Q: What should appear in a Gleanings page?

A: It should accurately reflect the source record.

The precise content of a gleanings page will vary depending on the nature of the information to be found in the source record.

However, the gleanings page should be structured into four parts, namely
                 Introduction (optional)
                 Transcript (mandatory)
                 Commentary (optional)
                 Source (mandatory)

The page may optionally begin with an Introduction section, which, for example, would indicate whether the record has been extracted verbatim or is a précis. Unless otherwise indicated, a full transcript is assumed.

The Transcript section should follow, with either the verbatim transcript or the précis (or any combination as described in the introduction) of the information from the source record.

The Transcript section may be optionally followed by a Commentary section. This is the place to include any hypotheses about who the individuals in the Transcript are and how they might be related (or not). It is important that the reader is able to quickly and easily distinguish between the Transcript and Commentary; they should never be intermixed.

If the wiki page name uses a pseudo date, that should be explained in the commentary section. For an explanation of pseudo date in this context, please see FAQ Gleaning Page Naming.

The use of Wiki links from both the Transcript and Commentary sections to the person pages for named individuals is encouraged.

The Source section is mandatory and should identify the repository or other source(s) where this record may be inspected. This may result in some repetition of information implied by the structure in which this document is located within TRP, but making it explicit here is considered beneficial. This provides a degree of protection against technical failure of the structures within TRP or accidental damage of a structure.

For major sites such as Family Search and Google Books a url alone is acceptable as source information. However, recognising that websites do go off-line and/or re-organise their content, it is important that the source can be repeatedly found over time. For more unusual sites, particularly those using complex urls or with less obvious domain names, please include in addition to the url sufficient search terms that can be used with a web search engine to re-find the source information.

The use of this four section structured approach is required. However, the use of these headings within the gleanings page is highly recommended and represents best practice, but is not mandatory.

See also FAQ What is a Gleanings Page
and        FAQ Naming a Gleanings Page