User talk:James.Gourlay

Intros

Hi James,

I posted an introduction at User_talk:Teratornis#Technical_work_and_introduction. You may want to introduce yourself there as well, and be expecting some fun technical stuff to head your way.

Thanks, --Lonny 22:55, 25 January 2011 (PST)

Yes, here it comes. A place to start is User:Teratornis/Tasks to see what I have been doing. Tell me if you see anything interesting there you'd like to do. I have written that page to keep track of my own work, rather than as a list of to-do items that could easily be delegated, so organizing the various to-do's scattered around Appropedia might itself be a good place to start. How much experience do you have with editing on MediaWiki wikis? (There is no preferred answer to that question, I'm just thinking of where you can plug in. I see your site, so obviously you know your way around computers and won't have any problem learning anything about MediaWiki that you might not know yet.) --Teratornis 23:12, 25 January 2011 (PST)

See wikipedia:Help:Talk page if you are unfamiliar with how these talk pages work. Also, I advise you to try to stay logged in while you edit, so Special:Contributions/James.Gourlay will show all your edits. The history of your user page shows an edit from an IP address, which might have been you while not logged in. See wikipedia:Help:History for details on how that works, if you are unfamiliar. Appropedia works a lot like Wikipedia, and Wikipedia has much more extensive internal manuals (another problem to address on Appropedia, porting over as much of the internal document set as we need). --Teratornis 23:19, 25 January 2011 (PST)

Information about MediaWiki

Some links you will find informative:

wikipedia:Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual - a book about editing on Wikipedia. Much of the content maps directly to Appropedia.
wikipedia:WP:EIW#MediaWiki - links about MediaWiki from the Editor's index to Wikipedia.

--Teratornis 19:20, 1 February 2011 (PST)

Also have a look at User:Teratornis/Template porting: theory and practice. It probably won't make sense on the first go, but you can keep coming back to it. It explains how to clean up the mess at Special:WantedTemplates. Many if not most of those wanted templates arise from people copying pages from Wikipedia to Appropedia. Instead of getting what they expect, they see a bunch of ugly red links^W to all the missing templates that the source pages use on Wikipedia to display various things (infoboxes, messages boxes, navigation boxes, etc.). A big part of making Appropedia nice for people is to port the needed templates here. That's what I'm doing. It's an endless job, so the more Appropedians we can train to do it, the better. --Teratornis 23:38, 1 February 2011 (PST)

Here is an article about the history of Wikipedia:

Poe, Marshall (September 2006). "The Hive". The Atlantic Monthly.

Clay Shirky^W and Yochai Benkler^W are two other writers about mass collaboration who I recommend. --Teratornis 12:10, 2 February 2011 (PST)

Intern project

See:

You should watch^W those pages, along with looking at Special:RecentChanges every day to see what is going on. --Teratornis 15:13, 15 February 2011 (PST)

Thanks Lonny and Teratornis and interns I look forward to working with you James.Gourlay 03:58, 16 February 2011 (PST)