This page is a quick-reference guide to all of the data fields you’ll encounter.
Under each of the high level categories (actors, initiatives, events, products/outputs from civil society/government/companies), there are a range of fields that are used to capture important information about the entry.
In some situations, data must be entered in a particular way (for example, dates and date formats, or use of commas to separate multiple items).
The title field is used to link entries and is the “primary field”. No two titles for entries in the database should be identical, as this will be confusing to users and potentially cause errors in data management. Ideally, titles should be entered exactly and we recommend making use of the copy paste function where possible. However, if the title of an entry is particularly generic (ie, “Researcher access to data”) we recommend adding minor details to make it less generic (ie, including a date in brackets, the name of an author, or similar).
In situations where the name of an actor or initiative begins with “the” (eg “The Brainbox Institute”), we recommend removing “the” and simply entering the name (ie “Brainbox Institute”) to optimise sorting by alphabetical.
If an actor or initiative is commonly known by an abbreviation (ie, “IGF”), we recommend adding the abbreviation to the name field, as well as the expanded name (ie, “Internet Governance Forum”). If the abbreviation is more common, we recommend you put it first, but either will show up in keyword searches.
The content field is the body text that appears on entry pages. A short, descriptive paragraph or two is preferred. Ideally, this would consist mainly of reliable copy-pasted text from the website or resource captured in the entry.
If you add significant amounts of text to the Content field, you can also add a shorter summary to the Excerpt field (below) which will show in search results and lists for the portal instead of the longer Content field.
The excerpt field gives the text that will appear below the entry when it appears on search results and lists, but not on the entry page itself. If this field is left blank (and it usually can be), the first several sentences of the ‘Content’ field will be used instead.
Please link to the content itself or the website of the actor/initiative/event in question. If there is no such website, link to a related one. If there are no related sites, enter “N/A”.
<aside> ❓ You can enter multiple URLs if they are separated by a space, the pipe character (|), and another space (eg. example 1 | example 2). We do not expect this to be necessary in the vast majority of entries.
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