User:Pee Tern/Sandbox/Template/Gen stub Law enforcement agency/doc

Creating a basic article on a law enforcement agency

Introduction
Before you start, you should read:
 * Overview: The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Editing: The short introduction, the full tutorial, or the concise cheatsheet
 * Help:Contents, the master index

or some advanced guides:
 * Article development stages
 * Our Manual of Style

If you are not sure how to go about creating an article in Wikipedia, then the following allows you to provide just the facts you want to describe in relation to a law enforcement agency, and automatically generate a basic article. If you are then happy with the information in the generated article, you can then make the generated article into a manually editable article to continue to improve the article and add more information, or you can simply leave it for others to add to.

Generating a basic law enforcement agency article
Step 1: Locate a suitable source of reference material.

A good source of reference material for the content of a basic article on a law enforcement agency is the agency's annual report.

Most organisations publish a report once per year which outlines the organisation's achievements, their resources, budget, and personnel status. The report will also outline the organisation's general structure and perhaps also a bit about the organisation's history. While probably none if this material can be copied into Wikipedia articles due to copyright restrictions, the specific facts can be included into a Wikipedia article.

You need to be able to provide a good description of your source material, for example, Foo Police Annual Report, 2007-2008.

Step 2: Create an article with the desired name.

In the search box in Wikipedia type in the name of the article you want to create: Foo Police.

Click on Create the article.

Check that the page you are now editing has the correctly spelled title. If it does not, just back out and start again.

Step 3: Set up the template for the law enforcement agency data.

Copy the following text, including the included comment, and paste it into the edit box exactly as is.

A description of each of these parameters is provided in the following table.

Step 4: Populate the template with facts from your source material.

After each parameter type in the fact's value if you have it available. If you do not know a value, then leave it blank, or blank out the skeleton examples.

You can always edit the article again and add or adjust facts later.

Enter your reference after the reference parameter, for example:
 * reference       = Foo Police Annual Report, 2007-2008

Step 5: Preview the article. (Click on the preview button below the edit box.)

Check that the article and your facts look okay.

You can edit and preview the templated data as often as you wish.

Step 6: Save the article. (Click on the Save button below the edit box.)

The type of article you will have generated is called a stub article in Wikipedia.

Upgrading the article - converting the generated article to a manually editable article
When you have more information and you want to take the article beyond its very basic form, do the following: When you next edit the article, instead of the template being presented, the text generated by the template will be presented, which you can edit as desired.
 * 1) Edit the article and insert subst: in front of the template name so that is looks like {{subst:Genstub Law enforcement agency
 * 2) Save the article.

Note that some of the text generated by the template will look very similar to the original template. Do NOT add subst: again.

Example
A simple example of the use of this template is available at User:Pee Tern/Sandbox/Template/Gen stub Law enforcement agency/simpleexample. A fuller example is available at User:Pee Tern/Sandbox/Template/Gen stub Law enforcement agency/example.