OpenWetWare:Community Portal

Welcome to the Community Portal! This page is a starting-off point for someone who is interested in contributing to OpenWetWare at any level. It tells you how to stay informed about what needs to be done. It lists ways to contribute to OWW and what tools you can use to contribute. It also serves as a location for discussions about OpenWetWare's structure, content and features. This page is basically a simplified version of the wikipedia community portal. We can add more of their features here as appropriate. Contents » How do I know where to contribute? » What needs doing? » Discussions

How do I know where to contribute? If you want to contribute to OpenWetWare there are a couple of things you can do right now- You can simply surf around and you're sure to find stuff that could be improved. A quicker way to find things to do is to come here and check out the lists of what needs doing below Add this page as one of your watched pages, so you get email alerts of changes to the page. Join the OpenWetWare steering committee. In the future, there are some other things we could do to help people contribute to OWW - Rename this page or give it a more prominent location. Create a mailing list for people interested in opportunities to contribute to OWW. This would be a contributers/developers mailing list. All the same information would be available on this page but its always useful to receive reminders of what needs to be done. It may also be useful to create a developers sub-committee of the OpenWetWare steering committee that could meet (in person if the need arises) to make decisions about new features or the organization of OWW. What other ways can we enable people to contribute to OWW? What needs doing? There are lots of things to be done and these items fall under different categories (there are many more categories than I can think of). I've tried to list them in increasing order of 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 hopefully 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. Formatting, Typos, linking 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 could be added here. How do I do this? Check out the Simple editing page or more detailed page from Mediawiki's User Guide and Wikipedia's editing page. Have a look at the OWW etiquette page. Aggregation 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. How do I do this? Right now, you need to just find a page by chance or go trawling through lab pages looking for protocol 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. I suppose there are many active collaborations but maybe it would make sense to focus attention on one or two at a time? 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 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. Desireable Extensions What bots, tags, features or special pages would we like to add to OWW, see the tools section below for how you can go about working on these items. For example - 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 data in some arbitrarily formatted way? A bot to convert mu to μ in some reliable way. An improved <gallery> tag. 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 [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Write_your_own_MediaWiki_extension Tutorial on how to write an extension Tutorial on how to write a new special page Discussions A listing of discussions relating to OpenWetWare. Categories <-- we're still figuring out how to best make use of categories Ideas for OpenWetWare <-- post general thoughts/ideas on OpenWetWare here Logo Ideas <-- contribute to the logo discussion Mailing Lists <-- Coming Soon! Help & General Information Pages you can go to (and improve!) to get more information on OWW. About us Why join OpenWetWare? <-- give others reasons to join Getting started <-- give advice to new OpenWetWare labs and users OpenWetWare:FAQ Tips on using OpenWetWare Dewikifying a page on OpenWetWare Reserved namespaces Extensions on OpenWetWare Etiquette <-- revise OpenWetWare etiquette guidelines Help <-- give advice on editing OpenWetWare