General Author Guidance

• Authors should review the information on this page prior to contributing.

• If you do inadvertently corrupt anything in the production wiki do not worry. Any modifications can be reverted to a previous version. If you are uncomfortable with reverting something please contact the project leader for assistance.

• Except where the customary term of the art is different authors must use metric units.

• Avoid standard abbreviations such as d for day, y for year, bw for body weight. Acronyms should be avoided except when the acronym is part of the regularly used term of the art (e.g., BV for "bleeding value"). When an acronym or term of the art is used it should be defined on first use.

• Authors should be aware that their content may have a degree of overlap to other articles and should work with the project leader to coordinate with the drafting committee of overlapping content areas.

• Authors should be aware of articles in this wiki that have covered details about a point they are covering. For example, If an author were discussing calving difficulty a link to the Calving Difficulty article should be made rather than reproducing that content in their article. Using the search area at the top of each article or the search special page will facilitate finding places to make these links.

• http://Gramerly.com provides a powerful free plugin for browsers that checks spelling, grammar, and punctuation on the fly as it is typed. Authors are strongly encouraged to install this easy-to-use plugin.

• The MediaWiki basic markdown and editing environment are very easy to use. However, as with any software, the more powerful capability can be tapped with just a little effort. In order to develop the wiki capabilities of the stakeholder community, authors are encouraged to perform all their editing in the wiki.

• The MediaWiki software we are using is very powerful and will track authors' contributions. All new articles and edits are recorded and the attribution to the author can be seen by going to the History tab on each article. Additionally, the bottom of each article indicates the original author and the most recent changes.

• If an author includes content that is not original then citation must be made to the original work using the ref cite tags.

• Generally, articles should be kept to a minimum of one to two screens. Longer articles may be necessary but authors should consider breaking a longer article into logical multiple linked articles. Generally, it is best practice to organize articles in a hierarchy. The top article is the high-level explanation of the concept and the detail is on separate articles that are linked to the top article.

• Often articles can be shortened if, for example, larger tables or large images are placed on a stand-alone page with a link from the article.