Guidelines for individual entries

Writing guidelines and standards:

• All definitions must be written in a professional, neutral style. Personal opinion or discussion should not appear in definitions.
• Jargon and technical language should be avoided wherever possible. Instead, the definitions should be written for a business audience (see TargetAudiences for more on this). Our technical glossary is the place for jargon.
• We should use the writing standard of the Wikipedia as our benchmark.
• No references to individual products (commercial or otherwise) should be made.
• Material from other sites should not be quoted. Instead, we should link to appropriate resources, but aim to write entirely original content.
• "Wiki words" (cross-references) should be used sparingly within the body of definitions, and only to refer to terms that already been defined as "in scope" for the glossary.
• There are many good online resources regarding CM, and CM Pros will be developing many more. The glossary should be a gateway to these resources, by providing pointers to existing articles, etc whenever appropriate.
• A "Further resources" section will appear at the end of each definition, providing a consistent location to link to other articles.
• "See", "See also" and "Related terms" should be used instead of "RT", "UT", "BT", etc (the latter is jargon only understood by librarians).

Guidelines for overall glossary structure

Overall glossary structure:

• Definitions should not be created for acronyms. Instead, they should just provide a "See" reference to the expanded term.
• Duplicate terms must not be created. Instead, a primary ("preferred") term should be created, with the other terms consisting of a "see" reference to this.
• Colloquial terms (such as "baked" and "fried") should not be used as preferred terms, instead using more formal terms ("dynamic", "static", etc) as the preferred terms, with reference to colloquial synonyms in broad use as helpful.

(See TermsToBeIncluded for more on the overall glossary structure.)

Questions and comments

JamesR: comments?

TonyB: This is very good. I modified the last bullet a bit. Many newbies may not know the formal term for something, but may be familiar with a colloquial synonym or variant, so we should try to account for the latter where possible, if not as a separate entry, then within the definition of the preferred term. On the whole, though, I am in favor of a "preferred" term. It will get interesting, because, for example, baked and fried are not exactly the same as static and dynamic. Let the debates begin! This is a good frame....

BobD: I see the actual writing stage as the third in a three-stage process...

1) Review all existing definitions for our term

2) Identify the critical elements needed in our definition

3) Have our wordsmiths craft our definition.

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