Appropedia:Workspace

Here are some platforms where Appropedians gather to work.

BetterMeans

Our BetterMeans workstream is for task management. Substreams are listed on that page. The dashboard is the best place to see all tasks.

StatusNet

(Just set up, to try out - at least I'll use it for my own notes in tagged form, but I'm hoping others will also use it. --Chriswaterguy 18:03, 3 March 2011 (PST))

Appropedia Workspace on StatusNet - this is a microblogging platform, with groups (e.g. funding, tech, service learning...). You can follow users, join groups and send messages from any Identica or other StatusNet account, but if you use it a lot you'll probably want to set up an account directly on this site. Local accounts are currently set to allow 300 characters per message.

"Context" links allow conversations to be tracked easily.

You can have posts automatically feed to Twitter. You can use Twitterfeed.com to post your feed (including a filtered feed option) to Twitter, Facebook, other StatusNet accounts.

Right here!

This wiki, Appropedia itself, is the most important platform, of course. You don't need to use other platforms if you don't want. Just edit, and leave notes on talk pages^W and people's user pages.^W

Edit summaries

By always leaving descriptive edit summaries^W when you edit on Appropedia, you can inform other users of your work. An edit with no summary is harder for other users to decode. They can only examine your diff^W and try to infer the reason for your edit.

Edit summaries appear on the Special:RecentChanges page (the heartbeat of Appropedia) and in page histories.^W

Edit summaries may contain wikilinks, to guide other users to detailed documentation that helps to explain what you did. Shortcuts often make suitable link targets for edit summaries, and are easier to fit into the character limit. If your edit applies a policy or guideline, linking to the corresponding page from your edit summary makes your edit understandable to other users who may be unfamiliar with the rule you applied. Always check your edit summary links by previewing your edit before you save it. If you use a modern Web browser with a tabbed browsing feature, you can open your edit summary link in a new tab before you save it, to insure your link works. Once you save your edit, you can no longer edit your edit summary itself, so there is only one chance to get it right.

If you have created an account, you can instruct the MediaWiki software to require you to always leave an edit summary. Go to Special:Preferences, select the "Editing" tab, and check the "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" box. Doing so will help other users collaborate with you more efficiently.

User subpages

To make it even easier for other users to understand what you are doing, you can make subpages^W in your user space for taking detailed notes.^[1] User subpages are usually the most appropriate place to write at length in the first person. That is, if you need to write many sentences beginning with the pronoun "I", and you are not addressing any particular person at the time, you should probably not be writing on an article^W page, but rather in your user space.

References and notes

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