User talk:Thehelpfulone/Archive/July 2008

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What is Around the World?

It's a collaboration!

A collaboration using advanced wiki-tools!

If everything goes according to plan, it will begin on July 15th.

The event is being co-sponsored by Wikiproject Lists of basic topics and WikiProject Geography, and participants will be "traveling" all around "the World" visiting each country online (here on Wikipedia and perhaps beyond) as they apply advanced wiki-tools to improve pieces of the profiles of each and every country on Earth!. Each pass through these pages is a "trip around the World..."

The set of pages we are working on is currently located at Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists of basic topics.

Each page presents essential information on each country in a topic outline format, for ease of overviewing and navigating. Most of the topics presented are linkified, which turns these pages into a hypertextual map to material about each country on Wikipedia. When completed, they shall all become part of Wikipedia's contents system.

The pages share a standard format, with the information on each country presented in the same general order. So rather than getting stuck on a single country trying to complete it, each participant works on all 200+ political entities, completing a single data item or detail across all of the pages!

For this they use advanced tools like WP:AWB, Linky, etc. It goes fast, and since others are doing this at the same time, it makes "the World" feel like a beehive, and the participants are its bees.  :) The energy is contagious.

And since you are moving from country to country, the tasks make it feel like you are traveling around the world, and you get to learn a little about every country as you do so. This approach also allows for greater efficiency, because by the time you've done 30 or so of a particular item, you've figured out how to finish it faster and more effectively (such as where to find the data or how to make adjustments), and this specialization speeds up development - but more importantly it reduces errors.

The tasks are varied, which adds even more variety to the project. Some tasks are look-ups-and-fill-ins, some are copy and paste, some are image hunts, some are maintenance adjustments, some are link fixing, some are blue-linking (creating an underlying redirect so a link turns blue), some are fact checking, etc.

For an example of what a nearly complete page looks like, see these:

List of basic Albania topics • List of basic Argentina topics • List of basic Australia topics • List of basic Canada topics • List of basic Ecuador topics • List of basic Egypt topics • List of basic France topics • List of basic Germany topics • List of basic Iceland topics • List of basic India topics • List of basic Indonesia topics • List of basic Iraq topics • List of basic Republic of Ireland topics • List of basic Italy topics • List of basic Isle of Man topics • List of basic Israel topics • List of basic Japan topics • List of basic Macau topics • List of basic Mexico topics • List of basic Russia topics • List of basic Taiwan topics • List of basic United Kingdom topics • List of basic United States topics

There are only about 200 more pages to go!

During the collaboration, co-coordinators will be standing by, to lend a helping hand to participants, provide instruction and tips on how to use the tools, and help them find what they are looking for. Co-coordinators will also be using advanced tools to inspect the work of participants, and touch it up as needed, or if a task was done wrong throughout, point this out to the participant so he or she can make the necessary corrections.

Co-coordinators are working on the set of pages right now, to familiarize themselves with "the World" so they can help more effectively by the time the main event starts. But there's still lots of preparation left to be done, and we are looking for editors experienced in advanced wikitools who would like to become co-coordinators.

The Transhumanist 09:52, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

24 Project C Class discussion and Merger Discussion

Just a note that the 24 WikiProject is having a discussion on whether to implement the new C-Class into our assessment scheme, is taking place on the assessment talk page. Feel free to add your input here. SteveBot (owner) 06:53, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

• Also note that Reed Pollock and Walid Al-Rezani are up for discussion to be merged.

Image Fair Use Issue Discussion

Discussion is currently taking place as to how the project will use images, the quantity of images in our articles, and whether we are currently overusing images. Your input is requested on this page. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on my talk page. Thanks. Steve Crossin (contact) 12:42, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

WP:HAU, Status, and you!

As you may know, the StatusBot responsible for maintaining the status of the Highly Active Users was taken offline. We now have a replacement in the Qui status system. This semi-automatic system will allow you to easily update your status page found at Special:Mypage/Status which the HAU page code is now designed to read from. If you are already using Qui (or a compatible system) - great! - no action is needed (other than remembering to update your status as necessary). If not, consider installing Qui. You can also manually update this status by changing the page text to online, offline, or busy. While it is not mandatory, the nature of HAU is that people are often seeking a quick answer from someone who is online and keeping our statuses up-to-date will assist with this. Note if you were previously using your /Status page as something other than a one-word status indicator, your HAU entry may have been set to "status=n" to correct display issues. Please clear this parameter if you change things to be "HAU compatible". Further questions can be raised at WT:HAU. This message was delivered by xenobot 23:10, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for approving my ACC request. I also want to apologize for my somewhat untoward comments that I made to you back in February in this discussion. They were uncalled for. best regards, –xenocidic (talk) 14:15, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm glad that there's no hard feelings. Quick question regarding ACC, do I need to be bumped up to admin due to being admin here, or is there a separate group of admins just for ACC? –xenocidic (talk) 14:26, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

k, will do. thanks again. –xenocidic (talk) 14:37, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

eh

• I'm pretty familiar with the tool now, if you wanna throw me some rights. I want to add some lulz into the email templates. (i keed ;>) –xeno (talk) 02:21, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

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