TransHealthAccess:Contribution guidelines

We're happy for any information you want to add to this site! However, we have some guidelines about how to write your additions. (Although if you don't follow the guidelines? Don't worry about it, as long as your information is good, I'll just go back and fix it up myself. -- Andi)

Citation
The most important thing we can ask of you is that all information on this site needs to have a source. If we just have a note on the site saying that the student health care plan for Case Western Reserve University covers transition, this is not very useful to a reader because they do not know if they can trust us. We should always explain how we learned any claim we make, both so that readers know we are telling the truth and so that readers have a trail to follow up for more information. There is a special site feature for doing this in a convenient way:

Adding a citation
The best way to provide a citation is to use the wiki's &lt;ref&gt; feature. Text between a &lt;ref&gt; and a &lt;/ref&gt; will be replaced with a little footnote number, linking to the bottom of the page. So for example:

"Case Western Reserve University has included gender transition in its student health plan since 2006."

If you put this into the edit box on a page, it would become

"Case Western Reserve University has included gender transition in its student health plan since 2006."

Notice a few things I did writing this cite: I put the ref *after* the punctuation at the end of the sentence, not before; I made sure to include a URL for further information; and I put [ and ] around the URL to turn it into a link.

Citations don't have to be links, by the way. For example, on this wiki at least, it's fine to cite a person that you'd consider a credible source, as long as you explain exactly who they were (a name would be great) and the date you spoke to them. For example:

"Case Western Reserve University has included gender transition in its student health plan since 2006."

This is fine, and will become just:

"Case Western Reserve University has included gender transition in its student health plan since 2006."

Advanced Techniques: Using a citation more than once
Let's say you are editing a page and you find you are using the same citation over and over. So that you do not have to copy and paste the same reference over and over, you can give your citations names by putting a name="this_is_the_citation_name" inside of the &lt;ref&gt; tag. Like this:

This is a line of text. This is a second line of text.

Notice the / in a funny place on the second line of text! It's very important.

If you use this feature, the second "ref name" will turn into a copy of the first "ref name":

This is a line of text. This is a second line of text.

Making a page
You can add a new page to the site by typing the name of the page into the search box, then clicking the "yes, create this" link.

Any kind of page
This is silly, but any new page on the site absolutely has to have the following exact text copypasted at the bottom: == References == If you don't put this magic incantation on the page, the site will print errors when the page is shown. Sorry!

States
Some things you should try to do if you add a state page:


 * Some people may be overwhelmed by the amount of information on the page, or for language barrier or other reasons may have difficulty reading the text. We should make sure these people can still find the site useful. For this reason, on all the state pages we should try to include the phone number of a local assistance organization so a reader can give up and just call someone.
 * We want to include information for all kinds of people. Eventually, we'd at least like to include coverage information for people on private insurance, people with Medicaid, state employees and people in prisons. (Of course, if you can't get all that information at once, just add what you have!)
 * Try to include, for any group of people you have information about, both what is covered and what the step-by-step instructions are for getting care.