Writing "Best Minerals" text entries

A “Best Minerals” article will normally be based on the combined effort from the article author/editor, input from the Mindat community, information found in magazines and papers as well as direct personal communication with other individuals. The task of preparing an article may seem overwhelming at the beginning, and it is apparent that the entry level threshold for getting started as a “Best Minerals” author is high, possibly higher than necessary. In this text I will present my approach on writing the text entries for an article, and I will refer to Harjo Neutkens excellent text A guide to the lay-out for the Best Minerals articles for creating an article and preparing the layout.

The intention behind this text is to show that anyone with some interest and general geology and mineralogy knowledge can write Best mineral articles based on a structured search for information even with very little or no specific knowledge of the mineral or the locality in advance.

I am starting by reviewing all photos for the specific mineral in the database, selecting those I think may be relevant for the “Best Minerals” article. I create a “under construction” article in the “Best Minerals” message board listing all the localities and photos I think will be relevant, following Harjo’s guidelines and advice for the layout to the best of my patience and abilities. This will create a number of information “blocks”, or localities to be included in the article. The screen shot below illustrates one of these initial “blocks”.

© Olav Revheim

In order to prepare the text for these blocks, I use the following method:
1- Search for and store information from various sources
2- Skim through information and check for relevance- delete non-relevant information
3- Read the reminding documentation and paste the most relevant sections into a word document.
4- If necessary, contact photo uploaders, Mindat experts or paper authors directly for more specific information.
5- Prepare a “cut and paste” draft text
6- Write the text and update the best mineral article block with a text entry.
7- Move on to the next block.
8- When all blocks are filled, writing the article introduction is very much straight forward.

Normally, I will have little or no knowledge of the locality and the occurrence of the mineral from a locality, I have used riebeckite from Quincy, Massachusetts as an example. If I am lucky, someone with a detailed knowledge on the locality will step forward and share information in a post in the forum, if not, I start looking for information.

The best place to start is the photo caption and the locality description on Mindat, including the detailed mineral report. This will sometimes provide valuable information on the mineral and the locality, either directly or by listing references. In this specific case not much appeared. See locality page and Detailed mineral report

Then there is the internet. The wealth of information available amazes me. There are some default sources I check out first. Rruff.info is one of them. I look up riebeckite and find at the bottom of the page a list of references, often available as a downloadable pdf. Rruff.info also has a searchable archive of older volumes of the Mineralogical magazine. Needless to say, the archive is bookmarked as a favorite in my web browser. Quite often, something will appear from there.



General searches will also be helpful. I often start with a wide search, such as “riebeckite Massachusetts”. I am in particular looking for pdf’s, google books, archive.org or similar sites where full documents can be read or downloaded. Many sites presents only the abstracts, but these may occationaly be helpful. In this case the general search was helpful, but for more remote localities with less information published even more general searches exemplified with “Quincy geology”, “Massachusetts amphibole”, “ petrology, Massachusetts” etc. may be necessary.



After browsing through the information gathered by general searches, more detailed searches my reveal addition information. In this case I used searches like “granite new England history” and “Cape Ann granite riebeckite” gave even more information.
For this Quincy granite riebeckite block I downloaded 14 documents and links representing articles, books, thesis’, papers etc. ranging in content from petrology, analysis of riebeckites, early 20th century field observations, a guidebook and an online book on the history of the New England granite industry. All very interesting reading.

Web information formats:



From this information I prepare a “cut and paste” word document with bits and pieces from different sources. These cut and paste text blocks of 1-2 pages forms the draft text for the article entry. At this stage I will have a good overview of the locality, and can easily identify if I there are some issues that need clarification. For the New England riebeckites, I’ve had a very pleasant e-mail correspondence with Van King to discuss the occurrence of riebeckite, arfvedsonite and other amphiboles in these granites.
I then write the text entry, and add to the article, I try to include information on

• How the mineral occurs and how large crystals that has been found
• Some geological/petrological background and associated minerals
• The significance of the locality
• Any site descriptions as relevant
• Any use of the material
• Any good stories that may be available

I tend to include more text on the significant occurences, may be as much as 20 lines of text, and less, may be only a couple of lines on the less significant or really obscure/remote localities.
The final result can be found here: riebeckite series article.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/10/2012 11:18AM by Rock Currier.