118Wiki:To Do List

There is plenty to do around the Wiki. Because we're just beginning this new project, we have lots of small things we need to fix and change to make our Wiki more whole. Here's a brainstorming-type list of things we need to do:

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, and copying/pasting the articles there into the Academy Library area of the Wiki.

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. 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.

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.

Create Navigational Templates

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.