118Wiki:Community Portal
Wiki Introduction
Our Wiki: [1]
A Wiki is a website that allows anyone to edit the pages contained within. By simply clicking "edit," on any page on our Wiki, you can use very simple "Wiki Code" to change and update the pages. This is a great collaborative tool because it allows everyone to take part in the editing and creation process.
Our Wiki is intended to be a repository of data about our group, and about Star Trek. One of the main purposes for our Wiki is to replace what you can find in the "Academy Library" area of our current website. When the new member's side of our website launches it will not include an "Academy Library," but will instead point to the Wiki's Academy area.
In doing this, the hope is that these files on Star Trek which people use for reference will become more accessible to everyone. And, anything that needs to be added or changed can have that done easily.
Of course, the Wiki is also used for other purposes as well. For example, much of the information about the Embassy project is being house on the Wiki. It works well as a place where you can drop data and information so that others can access it easily.
If you have any questions about the Wiki, feel free to ask them here.
To Do List
- Move Academy Files to the Wiki
- Create Categories
- Create and clean-up help files
- Create Navigational Templates
- Re-Create the Main Menu
Move Academy Files to the Wiki
As mentioned elsewhere in this forum, we're planning on moving everything that's in the Academy Library into the Wiki. This simply entails heading to the Academy Library here, and copying/pasting the articles there into the Academy Library area of the Wiki (here).
If you need help figuring out how to best use the editing tools of the Wiki, you'll want to head to Wikipedia's help area, here. Wikipedia is the best example of a Wiki on the internet today, and we use the same software they do. So, anything you learn to do on Wikipedia, you can do on our Wiki.
Create Categories
Wikipedia uses a number of tactics to organize their encyclopedia, many of which would benefit our Wiki. We want to make our Wiki as simple as possible to work with, so we should endeavour to make it simple to find things. Categories are one way to make a subject easy to find.
To learn more about how categories work on our wiki, go to Wikipedia's help files on categories, here.
Once you've read that file, you can start categorizing the pages on our Wiki. Ideally, everything should have a category!
Create and clean-up help files
We currently have some help files that have been moved over from Wikipedia. But there's a new version of MediaWiki (the software that runs our wiki), so we need folks to edit the current help files we have, and create any new, necessary ones.
We don't need all of Wikipedia's help files on our Wiki, just some very good, quality help files that will be important to anyone trying to help build our wiki.
There are also some help files which were copied over verbatim from Wikipedia, and as such say things like "Here on Wikipedia..." when they should say "Here on 118Wiki..." We need folks who can edit the help files to reflect our wiki.
So the tasks here are:
1. Head to Wikipedia's Help Contents and find the articles which are most important to those who will help build our wiki. This, this, and this are probably the most important to begin with.
2. Head to Main Page of our wiki to see where we have links to our help files, like the "Repository of Official How-to Wisdom" and such. Edit those files for accuracy.
3. Move over any articles from Wikipedia to 118Wiki which aren't already there, and which will be useful to us.
This is a lot easier than it sounds. Basically, navigational templates are little menus which help you find your way around a particular group of pages which share a common subject. For example, if you head here, and scroll to the very bottom of the page, you'll see an area on our wiki (information on the Embassy project) where I've implemented a navigational box.
To learn more about navigational templates, head to Wikipedia's help file on them, here.
Then, head to our wiki and find areas which could use this kind of organization. A good place to start would be the "Academy Library" files.
Re-Create the Main Menu
The main menu is a bit organized at the moment. We need it to be more user friendly, and more aesthetically pleasing. As always, Wikipedia's Main Page is a good example of what we'll want.
We WILL want:
- A featured article.
- A "did you know" section.
- A "Browse by Topic" list.
We WON'T want:
- An anniversary section -- we're not an encyclopedia.
- A news section -- our website's main page will do that.
So I'd suggest perhaps putting in place of the anniversary and news sections some ideas from the Wikipedia Community Portal. In place of an anniversary section, we could put an "open tasks" list, and so on.
Here you can see how the new main pages is coming along. Feel free to discuss it.