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::I will work on expanding that list. Let me know if anything now on the list is not understandable. There is a lot of technical jargon associated with MediaWiki wikis, and I don't know how much background knowledge everybody has so far. The indexing project is not quite ready to delegate yet, but it's getting close. In the meantime you could read [[Help:Index pages]] which explains some of what you will be doing. I have some other techniques for harvesting lists of page names from the [[Special:Export]] page and doing a regular expression search and replace to format them for easy adding to the index. That makes it straightforward to grab whole categories of pages at once, saving a lot of editing tedium. I have not documented the method on Appropedia yet. Image maintenance tasks might actually be easier to work on in the short run. The trick to doing these types of [[Appropedia:Gnome tasks|gnome tasks]] is to learn how to do (any) one thing, and then do it repeatedly all over Appropedia. For example, once you learn how to properly format one type of image page (such as an image that someone copied from Flickr), then you can search for all the other images other people copied from Flickr and format them similarly. The beauty of wikis is that you can learn to do almost anything by reading the friendly manuals and studying diffs.{{w|Help:Diff}} One solid example of fixing one page shows how to fix dozens of other pages with the same problem. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 12:34, 20 February 2011 (PST)
::I will work on expanding that list. Let me know if anything now on the list is not understandable. There is a lot of technical jargon associated with MediaWiki wikis, and I don't know how much background knowledge everybody has so far. The indexing project is not quite ready to delegate yet, but it's getting close. In the meantime you could read [[Help:Index pages]] which explains some of what you will be doing. I have some other techniques for harvesting lists of page names from the [[Special:Export]] page and doing a regular expression search and replace to format them for easy adding to the index. That makes it straightforward to grab whole categories of pages at once, saving a lot of editing tedium. I have not documented the method on Appropedia yet. Image maintenance tasks might actually be easier to work on in the short run. The trick to doing these types of [[Appropedia:Gnome tasks|gnome tasks]] is to learn how to do (any) one thing, and then do it repeatedly all over Appropedia. For example, once you learn how to properly format one type of image page (such as an image that someone copied from Flickr), then you can search for all the other images other people copied from Flickr and format them similarly. The beauty of wikis is that you can learn to do almost anything by reading the friendly manuals and studying diffs.{{w|Help:Diff}} One solid example of fixing one page shows how to fix dozens of other pages with the same problem. --[[User:Teratornis|Teratornis]] 12:34, 20 February 2011 (PST)


== Global Food Swadeshi ==
== Global Food Swadeshi and Emergency Permaculture ==


Hi. [[User:LucasG]] here. [[User:Lonny|Lonny]] directed me to this page when I said I'd like to revisit [[User:LucasG#Food|a couple of pages]], [[The_future_we_deserve|TheFWD]] way.
Hi. [[User:LucasG]] here. [[User:Lonny|Lonny]] directed me to this page when I said I'd like to revisit [[User:LucasG#Food|a couple of pages]], [[The_future_we_deserve|TheFWD]] way.

Revision as of 21:19, 20 February 2011

Template:Talk header

Why will discussion be off-wiki?

It's none of my business, and feel free to ignore this, but I'm curious about the reasons for this statement in the article:

"For the most part communication within the group will be asynchronous, relying upon BetterMeans.com, email, and a private discussion board hosted by HSU."

Asynchronous communication is where wikis excel. Will the team members use other communication tools because they have prior experience with them, or because the other tools offer some advantage? Communicating on-wiki has some advantages:

  • Easy wikilinking, and full wikitext markup including custom templates.
  • Easy visibility to all other wiki users. Wikis are inherently about massive open collaboration and quickly getting productive with distant strangers. Formation of cabals is un-wiki. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia:There is no cabal. The success of a wiki development project is the degree to which it draws in distant strangers to collaborate in possibly unexpected ways. See User:Teratornis/Template porting: theory and practice#Templates and stigmergy. For example, if someone writes a template,W the measure of success is the number of other users who discover the template without prompting and decide it is worth using. Being open and visible about everything one is doing is the wiki way.
  • Learning to communicate on Appropedia equips a person to communicate on just about any of the thousands of public MediaWiki wikis. See Wikipedia:Help:Using talk pages.
  • The world's largest and most successful wiki discourages off-wiki communication about on-wiki work. The result is that the reasoning and argument that led to virtually every policy, guideline, and process on Wikipedia is available for anyone to study. While the success of Wikipedia is not sufficient to prove that everything Wikipedia does is right, I think one must have a good reason to ignore what Wikipedia does.

--Teratornis 17:06, 7 February 2011 (PST)

Hanging indents

One thing I can't seem to figure out is how to do a hanging indent in appropedia. --Maccabee 10:54, 14 February 2011 (PST)

Why do you want to make a hanging indent? wikipedia:Template:Hanging indent shows one way to do it. Also see the wikitext source code of wikipedia:Indentation#Indentation in typesetting. Hanging indents are not part of the Wikipedia Manual of styleW as far as I have seen. Appropedia more or less follows Wikipedia's style guidelines, although not in as nailed-down a way as we might need to if Appropedia grows to a large size. (The bigger a wiki gets, the more formal and rule-based everything has to be, to minimize the scope for unproductive edit conflicts. Letting everybody do whatever they like doesn't work when lots of people are editing each other's edits. Instead the community has to agree on highly detailed rules to eliminate style disputes as much as possible.) --Teratornis 18:01, 14 February 2011 (PST)
The easiest way to avoid repeating the years of debate and discussion that Wikipedia labored through to create its style guidelines is to follow them on Appropedia. Appropedia:Policies says that is pretty much how Appropedia works, except that Appropedia has not seen the need to become strict yet. As I pointed out above, I think the need for strictness is a function of size. The bigger a wiki gets, the more users with more varying opinions it will have. At some point stricter rules become necessary to keep people working productively on content instead of potentially arguing and edit-warring over non-essential style issues. My preference is to be strict from the outset, rather than wait to get big and experience predictable problems. --Teratornis 19:43, 14 February 2011 (PST)

Re: Why will discussion be off-wiki?

Well explained point. Thanks for the input. --Maccabee 18:37, 13 February 2011 (PST)

Another factor I forgot to mention would be the wiki equivalent of cultural immersion. If an intern group uses a wiki for all aspects of managing its work on the wiki (all aspects that can be done on-wiki), this will accelerate learning. In a similar way, one learns a foreign language faster by being thrown completely into the foreign culture, rather than by merely dipping a toe in the water while continuing to stand on the familiar shore. Also see my points about editing on more than one wiki to gain perspective on how they differ. --Teratornis 20:20, 13 February 2011 (PST)

All notes for project so far

No dates on these but they are in chronological order.

  • Breaking this into specific steps:
-Choose screencast software
-Identify problems with current cast
-Create a script
-Create screencast
  • I am focusing in on identifying problems and creating a new script. Below I have listed the current casts steps and some issues, please add to this as you see fit. I am going through the image adding process again myself and listing the steps. I will combine and filter the two lists to make the script we will use.
  • General Issues:
-Image s/b 800x600 or smaller
-Animated steps such as image browsing happen too fast to see
  • Steps of the current system (issues in brackets):
1. Intro
2. Login
3. Upload Image (make sure you have permission to use image)
4. Rename image (leaving extension)
5. Summarize or Describe image, including license info ["Summarize" the image? Should that be "describe" the image?]
6. Click "Upload" 
7. Copy image name for later
8. Click your name to get to user page
9. Click edit
10. Click image to insert code
11. Paste image name
12. Preview
13. Image thumbnail, alignment, and caption. 
14. Preview 
15. Summarize and save [again, what are you summarizing?]
  • Created a dummy account to work with:
login: ImageCast
pass: interns
  • Here is my version of the steps from which to from a script to follow:

Steps I followed to post an image:
1. Prepare image on local machine
1b. Login 
2. In "toolbox" in the lower left, click "Upload a file" 
3. Review and conform to the bullet points under "Upload a file" 
4. In "Source file" click "Browse..." 
5. Below, in "File description" give the image a meaning full name without changing the extension. 
6. Click "Upload" 
7. Copy the image name with extension
8. Click your username at the top right corner 
9. Click "edit" at the top
10. With your curser on the line below "==About Me==" Click the image (actually "embedded file") icon to insert code to show image
11. Paste image name in place of "Example.jpg" 
12. Paste the following after the image extension but inside the brackets: " | thumb | left | TYPE YOUR OWN CAPTION HERE
13. Click preview
14. Summarize? and Save

  • I've been looking at different screen capture tools and am not seeing much free software for Mac. I am looking at screen toaster which is web based.

I am wondering though, if this really needs to be animated. Some of the issues with the current tutorial are that I can't see the animations. Could this be done effectively with a series of still images?

  • I'm also thinking to separate as much text from the images as possible so that it can be more easily translated.

--Maccabee 20:17, 13 February 2011 (PST)

Screencasts can be nice (depending on what subject you're trying to convey) but I don't know that they teach more effectively than slide shows of still images. A wiki page works fine for a tutorial, and being text-based it is straightforward to translate to other languages. (See for example Wikipedia:WP:TUTORIAL - we can duplicate the tabbed design on Appropedia. Let me know if you need help with that, it shouldn't be harder than other things I have ported here.) Screen shot images on a wiki are expandable to original size when a user clicks on them, so they remain fully legible, unlike many screencasts I have seen that had to shrink the screen images. For a tutorial to be really effective, the user needs to follow along and perform the same steps. Passive viewing isn't as effective, because even a few unfamiliar instructions will quickly overwhelm the viewer's short term memory.W Actually performing the steps several times, over several days, drives them into long term memory.W Repetition helps too, which is why using a wiki for everything shortens the calendar time that it takes to internalize the wiki approach to collaborative problem solving. --Teratornis 20:37, 13 February 2011 (PST)

--Maccabee 12:20, 14 February 2011 (PST)

OK, I'll make some notes there. Side issue: read meta:Help:Link to learn the difference between wikilinks, interwiki links, and external links. We link to pages on Appropedia with wikilinks (Talk:Add Image Tutorial) rather than with external links (the URL in one pair of square brackets), even though the external link method works. It works, but isn't as informative, since:
  • An external link implies to the reader that the destination is on an external site. That's what the little square with the arrow graphic suggests.
  • External links do not benefit from the red linkW mechanism, which indicates a wikilink to a page on the local wiki which does not exist yet, or has been deleted. With an external link, the MediaWiki software does not give any information about the existence of the link destination page.
  • If someone ports Appropedia content to another wiki, wikilinks here become (local) wikilinks there, whereas external links stay burned in to the same URLs.
  • If Appropedia's domain name changes, the external link might become invalid, but the local wikilink will still work.
  • If someone creates an offline version of Appropedia, wikilinks will still work, but URL links require access to the Internet.
  • Wikilinks are easier to type. The word "wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick".
--Teratornis 18:15, 14 February 2011 (PST)

Link formatting on project page

Some tips on formatting links, and linking all things that can be usefully linked:

Another item: follow the Appropedia/Wikipedia title case convention for page and section titles. First letters of second and following words should be in lowercase unless they would ordinarily be in uppercase; see Appropedia:Policies (item 12, naming conventions) and wikipedia:WP:LOWERCASE. E.g., "Opportunity Definition" should be "Opportunity definition"; "Literature Review" should be "Literature review". Wikipedia's title case is different from the way almost everybody else in the world does it. The basic reason is that page and section names are case-sensitive except for the very first character, and Wikipedia wants its titles to be directly linkable as they appear in ordinary prose sentences. If titles have different capitalization as titles than in sentences, a wiki needs lots of silly redirects to avoid misleading red links on letter case variants. --Teratornis 19:35, 14 February 2011 (PST)

Intern Work

Hi Guys,

As per our discussions, you are now under the direction of User:Teratornis until Sunday, March 20th. On March 21st, we should re-evaluate and decide the goals for the final five weeks. Please see User talk:Lonny#Can outside people join an ENGR305 intern project.3F for more.

In addition, you will be collaborating with User:James.Gourlay.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thank you, --Lonny 18:19, 15 February 2011 (PST)

Current work/projects

Hey User:Teratornis I was wondering if you had any projects or work that needed to be completed. User:Lonny said we need about 5 hours of work per week. I am interested in making changes/alterations to pages or whatever else needs to be done.

Thanks alot ==Munimortal 11:38, 20 February 2011

Hi Munimortal,
Thank you for taking initiative on this. Teratornis has an indexing project that might be a very good fit. --Lonny 11:56, 20 February 2011 (PST)
I have been listing some tasks in:
I will work on expanding that list. Let me know if anything now on the list is not understandable. There is a lot of technical jargon associated with MediaWiki wikis, and I don't know how much background knowledge everybody has so far. The indexing project is not quite ready to delegate yet, but it's getting close. In the meantime you could read Help:Index pages which explains some of what you will be doing. I have some other techniques for harvesting lists of page names from the Special:Export page and doing a regular expression search and replace to format them for easy adding to the index. That makes it straightforward to grab whole categories of pages at once, saving a lot of editing tedium. I have not documented the method on Appropedia yet. Image maintenance tasks might actually be easier to work on in the short run. The trick to doing these types of gnome tasks is to learn how to do (any) one thing, and then do it repeatedly all over Appropedia. For example, once you learn how to properly format one type of image page (such as an image that someone copied from Flickr), then you can search for all the other images other people copied from Flickr and format them similarly. The beauty of wikis is that you can learn to do almost anything by reading the friendly manuals and studying diffs.W One solid example of fixing one page shows how to fix dozens of other pages with the same problem. --Teratornis 12:34, 20 February 2011 (PST)

Global Food Swadeshi and Emergency Permaculture

Hi. User:LucasG here. Lonny directed me to this page when I said I'd like to revisit a couple of pages, TheFWD way.

The issues I've been visiting recently make me realise maybe (or maybe not) this time things are riper for gathering a coherent picture, or even a language, that may help people undertake practical projects to speed up the path from local unsustainable fragile hyper-dependency to something better, at a more or less local level, and connected to the rest of the world as needed/wanted.

I live in the Canary Islands, which may serve as a test place for our thinking.

LucasG 13:18, 20 February 2011 (PST)

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