Editing Guidelines

Book and Paper Group Wiki > BPG Editing Guidelines

THIS ENTRY IS A DRAFT

Welcome to the BPG Wiki Editing Guidelines. This page provides information and resources for those interested in contributing to the BPG Wiki.

Compiler: Sandrine Blais
Contributors: please add your name here

Copyright 2025. The AIC Wiki is a publication of the American Institute for Conservation (AIC). It is published as a convenience for the members of AIC. Publication does not endorse nor recommend any treatments, methods, or techniques described herein. Information on researching with and citing the wiki can be found on the Reference and Bibliography Protocols page.

Cite this page:

American Institute for Conservation (AIC). "Editing Guidelines." AIC Wiki. October 8, 2025. https://www.conservation-wiki.com/wiki/Editing_Guidelines.

Ways to get involved

Contributing without a Wiki editor account

You do not need a Wiki Editor account in order to become involved with the Wiki. For any level of contribution, contact the BPG Wiki Coordinators at bookandpapergroup.wiki@gmail.com for suggestions or questions. We will be able to make the edits on the wiki ourselves.

Here are some suggestions of what contributions:

• Look at the BPG Help Wanted page to see a list of pages that are seeking editing assistance.
• Ask the BPG Wiki Coordinators about ongoing editing projects in need of assistance.
• Contribute photographs! Photographs are particularly appreciated additions to existing pages. Do make sure that they follow our guidelines (insert link to the section on this page that talks about photo guidelines)
• If you find a broken link or outdated information, please contact us and we will address it!

Contributions with a Wiki editor account

How to become a Wiki editor

To become a wiki editor, you must watch the training videos on the AIC Learning Platform. For any specific questions about the training videos, contact either the AIC wiki e-editor Rachael Arenstein or Bonnie Naugle.

Former AIC Wiki editor training video, which does not show the visual editor but still lots of good tips.

A great tip for becoming familiar with the MediaWiki software is to create your User page. Take a look at the pages of Rachael Arenstein (Wiki e-editor), Denise Stockman, Cher Schneider, Katherine Kelly, Suzy Morgan, Sarah Reidell, and others.

It is also recommended to sign up to the AIC Wiki community forum to share with other wiki editors to get feedback or start a conversation.

BPG page structure

Naming conventions: wiki compilers, contributors, and coordinators

Compilers and contributors work directly or indirectly on BPG pages to update content and references and make sure the information is up to date. Coordinators support the work of compilers and contributors with a variety of tasks, including monitoring the BPG wiki coordinator email.

Compilers

Role description, this is a more intensive role, you are strongly recommended to have a wiki editor account for this role, etc.

Contributors

People contributing to the page in a significant way, even without a wiki editor account, send us photos and/or bibliographies

Coordinators

A coordinator is a more formal position requiring a 3-year commitment. There is one Book (Mitchel Gundrum) and one Paper (Sandrine Blais) coordinator, who report to the BPG PubComm chair. Coordinator's tasks include:

• Raising awareness of the AIC Wiki
• Overseeing pages and section revisions
• Recruiting contributors
• Organize editing events, such as wiki edit-a-thons (link here to projects page)
• Keeping BPG members informed of its progress through AIC community forum posts
• Typically, coordinators also host a discussion session regarding past and future work on the BPG Wiki at the AIC annual meetings

General editing guidelines

Edit boldly

The BPG Wiki encourages anyone to edit in the following ways:

• It is always okay to fix typos or add citations.
• It is always okay to add to Talk/Discussion pages.
• It is usually okay to add information to a page. If there is a Wiki Compiler listed at the top of a page, send an email to them first. If you have trouble getting in touch or would like to discuss your edits, email us at bookandpapergroup.wiki@gmail.com.

If you would like to make substantial edits to a page or delete content, please get in touch with us first at bookandpapergroup.wiki@gmail.com. We will make sure that you are connected with anyone else currently working on the page and help make certain that your changes are appropriate.

The BPG Wiki coordinators monitor all changes to our pages, so don't be surprised if we get in touch about your edits.

Some of the other Specialty Groups have a more formal process of "draft, review, then publish". Before editing pages outside of the BPG Wiki, check with them.

Be courteous

Contributors have different views, perspectives, and backgrounds which sometimes vary widely. Treat others with respect.

Always provide an edit summary

Any time you edit a page, please summarize your contributions in the Summary text entry field located under the main edit box. This will help other contributors understand your edits and decide whether they would like to review them. It also makes it much easier to determine who added what. Be concise, but be specific. "Added content" is not a very helpful summary, but "added embedded video about handling scrolls" is. Summaries are less important for minor changes, but a brief note like "fixed spelling" is helpful even then. Edit summaries for any Wiki page can be reviewed by clicking the "History" link at the top of the page. Read more about edit summaries on this Wikipedia help page.

Give credit for contributions

If you improve the content of a BPG Wiki page, please add your name to the top of the page under "Wiki Contributors". The History tab on each page will record what changes were made. If you add material on behalf of someone else, please record this in the Summary field as you save the edit - e.g., "Added recipe from Jane Q. Conservator" - and add their name to the top of the page under "Wiki Contributors". This should only be done with the contributor's permission.

Cite your work

When your contribution relies on someone else's published work, you must cite their work appropriately. We also encourage contributors to include inline citations wherever possible (within reason). This practice improves the credibility of the Wiki and makes it even more useful to researchers. More guidance is available in the BPG Reference and Bibliography Protocols. When referring to pages in the AIC Wiki, use an embedded link instead of a formal citation.

Written by and for conservation professionals

While references to published sources are best, the BPG Wiki can include statements based on the author's personal experience and training. This is different from Wikipedia, which does not allow original research. Readers are expected to use their professional judgement when evaluating all information on the Wiki. That being said, accuracy is our standard. If you see something that looks wrong, please contact us at bookandpapergroup.wiki@gmail.com.

Use of wikitext

When editing the BPG Wiki, the use of wikitext is preferable. HTML should be used sparingly to allow for ease of use by all editors and consistency in the code throughout the BPG Wiki.

Images and Videos in the BPG Wiki

Uploading images

Images (.jpg, .gif, .pdf, and others) can be uploaded by clicking on the "Upload file" link at the bottom of the left-hand navigation of each page. Images uploaded to the AIC Wiki should be jpeg (or jpg) format and between 1 and 5 MB in size. Smartphone and point-and-shoot images are fine.

Copyright

It is the responsibility of submitters to seek and obtain permission to publish from other rights holders (owners of objects described or illustrated, photographers, illustrators, or copyright holders other than the author) and to provide appropriate credits. Wikipedia’s Image Use Policy provides useful guidance.

Contributors to the Wiki retain ownership of their submitted material but grant AIC the right to republish it. So, images you upload may be reused throughout the Wiki.

Credits and captions

The BPG Wiki does not require photographers, people, or objects to be identified. If you would like to add details, please follow the guidelines for figures in the JAIC Style Guide.

On the wiki pages, short captions are preferred. We encourage you to include full credit and citations for an image in the description of the file when you upload it, but only put a short caption on a wiki page that contains that image. For example, when you click on the image of the lightbox below, you can see details of when and by whom the photo was taken.

These are all examples of acceptable images and captions for the BPG Wiki.

• 

  Water damaged photographs removed from paper clip (Student Folders with Photographs, Baghdadi Jewish Schools, 1961–71, Iraqi Jewish Archive #3755).

• 

  Acid burn on adjacent materials. Lewis T. Gregory Scrapbook, 1909-1913 Scrapbook, University Archives, University of Illinois. Image: Jennifer H. Teper.

• 

  A thin light box for illuminating a bound page from behind.

Videos
The AIC Wiki does not host videos, but you can link to and embed videos that are hosted by YouTube. Here is an example:
Video from the Getty on calibrating pH and Conductivity meters.

Useful "How-to" Pages

• BPG Template for New Page

• Wiki User Guidelines

• Templates and other technical information

• Wiki Editors' Resources

• BPG Reference and Bibliography Protocols

Bibliography Guidelines

This page provides guidance for adding or updating bibliographies and citations in the BPG Wiki. The BPG Wiki is looking for volunteers to help with this effort, as many sections of the wiki lack sources published after the early 1990s. Resources should be suitable for an audience of conservation scholars and conservators and can be in either physical and digital format.

Volunteers are encouraged to become wiki editors, or they can email their bibliographic citations to the BPG Wiki Coordinators at bookandpapergroup.wiki@gmail.com, and we will do the rest.

Terminology

These are familiar terms, often used interchangeably. We are providing specific definitions here to so that Wiki collaborators can be absolutely sure they are speaking about the same thing.

Annotated Bibliography

A selective bibliography where each listing is followed by a brief description of the source with comments about its relevance to the topic.

Bibliography or References or Reference List (the terms are interchangeable)

A list of sources on a particular topic. A full bibliography or reference list includes every source cited in the main text and may include additional sources consulted by the author(s). It is usually placed at the end of an article. A selective, or selected bibliography can be shorter, but the selection criteria should be explained in a header text.

Citation

A method of acknowledging the source of information in the text. Citations occur in a short form within the text and in a more detailed form at the end of the text as a Reference List or Bibliography.

Endnote

May be used interchangeably with citation or reference, or may refer to a reference list placed at the end of a section, as opposed to at the end of the article.

Footnote

In wikis, a footnote refers to the hyperlink directing the reader to a reference. See Wikipedia article on Footnotes or Wiki Templates for more information.

When and How to List References

We encourage you to cite your work appropriately, with brief citations in the text, followed by a list of References or Works Cited at the bottom of the page. If you use the built-in wiki reference tags, the wiki will automatically generate a list of references wherever the <references /> tag is placed. In its simplest form, which is described on the AIC-CC User Guidelines for References and Bibliographies, the list is arranged in order of appearance in the text. This system can be modified to arrange your references in the preferred alphabetical order.

The BPG Bibliography group is currently exploring the possibility of using custom markup for in-text citations and references, as the automated system has a number of disadvantages. It is designed to provide references in support of the text, rather than provide a living list of scholarly resources. It is difficult to add new references into an existing list in alphabetical order, for example. This will potentially allow more manipulation of the references and citations. The Bibliography group will continue to gather information and feedback.

Under the standard automated system, references look like this:

:<span id="ref2"></span>Baker, Cathleen A. “Methylcellulose and Sodium Carboxymethylcellulose: An Evaluation for Use in Paper Conservation Through Accelerated Aging.” International Institute for Conservation. <i>Preprints of the Contributions to the Paris Congress</i>. Paris, 1984.

When the ref section is numbered, as in ref2 above, it does not allow intuitive additions to be made to the bibliography. As the bibliography grows to include new resources, you could not simply insert a ref3, as that entry already exists. Rather than find the lowest number that does not yet exist and insert it, we are changing this portion of the wiki markup to allow us to organize and change the bibliography more easily. We would like to change the 'ref' section to LastnameYear, as below:

:<span id="refBaker1984"></span>Baker, Cathleen A. “Methylcellulose and Sodium Carboxymethylcellulose: An Evaluation for Use in Paper Conservation Through Accelerated Aging.” International Institute for Conservation. <i>Preprints of the Contributions to the Paris Congress</i>. Paris, 1984.

This allows us to use ref entries that match the resource in question, and makes organizing the bibliography alphabetically a little more straightforward. For those references that have two authors, use the format refLastnameLastnameYear, as below:

:<span id="refCainMiller1982"></span>Cain, C. Eugene and Barbara A. Miller. 1982. Photographic, Spectral and Chromatographic Searches into the Nature of Foxing. ''AIC Preprints of Papers Presented at the 10th Annual Meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 26-30, 1982'.' Washington, DC: AIC. 54-62.

For those references with three or more authors, use the format refLastnameetalYear, as below:

:<span id="refCainetal1987"></span>Cain, C. Eugene, M. B. Stanley and W. H. Roberts. 1987. Paper Foxing: Biochemical Effects of Fungal Infections of Paper. ''Journal of the Mississippi Academy of Science'' 32: 24.

In the event that this system creates two identical ref tags, for example if the author has produced two or more articles during a single year, add a letter to the end of ref tag, starting with 'a' and proceeding through the alphabet, as below:

:<span id="refCainMiller1982a"></span>Cain, C. Eugene. and Barbara A. Miller. 1982. Some Examples of Inorganic Foxing. ''IIC 9th International Congress, Abstracts of Poster Sessions, September 3-9 1982.'' Washington, D.C: 7

We also encourage you to develop short, annotated bibliographies that guide your readers to the most useful resources on your topic. Include a header that describes your selection criteria (e.g. exhaustive, online-only, most useful). Bibliographies can be broken down into topical sections, and references within each section should be alphabetical by author's last name.

All references should be formatted according to the JAIC Style Guide (scroll down for guidance on citing websites) , which corresponds to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., Author-Date system. Some wiki-specific guidelines:

• An entry in a bibliography should include all of the standard elements of an entry, not simply a title and link.
• Use the author's full first and last name, instead of initials.
• If the book or article is available online, the entry in the reference list or bibliography should include a hyperlink to the source. Permalinks or DOIs are preferred.
  • The link should be expressed as the title of the article or book.
  • When providing a link, note the date the website was accessed or last updated.

For example, this code:

Ogden, Sherelyn. 1991. “[http://cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v10/bp10-14.html Preservation Options for Scrapbook and Album Formats].” ''Book and Paper Group Annual'' 10. Accessed October 9, 2014.

will display:

Ogden, Sherelyn. 1991. “Preservation Options for Scrapbook and Album Formats.” Book and Paper Group Annual 10. Accessed October 9, 2014.

Linking to PDFs

There are several ways to link to a pdf in the wiki, but we prefer to link the user directly to the file, rather than to an information page about the file. The code below will automatically add the icon when you link directly to a pdf.

good:

Horton, Richard 2000. “Glossary of Terms Relating to Photo Albums.” in Conservation of Scrapbooks and Albums: Postprints of the Book and Paper Group/Photographic Materials Group Joint Session at the 27th Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. 21-28. AIC, Washington, DC.

bad:

Horton, Richard 2000. “Glossary of Terms Relating to Photo Albums.” in Conservation of Scrapbooks and Albums: Postprints of the Book and Paper Group/Photographic Materials Group Joint Session at the 27th Annual Meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. 21-28. AIC, Washington, DC.

If the "bad" version occurs, it might be necessary to edit the source code and change the word from "file" to "media" inside the brackets to fix the issue. See the source code from this paragraph as an example.

Additional information about references guidelines

AIC-CC User Guidelines for References and Bibliographies

Citations

A concise guide to producing an alphabetical reference list with in-text citations.

JAIC Style Guide

Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., Author-Date system

Wikipedia Guidelines on citations

This article discusses the reference style of Wikipedia, not the AIC wiki, but it is a useful place to learn about conventions in online citation.

Examples of Citations and References on the Wiki

Encapsulation

This page demonstrated the simplest style of citation, where references are listed at the end of the text in their order of appearance.

Foxing

This page demonstrates how in-text citations link to a Bibliography that is organized alphabetically by author's last name.

Examples of Annotated Bibliographies on the Wiki

Scrapbooks - Annotated Bibliography
Mold Bibliography
Mold and Foxing Remediation (Photographic Materials Group)

Bibliographies in Need of Updating

The following pages have hopelessly out-of-date bibliographies that were last updated in the 1980's or early 1990's. No one has stepped forward to review them (as of October 2018). If you can recommend readings published in the last 30 years, please add them to the page.

• Condition Problems: Fiber Identification, Media Problems, Support Problems, Foxing
• Conservation Treatment: Surface Cleaning, Hinge, Tape, and Adhesive Removal, Washing, Sizing and Resizing, Bleaching, Alkalization and Neutralization, Consolidation, Fixing, and Facing, Backing Removal, Mending, Lining, Inpainting

This pages has nothing, and so anything you add will be an improvement!

• Alkalinization of Books

Citing the BPG Wiki

Researching with the BPG Wiki
Our goal is for all BPG Wiki pages to include robust citations and comprehensive bibliographies, providing researchers with a trove of significant texts and resources on a given topic. Many of our wiki pages gather and summarize already published knowledge. Where this is the case, we advise researchers to use those published sources as references when writing for publication, rather than citing the wiki. However, in some cases it may be necessary or preferable to cite a wiki page. This could be because the content exists only on the wiki, such as the presentations from the AIC Annual Meeting BPG Tips Session, or the summary write-up of the 2018 pre-meeting symposium “The Current Use of Leather in Book Conservation” found on the Use of Leather in Book Conservation page. Or you may wish to cite the BPG Wiki in order to demonstrate current practices and popular thinking among conservators who use this resource.

Wiki pages are frequently revised. Keep this in mind if you decide to quote from the wiki.

How to cite the BPG Wiki
With the above caveats in mind, we encourage you to cite BPG Wiki pages in your papers, blog posts, and presentations. Please use the following citation format, which is based on the Chicago Manual of Style for citing a page on a website:

Footnote:

"Title of Wiki Page," AIC Wiki, American Institute for Conservation (AIC), Date of copyright or modification or access, URL.

Bibliography Entry:

American Institute for Conservation (AIC). "Title of Wiki Page." AIC Wiki. Date of copyright or modification or access. URL.

Don't cite the wiki on the wiki
When referring to BPG Wiki pages on the wiki itself, always use an embedded link to that page (for example, Parchment Bookbinding); do not use a citation.