSRW-link-sc|Russia, Empire of|Russia}} → Russia.
  • For other links, use the {{NSRW-link}} template.
{{NSRW-link|Russia, Empire of}} → Russia, Empire of
{{NSRW-link|Russia, Empire of|Russia}} → Russia.


The header format uses the {{NSRW}} template as shown:
| previous=Xxx
| next=Yyy
| wikipedia=Zzz

An example from The New Student's Reference Work/Kamloops

| previous=Kamimura
| next=Kanakas
| wikipedia=Kamloops, British Columbia
Note: one may have to search a bit for the correct Wikipedia article name for linking.


  1. All of the pictures and charts in the original text should be included in the new articles.
  2. Please save them to the Wikimedia Commons.
  3. File name convention: NSRW_description
    • example: NSRW_Sir_Galahad.png
    • PNG is preferred over JPEG, as it doesn't have any artifacts of compression. Greyscale PNGs for line drawings, and full colour PNGs for full colour images.
  4. Do not include the captions in images. They should be inputted as text, using {{subst:small-caps|Caption}}.
  5. They are all public domain, since the book was published in 1914.
  6. Please tag them with {{ExtractedFromNSRW|original image name.png}}, which adds them to the category [[Category:Images from The New Student's Reference Work]] and automatically tags them with the appropriate license.
  7. When inserting the images in the articles, please make the captions Small Caps.


  1. Please do not hesitate to ask.