User:Petrouchka/I wish I'd known that

I wish I'd known that ...
The following pointers are things I wish I had known when I started editing Wikipedia articles. They're especially geared towards editing articles on the ancient Greco-Roman world. It's certainly not exhaustive; there always seem to be more conventions and templates, and if you don't use them someone or other is always going to be saying your articles are "non-standard". There's always another undiscovered template -- so just get used to it.


 * Transliteration of Greek.
 * The policy is to follow Naming conventions (Greek). The upshot is: translate everything into Latin. I'm not a fan of this, but it's better for articles to be consistent than to be a mess. If you disapprove of the policy, the place to register that is at the talk page for the policy, not in the articles.


 * Quoting text in Greek.
 * This is mostly for providing a name in the original language at the start of an article. Ideally it should work if you just plopped down Unicode text into the articles, but ... not everyone's web browser is set up well for multiple alphabets. The most widely used convention is to use the ... template. (Don't use the  ...  template, that's for quoting transliterations.)
 * Usage: Ὅμηρος


 * Infoboxes.
 * Infoboxes are common on biography articles and give basic info about the subject. The most standard one is Template:Infobox Biography.
 * Usage: simply copy-and-paste the template into the article and fill in the blanks as appropriate.


 * Footnotes.
 * At the point where you want a footnote in the text, add the tag with the text of the footnote inside the tag. Then, at the bottom of the article, add in the "References" section to make the footnotes actually appear there.