Help:How to decorate your article

You've followed the essential steps of Wikinews:Writing an article, and your article is now complete. Its well written, well sourced, interesting, and so on &mdash; but you want to give it that extra special touch. Time to add some decoration to break up your paragraphs of text. Well the most important part of an article is the well written text, to be a truly great article, it needs graphic elements to split up the text.

Images
See also meta:Help:Image

You may wish to add images to your story. Even if none are available from the actual event, it can be helpful to the reader if you add a graphic of some sort, perhaps a map, or some icon representative of event features. Wikimedia Commons contains a wide variety of images, which you can automatically include on any Wikinews article using the standard  syntax. You must ensure any image you use, particularly images you upload yourselves are not infringing on somebody's copyright &mdash; as explained below.

Use the Reference desk to find images to upload, or take your own photos too (see digital camera), or even draw your own pictures (using a free program like the Gimp or Inkscape, for example).

If you want to upload public domain images, use the Commons image, sound and file library. There commons:commons:Upload. You will need to register on the Commons if you have not already done so.

You can only upload 'free' (as in 'free to be redistributed and edited at will') images on the Commons. You can upload 'fair use' images directly to Wikinews. Thoroughly read and understand the fair use guidelines before uploading a picture to Wikinews; if you picture does not meet the fair use guidelines, it will be deleted. Remember, images from competing news sources are never allowed. If your image is allowable, use this link to upload images to Wikinews.

Even if you cannot find any suitable images, a flag or map is often enough to spice up your article. Commons contains a vast library of generic images we can use, including a flag and map of almost any country. For example if you article was something related to Somalia, you could try adding  or   (replace Somalia with appropriate country name)

Lots of images?
Sometimes articles have lots of images (for example Wikinews international report: "Anonymous" holds anti-Scientology protests worldwide). There are two approaches to including large number of images:

See meta:Help:Image for advanced gallery formatting

The first is the gallary. this creates a thumbnail gallary of associated images. the format is:

Picture select
Picture select makes a picture select box. In its simplest format:

Infoboxes
Infoboxes are long boxes on the side, usually highlighting other articles on the topic, some image of the topic, and links related to the topic. Many topics have infoboxes, including almost every country (For example Canada), and major subject (For example Crime and law). A list of infoboxes is available. For example to include the Wikinews Today short infobox displayed on the side, add:

to the top of your article.

pull-quotes
See also the documentation at template:QuoteRight and template:QuoteLeft

The two templates QuoteLeft and QuoteRight are another decoration that can highlight some aspect of the story you are telling.

When you use these templates always make sure the text you're quoting from the article is actually in the article! Don't lift a quote from a source that is otherwise unused and add it in one of these templates.

To get the example shown in this section you would use the following syntax: