FIRSTwiki:To Do

From FIRSTwiki

This will be a rough list of stuff that needs to be done on FIRSTwiki.

1 Frequently asked questions
2 Weeding articles
3 Meta pages
4 Format
5 Appearance
6 Content
- 6.1 Technical

Frequently asked questions

A concerted effort, IMO, should be made to creating decent FAQ pages, so that new users have a good resource to learn more about the project and how to contribute. It goes hand in hand with our FIRSTwiki:New users page and FIRSTwiki:Help. See FIRSTwiki:User questions (and my comment on its talk page). And, in my ranting tradition of bringing up un-related matters in posts, another task might be to clean up this page, i.e., remove old tasks and better organize current tasks, perhaps separating them from the discussion about them. --Mrawls 20:00, 30 Jun 2004 (EDT)

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Weeding articles

Weeding articles is an important task to be done, and refers to making sure articles are in the correct format, follows our style and convention ... and other copy-editing tasks (see wikipedia). I think a major task that needs to be done is to go through the articles here, and list the ones that need to be cleaned up on FIRSTwiki:Cleanup -- currently it's a low viewed page ... but if it is updated frequently, it can provide a useful tool to the wiki. Often people notice things that should be cleaned up, but don't always have time to do it. A comment in the talk page isn't always as visible as a reference on the cleanup page. That page, as well as some of the other meta content on what to contribute needs to be worked on ... these are supposed to be where new people go to decide what to contribute, but if the pages are horrendous, it sure doesn't help the wiki. Along with this, we need to work on our FIRSTwiki:Community portal page. As evidenced on CD, there are at least a few people who are confused by the wiki (and justifiably so). We want to try to make their stay as smooth as possible. IMHO, this is where a lot of our attention should be directed, primarily because it stands to generate a lot of helpful edits where they are most needed and that otherwise might not be had. If we get an influx of users, we sure want them to know what they can do to help, or else it's all for naught. Other ideas/opinions on this? --Mrawls 18:52, 14 Jun 2004 (EDT)

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Meta pages

We need to overhaul the meta pages. Such as our help pages, this page itself, and especially the Style Guide and how to edit pages. I've tried to start this to get it going ... we can follow wikipedia for suggestions, but some of the stuff will have to be customized for us, of course. I think now we have some useful content up there, but we need to organize it and structure it so that it is easy to access for even the technologically inept (err.. slow). My reasoning is that a lot of people don't know about a wiki, and the idea is a little scary ... we want to explain it to them and help them out, so that they stay and contribute. Currently I'm not sure we're as user friendly as possible. It seems to be somewhat of an ad hoc scheme -- which is fine, but now we need to unify it. Somethings that need to be decided, for instance: when to refer to wikipedia and when to have our own version. --Mrawls 14:52, 9 Jun 2004 (EDT)

List of pages (incomplete and in no particular order)

Ah, this reminds me, i was meaning to make a msg:meta_toc to put on all meta pages, that will definitley help in organizing them. Also, I think the FIRSTwiki:New users page should definitley be brought to usefulness that way we can remove all or most of that intro junk from the first page and just have a large, emphasized link to the new users page. --Max 16:39, 9 Jun 2004 (EDT)

Yes, I've tried to help the FIRSTwiki:New users page, but alas, I'm only one man (and even that, some claim, is a liberal estimate). Also, to be specific, I think we should come up with our own policy pages on

when to delete an article
improve what we have on naming convention
image use
protection policy for sysops
banning users for syspos

etc. and etc. That's not to say we can't borrow from wikipedia, for sure we can! But we should also modify to suit our needs, and at least have our own pages so we can discuss and debate what would best suit our needs on the talk pages. This is a pretty big project, though, and pretty important (organizing meta pages, that is) ... and I think everyone would benefit from examining wikipedia's help pages, et. al., to get an idea of how they do it. --Mrawls 16:51, 9 Jun 2004 (EDT)

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Format

Standard FIRSTwiki:Team page format, people, competition, etc. page formats must be developed ASAP, and that means soon. There is going to be a lot of wasted work redoing pages if we wait too long. We should do it right and utilize {{msg:xxxxx}} where possible. --Max

Look for a better system for organizing all the list of awards. Awards will be on team pages, regional pages, awards pages, etc etc. A DB system is possible, but that will require a lot of code to interface with MediaWiki that may very well break in future versions of it. --Max 21:03, 27 May 2004 (EDT)

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Appearance

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Content

I think we should see every single:

team
- maybe a page for a team's performance each year
regional/national
page for each year of a regional/national, at least as far back as anyone can remember stuff
page for every year's game

--Max

In order to enhance the content, I propose the completion of an outline, or FIRSTwiki:Roadmap, so that everyone is on the same page and so that contributors know what to contribute. --Mrawls 13:15, 4 Jun 2004 (EDT)

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