Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Part four of our series of posts about how Te Ara comes into being.

In some ways we editors have the perfect job – while editing a text we get to learn about all sorts of subjects without having to do any research. Through working on The Settled Landscape I have learned many fascinating facts about such things as Exotic farm animals, Land ownership, Zoos and aquariums and Rural language.

I have to confess that occasionally some of the subject matter in entries for The Settled Landscape does fall into the ‘I didn’t think I wanted to know about it and now I’m trying to forget’ category – one offender being Diseases of sheep, cattle and deer. Though really the pictures were the main problem rather than the text.

Editing

Once the entry text has been researched, written and checked, and after the resourcers have found a bunch of pictures and other media to go with the entry, and once the writer has written captions for those resources, it’s time for editors to have their turn.

The role of an editor is really to get the text into the best possible shape for publication on Te Ara. We:

• spot and fix typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, punctuation errors
• make sure the text is consistent and follows our house style for things like capitalisation and references
• tighten up the text by removing repetition and waffle
• query with the writer anything that seems wrong or confusing
• check that caption text matches the resource it relates to
• make sure the text is in plain language and easy to read for people with little or no previous knowledge of the subject – without dumbing it down. To do this we change jargon words to ones that are more familiar and meaningful, make sure sentences are ‘active‘ rather than ‘passive’, make sure the subject of a sentence is at the beginning of a sentence rather than buried at the end, and so forth. Te Ara has been very successful in making even complicated text understandable, and was rewarded with the 2008 WriteMark New Zealand Plain English Award for best plain English website.

We are very fortunate to work with writers who are expert and professional, which makes our job much easier. Sometimes there can be a little tension with writers, who may feel we’re messing up their gorgeous prose. In (humorous) speeches at farewell morning teas, in which the Te Ara team were compared to animals, editors have been both possums in the forest (I guess because we prune), and predators (but surely only because it rhymes with editors). But our relationship with writers is really very symbiotic, and we aim to treat their text with the respect it deserves.

Production

Editors at Te Ara don’t just edit, but we’re also the people who get the words and images onto the web – we call it ‘production’.

First we have to style the documents in Microsoft Word, so we can transform them into XML (eXtensible Markup Language), from which our web pages are created using stylesheets. We load this XML up to our staging server to test it, make any corrections in the XML and then load it up again. When a theme or entry is ready to be released to the world, we load it up to the live server.

Other stuff

We editors like to think of ourselves as an adaptable lot, and we are involved in other things as they come to hand, such as running this blog, editing and checking proofs for books Te Ara has published in association with David Bateman and other project work.