BrandWiki:Editierrichtlinien

In Kürze: This should be the only page you need to read to get an idea of how to work in the BrandWiki. It introduces the ontology, some little how-tos and tricks, and some content details. Admins, get straight to the bottom. All others, check out our vision and mission first, and then read on.

What is a brand?

In Kürze: A brand is the visible label on a product that conveys values.

To define brand is not an easy undertaking. There are company brands, service brands, product brands and similar. Sometimes, the name of a brand is all three of those. For our matters, we are starting with a brand as the visible label on a product, that is more than the product name. Difficult already. ;)

Examples:

Red Bull: Red Bull is a product, a sugared lemonade with caffeine in a tin can. Red Bull is also the brand that sponsors extreme athletes and events. Red Bull then is also the company, although here the distinction is easier made, since the official company name, the so-called "firm" is Red Bull GmbH.

Topics and naming conventions

At the moment, these topics are featured here:

A brand is neither the name of a product nor the name of an organisation, although the same name could by used by both. A brand conveys a company's values and differentiates products and services.

Example: Milky Way is the name of a brand with 2 products with this name (1 in USA, 1 in Europe), the organisation behind it is Mars.

An organisation is a broad term for a private or public company, institution or enterprise, holding other companies, brands or products, issuing certificates. Can be public or private, for-profit or NGO/NPO.

A certificate is our broad term for an official/federal or private quality seal, quality label, quality mark, cachet.

Step by step for becoming an editor

Register a user account in the BrandWiki. Go for a user name you like. Please make sure to include an email address, otherwise you will not be able to reset your password.
We confirm your account. Ready!
Add a new Brand, organisation or certificate.
Add and edit information in the wiki.
In case of questions, get help on talk pages, your own user page (we are watching edits) or reach out to us via Contact.

Short guidelines for being a hot part of the cool BrandWiki

A wiki is a wiki is a wiki. So be bold, go ahead and add and change anything. Best case, you help the grand idea. Worst case, you give us something to think about.
Be friendly and considerate while you do so. That makes 90% of the way.
Stay critical. While the information here is double-checked and referencing to sources, truth and reality are no easy concepts. What looks like facts might not be facts. The opposite might also be true. News might have left out information. Try to find as many good and trustworthy information as possible, before you build yourself an opinion or judgement.

How can I participate?

You would like to participate? Big Japanese bow. Wonderful, welcome on board! There are several ways how you can take part here in the wiki:

Add new brands, new companies or new certificates in your country
Do deep research for a single brand and add your research findings
Add resources and source links
Suggest external data sources that can be integrated into the wiki. (We currently inspect the idea of including Wikidata's data).
Last but not least: Improve the language and correct spelling mistakes
Report bugs, send screenshots, help with the styling
Tell friends and enemies about BrandWiki, spread the word

Can I destroy the BrandWiki by editing?: Not really: All edits are patrolled and approved, your changes won't show on the pages before approval. All edits are revertible, so whenever you delete something by accident, it can be undone.

Guidelines for adding a brand

It’s pretty straightforward to add a brand: Just fill out the form. (Where it’s not yet straightforward, please tell us and we will try to fix it.)

If you need some guidance or help with details, you can also check out the Links and resources.

Brand details

These are the profile details you can add for a brand:

ID: Every brand gets assigned a numeral ID. This way, even if text gets changed, the access link always stays the same. This has been implemented to ease linking to the BrandWiki. You can also link to certain page revisions from the history tab.

Organisation: Every brand is related to one (or more) organisations. We are interested in uncovering company and enterprise structures supporting a brand.

Short brand profile: Write it. While quoting sources is a good idea, the brand profile should be something attractive to read and unique. Catchy phrases in your own words. In case you are quoting or including claims or statements, make sure to mark them as quotes and link them to their source online. If you are quoting sources, you might want to add a new brand aspect underneath instead.

Logo: Please do not upload logos (it’s prevented for now, anyway) that you don’t own. All logos that are online in the wiki now are either taken from public press kits or supplied by the company itself – hence, we are allowed to publish them here. We are NOT drag&dropping logos from company websites, this is not good practice.

Product images: In case you want to upload product and label images, please make sure you made the image yourself.

Brand aspects: You can add information as “aspects” to the brand, something you found on websites, in the news or somewhere else. The more sources you can find to one aspect, the better. It could also be personal experience, but also here sources are crucial.

Certificates: We have included a number of official brand certificates in the wiki. This way, you shall get a quicker overview over the brands and their certificates.

Useful content elements for pages

These are useful templates:

Quote – for direct quotes with sources
Box – for page summaries, alerts and help boxes
BoxInfo – for simple info boxes
Button – a simple blue button for internal links
Icon – a template for inserting an icon
Teaser – a template for a teaser banner image

For administrators & wiki experts

Things you might want to know:

The top category for administering Brandwiki's ontology is BrandWiki Topic, where all forms are listed.
BrandWiki uses "patrolled edits" to coordinate patrolling edits in the recent changes overview.
BrandWiki also uses approved revisions for pages, only the latest approved revision gets displayed first. Revisions can be administered by admins on the special page.
Last but not least, BrandWiki makes heavy use of Semantic MediaWiki and Page Forms.