9CHRIS / style

Style Guide for Editing Document Pages

When you edit a document title page, the goal is to make it human readable but well-structured, so that eventually the information might be imported into a proper database. Please follow the guidelines below.

Goals

The overall goal is to edit the text of the page to reproduce the information on the actual title page faithfully. Additional useful information, notes, or context can be added at the bottom, in the "Notes" section.

Order of the page elements

When editing, each of the following elements should be on a single line or multiple consecutive lines, with a blank line separating them, in the following order:

  • "No." (document number)

  • Ninth Circuit Court title

  • First party in the lawsuit, with their designation ("Appellant" etc.)

  • "vs."

  • Second party in the lawsuit, with their designation ("Appellee" etc.)

  • Type of record ("Transcript of Record," "Appellant's Brief," etc.) If this is one of several pieces (such as "Volume III") include that here too.

  • Statement indicating the originating court, including any subdivisions or districts listed

  • Filing date and information, including name of clerk if provided

  • Printing information if present

  • Then a horizontal line separates this document information from other information, including keywords, links, and any notes about the document.

UGLY/BEAUTIFUL

You will notice the "Document Status" heading toward the bottom. If a page has not been corrected (or not been corrected completely), this should be "UGLY" -- but if you've fixed everything, please change this to "BEAUTIFUL."

Optional description of the change

The editor has a box at the bottom titled "Optional description of this change." Please give a short description of what you did on the page. This might be "Fixed OCR text" or "Added note about other cases" or something else like that.

Using Markdown

This wiki uses the "Markdown" language for formatting text. Some basic formatting help is available as a link at the bottom of the editing page.

Sandbox

Wikis typically have a Sandbox, where you can play around and get the hang of editing. The 9CHRIS sandbox is here: SandBox