What needs doing?
There are lots of things to be done and these items fall under different categories. They are listed in increasing order of technical difficulty from minor editing, right up to adding to the mediawiki software itself. Some of the lists are currently just discussions of how to organize and populate the list but once these issues are worked out they will be converted into actual lists of places to contribute.
You can do two things to these lists - add an item, or fix an item and remove it. Wikipedia operates on the policy that if you add a to-do item, you should if possible contribute to completing another to-do item. We may well benefit from a similar policy.
Add knowledge
Content is the lifeblood of OWW, contributing information to an existing page or starting a new page is arguably the most useful thing you could do for OWW.
How do I do this?
- Add to an existing page
- Start a new page on your favorite topic. Remember that many of the pages on OWW started off looking quite crude, so feel free to put up a page that doesn't look as polished as you would like it to. The community will help improve a page if you get it started.
- Check out the Questions and Answers page to see if you can answer someone's specific question.
Improve formatting and linking, correct typos
Nearly all pages could benefit from proof-reading, standardization of formatting or improved inter-page linking. In addition, it would be useful to make pages conform to the OWW etiquette. To make this process more directed, pages in need of attention should be added here.
How do I do this?
Aggregation and organization of information
For example, we'd like to list as many protocols as possible on the Protocols page. There are certainly protocols out there that are not linked to from the protocols page. If you find such a page and you think the author(s) would be happy to add it to the community protocols, then add the link. The same applies to equipment, materials or other shared resource pages in search of a home.
How do I do this?
- Right now, you need to find a page by chance or go trawling through lab pages looking for protocol/equipment/material sections.
- If we could come up with a more automated way of aggregating protocols that would be great, maybe an extension or new special page would help? See below for how to do this.
Active Collaborations
This is similar to the Featured Article page on wikipedia. We could list many pages here but it makes sense to list a small number to target peoples focus.
- Protocols<--see the protocols under development section
- OpenWetWare:New Lab Presentation <-- Basic intro to present usefulness for laboratory use
- OpenWetWare:FAQ <-- Needs to be split. User FAQ , New User FAQ, Visitor FAQ, Admin FAQ, New Lab FAQ
- Help:Contents <--Help currently resides in lots of places, these should probably all be centralized/aggregated here on the help page. They should possibly even be merged with the FAQ master page.
How do I do this?
- If you know how to edit a page and you have an opinion on something, then you can almost definitely go edit these pages. *Remember that a wiki such as OWW depends on users being bold with their edits.
Add pages that have been previously requested
People often want to see a page get started on a particular subject but don't have a chance to add content to that page at the time. Such pages are currently listed here - Special:Wantedpages.
How do I do this?
What bots, tags, features or special pages would we like to add to OWW?
- A spelllchecker
- A category or other way that people could quickly annotate a page in some way. For example something like the stub template but rather than saying "this is a stub" it would say, "this page is cool" or "this page needs editing" etc. If this template includes a category, then we can easily aggregate all pages that feature that annotation.
- A revamped categories page that presents the data (i.e. the items in the category) in a more aesthetic way. Even better, how do I present a category of page in some arbitrary formating of my choosing?
- A bot to convert mu to μ in some reliable way.
- An improved <gallery> tag.
- A proposed implementation of tags via categories has been described at OpenWetWare steering committee/Software development ideas. Please add your feedback and ideas there.
How do I do this?
These are harder to do and you probably can't actually get them working unless you have access to our servers. Assuming you can manage that, there are resources available to help you get started on some of these things. If you don't know perl or php before you start you'll probably learn pretty quick if try and do this
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