Help:Guidelines

Page Layout

Right now the standard format for a chapter is as follows:

Volume/Book/Chapter reference

English chapter titles on first line, French chapter titles on second line.

General notes on this chapter

Any textual notes that don't fit under a footnoted word or phrase. In numbered-list format.

French text

Our reference version is the Project Gutenberg ebook. If you're creating a page for a chapter that hasn't been added yet, use the HTML version of the ebook, hit Ctrl+U to get at the raw HTML, and convert the text of the chapter into MediaWiki format. A number of automatic converters exist online, but you may still have to use a text editor to remove extra line breaks. (In Notepad++: Find/replace-all "\r\n\r\n" with a single "\r\n", making sure you've checked the "extended search mode" option so it will recognize the special characters.)

English text

Same thing, pretty much. The Gutenberg reference version is here. If you want, you can turn words into Wikipedia links (or links to another site in that family of wikis), but that's the only change you should be making to this text.

Translation notes

Yes, our reference version is the Hapgood translation. Yes, the Hapgood translation is awful. If you have a correction or clarification for it, do not change the English text, add a translation note to this section. This is also where notes about puns go.

Textual notes

These should be as factual as possible. Keep your flights of literary-analysis fancy to a minimum and stick to elucidating Hugo's literary/historical references. Feel free to add other useful historical context either here or in the general notes, depending on how specific it is to a particular passage. Also feel free to add meta-information about Hugo's editing process or communications with his publishers regarding particular passages. Do not use the notes to opine about characters' sexual orientations or argue about the validity of Victor Hugo's understanding of class issues; do use them (with restraint) to provide raw information that might be useful for other people's analysis of those topics.

Citations

Cite your sources with the ref tag within the body of your footnote. Don't use the ref tag to insert your textual or translation notes into the body of the chapter; make them subheadings of the textual- or translation-note section. (If anyone knows of a technical workaround that would allow nested footnotes--i.e. textual/translation notes with anchors in the text of the chapter, and source citations within the footnotes themselves--contact Marianne.)