Intros[edit source]

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[edit source]

Some links you will find informative:

--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 linksW 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:
Clay ShirkyW and Yochai BenklerW are two other writers about mass collaboration who I recommend. --Teratornis 12:10, 2 February 2011 (PST)

Intern project[edit source]

See:

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

Article rescue from Wikipedia[edit source]

If you want to try rescuing wikipedia:Anoka Abeyrathne, here is a procedure:

  1. Post a reply at Talk:ENGR 305 Interns Spring 2011#Salvage articles deleted from Wikipedia to tell the other interns you are claiming this task, so no one else will duplicate your effort.
  2. Click the edit link on the article at Wikipedia.W
  3. Select all the wikitext in the edit window. Copy to clipboard. Close the edit window by clicking "Cancel" below the edit window.
  4. Click on this red linkW to start a user subpage: User:James.Gourlay/Anoka Abeyrathne
  5. Paste the wikitext you just copied into your user subpage.
  6. Near the bottom, add an attribution template: {{From Wikipedia|Anoka Abeyrathne}}
    • Later, we (I) can make a {{Deleted from Wikipedia}} template to add to our rescued articles. This is to show that Wikipedia retains the original list of contributors, but the article was deleted from Wikipedia so only Wikipedia administrators can see it. The terms of the {{CC-by-sa-3.0}} license require us to link back to the source when we copy material from Wikipedia, for proper source attribution (what the "sa" in the license name stands for).
  7. Save your user page. Then I can look at it and see how much cleanup it will need for Appropedia.
  8. After we have cleaned up the article, you can moveW it to article space. I would rather start the article in user space so we don't junk up article space with a prototype that might be messy for a while.
  9. When the article looks nice on Wikipedia, contact all the substantial contributors to the article there, whose work will likely get deleted on Wikipedia, and invite them to come home to Appropedia. You will of course have recorded all those contributors on your notes page by checking the article history on Wikipedia before it gets deleted (i.e., right now). It looks like there was only one substantial contributor, who has had a bumpy ride on Wikipedia so far:

You should keep a page of notes about any complex tasks you attempt on Appropedia, i.e. anything you can't finish in one session. See User:Teratornis/Tasks#Make your own user subpage for notes and links. A suitable name would be User:James.Gourlay/Tasks. --Teratornis 12:48, 23 February 2011 (PST)

For future reference, some WP admins are helpful if the page has already been deleted: Wikipedia:Category:Wikipedia administrators who will provide copies of deleted articles. (If specific attribution of edits is an issue, it's possible to get an xml file (usually anyone can get this from Special:Export, but only an admin will be able to do it after deletion). But that requires a bit more fiddling, as the contributor's names in the file need to be changed to indicate that they're not Appropedia usernames s see Appropedia:Importing wiki pages #Editing usernames before import.) --Chriswaterguy 19:55, 23 February 2011 (PST)
Thanks for documenting the extra complexities resulting from Wikipedia's campaign to destroy intellectual property. However, I'm only weakly inclined to think we need to worry about attributing specific edits to the original Wikipedia usernames, because:
  • Wikipedia, as the original publisher, remains logically if not legally obligated to retain the original article history. (The fact that Wikipedia does not actually delete its deleted articles suggests it recognizes this obligation.)
  • Complying with the terms of {{CC-by-sa-3.0}} only requires a link to the original source, as far as I understand. Re-users are not responsible for maintaining the integrity of the original source site as far as I can tell, nor is it easy to imagine how they could be.
  • Wikipedia in fact retains the article history in its database, so anyone who wants to verify the original authors can request the history from Wikipedia. I don't see why Appropedia users need to work harder to solve a problem being created unnecessarily by someone else (Wikipedia's deletionists). Wikipedia could easily create a sub-wiki of its deleted articles visible to the public, but has rejected this proposal frequently.W (Some third parties created Deletionpedia for this purpose, but they seem to have abandoned their project after collecting a few months' worth of deleted articles in 2008.) If Wikipedia wants to create unnecessary problems for other people then we should refer those people to Wikipedia where they can complain directly to the people who are abusing them.
  • I'd prefer to focus on current articles up for deletion anyway, because the authors of these articles are more likely to still be active on Wikipedia, and thus we are more likely to be able to contact them and invite them home to Appropedia. The authors of articles deleted from Wikipedia years ago are more likely to have given up in disgust and left the site. The primary goal of this particular porting project is not to obtain content, which is often not of the highest quality anyway or else Wikipedia would have kept it, but to attract more contributors to Appropedia where they can continue learning wiki editing skills without the initial hurdle of Wikipedia's difficult content requirements. Most of these lower-quality deleted articles need more work, so their authors could just as well start fresh here.
Counter-arguments are welcome if I'm not viewing this problem correctly. --Teratornis 10:24, 24 February 2011 (PST)
We can use WebCiteW to "permanently" archive a page on Wikipedia before it gets deleted. However, I doubt WebCite could archive the page history, but I haven't tested that yet. Archiving the page might be useful. --Teratornis 11:08, 24 February 2011 (PST)
Sound arguments, Teratornis. Thanks. --Chriswaterguy 10:55, 17 April 2011 (PDT)

Tech Intern team for mid-year[edit source]

Hi James,

Given your Software Engineering background, you may be interested in this: Appropedia:Tech Interns, Mid-2011.

It's taken a while for this idea to gestate, so it's short notice. But I'm planning to promote the internships pretty hard, and we have one already. I think a small team of tech interns would be awesome. If you want to lend a hand, that would be cooler.

It's a draft page - feel free to edit. Thanks --Chriswaterguy 10:55, 17 April 2011 (PDT)

Sure, please fill me in on the details James.Gourlay 13:08, 17 April 2011 (PDT)

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