Help:How to edit a plant article

The vast majority of the articles on Gardenology.org are plant articles, since the free plant encyclopedia we are building is one of the main goals of this site, and there are tens of thousands of plants out there. Our focus of course is to cover all of the garden plants in the world, with instructions on how to grow them. This article will go into detail about how to edit each article, and what the goal is of each article.

How to edit

First, you can visit Help:Editing to see how much of the formatting on the pages is accomplished. Basically, you click on the "edit" tab at the top of the page and just start typing away. It's pretty basic. The help page though will give you a little detail on bold, italics, links, etc. The rest of this page will explain a lot of additional tips on what to include in terms of content, how to include it, and what a good article will ideally be.

Basic structure of a plant article

Each plant article should have a plant information box at the top. Directly below that comes a description of the plant, followed by subsections about cultivation, propagation, pests and diseases, varieties of the plant, a photo gallery, references and external links. Remember that throughout the text, the main goal is to have a focused article on growing a plant, in language that can be pretty easily understood.

Sources

There are many great plant encyclopedias out there with ideal information for this site. The text must be reworded if it is copyright, but other than that the information in it is perfect for use here. They usually have all kinds of information on the cultivation and propagation, among other things. There is also the Sunset National Garden Book I use for the Sunset Zones, many plants are missing this information that gardeners often prefer to the USDA zones. There are other garden books, including information on gardening techniques such as pruning, composting, worm farming, etc which can be used as sources. You can use any material you like without restriction from sites with a Creative Commons license such as Wikipedia.org, just make sure there is a link back to the page you got the information from. If you can get permission from other sites to use their copyright materials, that's also ideal. Photographs of many plants can be found on Flickr.com - but you should do an advanced search for Free License Photos first, and if that doesn't come up with good stuff, look at some of the copyright stuff and ask for permission. Any photo in the Wikimedia commons can be used here, and in fact you don't even need to upload it here, just use the photo filename as you would with any other photo on this site.