#SENTENCE FRAGMENT DEFINITION WIKIPEDIA HOW TO#
#SENTENCE FRAGMENT DEFINITION WIKIPEDIA FULL#

While a short caption is often appropriate, if it might be seen as trivial ( People playing Monopoly), consider extending it so that it adds value to the image and is related more logically to the surrounding text ( A product of the Great Depression, Monopoly continues to be played today.).

#SENTENCE FRAGMENT DEFINITION WIKIPEDIA HOW TO#

Links to relevant sections within the article may help draw the reader in (see here for how to do this). 'The 1965 Ford Mustang introduced the whiz-bang super-speeder' tells the reader why it is worth the trouble to show a photo of a 1965 Ford Mustang rather than just any year of that model car.

This makes the legend more readable, and allows for easy translation into other languages.Įstablishing relevance to the article Ī good caption explains why a picture belongs in an article.

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A substantial, full discussion of a technical image may be confined to the caption if it improves the structure of the prose in the main article.įor maps and other images with a legend, the template can be used in the caption instead of (or in addition to) including the legend explaining the color used in the image. Any elements not included in a legend or clearly labelled should be defined in the caption. Prose should still be succinct, but the significance of the image should be fully explained. Technical images like charts and diagrams may have captions that are much longer than other images. For example, the statement: ''Yesterday' is one of the Beatles' best-known songs' might be more appropriate for the article body than the statement: 'The string arrangement on 'Yesterday' utilises counterpoint, which complements McCartney's vocals by reinforcing the tonic', which might be more appropriate as an Ogg file description, especially if the text pertains to the contents of the media file or supports its fair-use rationale. As a general rule, retain broader points in the article body, including specific points in the media file's description field. As with image captions, care should be taken to include enough relevant information in-line so the media file's relevance to the article is made explicit irrespective of the caption. And remember that readers wanting full detail can click through to the image description page.īecause non-visual media imparts no visual information regarding the content of its file, it is often desirable to include a longer description than is typically acceptable with image captions. More than three lines of text in a caption may be distracting instead, further information can be provided in the article body. Succinct captions have more power than verbose ones. It is not the same as brevity, which is using a relatively small number of words.

Succinctness is using no superfluous or needless words. In a biography article no caption is necessary for a portrait of the subject pictured alone but one might be used to give the year, the subject's age, or other circumstances of the portrait along with the name of the subject. Photographs and other graphics need not have captions if they are 'self-captioning' images (such as reproductions of album or book covers) or when they are unambiguous depictions of the subject of the article. Sometimes the date of the image is important: there is a difference between 'King Arthur' and 'King Arthur in a 19th-century watercolor'. The present location may be added in parentheses: ( Louvre). If the illustration is a painting, the painter's Wikilinked name, the title, and a date give context.

Be as unambiguous as practical in identifying the subject. Make sure your caption does that, without leaving readers to wonder what the subject of the picture might be. One of a caption's primary purposes is to identify the subject of the picture. What would you say while attention is on the image? What do you want your audience to notice in the image, and why? Corollary: if you have nothing to say about it, then the image probably does not belong in the article.Ĭlear identification of the subject However, it is best not to tell the whole story in the caption, but use the caption to make the reader curious about the subject.Īnother way of approaching the job: imagine you're giving a lecture based on the encyclopedia article, and you are using the image to illustrate the lecture. Those readers, even if the information is adjacent in the text, will not find it unless it is in the caption. Others read the first paragraph and scan through the article's body for other interesting information, looking especially at pictures and captions. Some people start at the top and read each word until the end.

establishes the picture's relevance to the article ĭifferent people read articles in different ways.

clearly identifies the subject of the picture, without detailing the obvious.

There are several criteria for a good caption.

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