Wiki cleanup

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Wiki cleanup here on wiki.crisiscommons.org is fast becoming a priority. The wiki is great tool for coordinating crisiscommons project work, and to collaborate on building information in addition to the more static pages of the homepage, however...

Problems

This wiki has become a bit of a mess. We have many classic wiki problems...

  • Un-polished stagnating content - It can be useful to use the wiki to sketch out brief ideas. A wiki grows organically. But too many unpolished wiki pages, with no proper contextual explanation/links, and we end up with a mess.
  • Duplicated information - A page dedicated to a concept, and then that same concept described all over again on many different pages.
  • Out-of-date information - Particularly information about events. Past events still described as upcoming. Also project status and task list type information.

Solutions

The wiki is open to edit, and editing a wiki is not hard (see Wiki help) so anyone can join in to help solve these problems. The solution to all of these problems will be to get more people doing wiki gardening, setting a good example and raising the standards of the wiki content.

To kick things off we'll need wiki enthusiasts leading the way with adoption of good wiki patterns

Category:Maintenance templates - A set of MediaWiki templates for labelling delete/merge/cleanup labels to wiki pages. We dont need to have quite as many as wikipedia, but a few simple cleanup templates can be useful. Also see how this is done on OSM wiki for example.

Wiki guidelines - We could set out some wiki guidelines. They are called "guidelines" because it's fine for people to not follow them. We can do wiki gardening to improve the pages gradually, moving them in the right direction. The guidelines make this easier, spelling it out for people who might otherwise not see what's wrong with the content. In this way wiki gardening becomes one of the Simple Tasks Anyone Can Do

Specific clean up targets

As well as general solutions we might have specific parts of this wiki which we want to aim to tidy up. We could list these targets here, but it's always better to discuss a specific wiki page on it's associated talk page. Please do this first before linking to the discussion here

Retrieved from "http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/Wiki_cleanup"
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