OrthodoxWiki:Administrators

This is a general discussion page for OrthodoxWiki Administrators to work out various administrative issues, notes, and to-do lists. Our host and first-among-sysops is FrJohn.

Useful Admin links

• OrthodoxWiki:Protected page guidelines
• Special:Listadmins
• Special:Listusers

Featured Article

What do y'all think about changing the Featured Article on a weekly basis? Also, how do we choose? Perhaps we could rotate the choice between sysops who would like to participate. --Rdr. Andrew 09:04, 8 Feb 2005 (CST)

Standard Welcome

Methinks a useful practice for us to begin would be to have a standard welcome that gets added to every new user's Talk page as soon as a sysop notices his registration. Included could be links to the Community Portal, the Style Manual, help pages, etc. This is what the one on Wikipedia looks like: Wikipedia:Template:Welcome

Perhaps the best way for us to do this would be to have a template with the welcome in it (Template:Welcome, perhaps, which is what Wikipedia does, too), so that we could just post {{welcome}} --~~~~ in the new user's Talk page and not have to update each Talk page every time we want to include something new in the welcome message—we could just update the template.

Thoughts? --Rdr. Andrew 12:33, 2 Feb 2005 (CST)

Empty Articles

Something which concerns me about the creation of multiple empty articles without even a basic definition first-line and a {{stub}} tag is that visitors to the site can get the impression that there's a lot of nothing here. I know folks who like to come here and hit the "random" link successively, and with lots of empty articles, there will come to be a preponderance of disappointment. This also will skew our results as they appear in search engines. Perhaps we should leave in-development articles simply as links in existing articles (or places like talk pages) until there's at least a little something to put on them?

What do you think? --Rdr. Andrew 10:13, 31 Jan 2005 (CST)

I see your point & it's convincing. I'll plan to populate (most of) them with some content shortly. OTOH my idea was to give a framework for growth -- some folks might be willing to contribute, but shy to start new topics. OTOOH (yes, there's 3) - I think that's just the way I "paint a fence" not linearly, but sketching out large sections and then going back to fill in bit by bit. It's probably a learning disorder, but... :-). - Fr. John

Just so you know, I certainly didn't intend it as a direct criticism of you, Father, but just wanted to say something on the "ground floor" of a possible trend. I definitely see your point about presenting an invitational framework. Perhaps when otherwise empty articles are created, we could at least include a brief descriptive statement and a {{stub}} tag? Otherwise, it may not be clear to a visitor that the article is an invitation but rather possibly some kind of error, --Rdr. Andrew 11:54, 31 Jan 2005 (CST)

Addendum: One other related thing that occurs to me is that I think we'll mainly find our growth in terms of folks who come here as a result of Googling and the like. That is, folks who have found OrthodoxWiki as a useful resource are more likely to want to contribute rather than those being solicited (not that we should stop solicitation, which I do all the time). That's why I'm firmly of the belief that we should hammer the site with as much good content as we can, thus potentially creating a domino effect.

The point of that comment is just that I'm optimistic about the future of the project, especially as we have more and more good stuff. Our critical mass lately seems to have been that we now have 3 or 4 folks consistently adding content. (Something like how a monastery works.) Anyhow, I just wanted to add this and say thank you for spearheading the project. I think it's a fantastic idea, and I'm really glad to be part of it. --Rdr. Andrew 12:04, 31 Jan 2005 (CST)

> I certainly didn't intend it as a direct criticism of you

This brings up a good point. I think we all need to take each other's good will for granted,to presume on it to a certain degree. I mean, it's easy to hear typed words in too harsh a tone, take shorthand the wrong way, or otherwise read into what's written or done (and MediaWiki doesn't offer proper emoticons!) Let's all assume we love each other :-). I mean, we're working free of charge in this common cause because we believe its going to have some value. Hopefully this won't be a temple to our egos! We do have to know how to give and receive criticism (gently / humbly), and also know that part of the mission of this place (as I see it) is to foster a healthy disputation of ideas -- challenging both sides (e.g. with the hot button topic of ecumenism or whatever) to do their homework and argue their position as thoroughly as possible -- and providing a forum for both, while calling all to a basic accountability and charity. Perhaps we won't be able to stop flame wars or personal offenses entirely, but I think we can give it a good shot. (...and practice Biblical principles for approaching those who we have a problem with - maybe we should write this up in the community guidelines! :-). I'm going on too long...

Thanks for your thank you and back atchya. Of course, this was conceived as a group project from the beginning, and it is now viable exactly because people like you (and our dedicated others) have caught the vision and have lent a helping hand so freely. I'm excited about its potential, too -- I see how a resource like this could be very helpful even just to me personally, and I'm excited about the collaborative dimension.

I think you're right about the Googling and usability... and the domino effect, which is already working! I appreciate your zeal in recruiting articles from knowledgable folks - I've been doing a lot of this (with a lot of vague promises for sometime down the road :-). I see things snowballing already!

God bless, Fr. John

Philosophy of Stubs

For Rdr. Andrew especially: I noticed you've put some effort into creating Category:Stubs. In the long run, wouldn't it be more labor efficient to simply post this link (http://www.orthodoxwiki.org/index.php?title=Special:Whatlinkshere&target=Template%3AStub ) to refer to all those pages counted as stubs rather than catgeorizing and re-categorizing everything? Fr. John

You know, that makes sense. --Rdr. Andrew 15:16, 2 Feb 2005 (CST)

Spam Battleplan

I notice we've been getting hit by spambots lately. Sadly, I doubt this problem will resolve itself. If it stays at this level, I think we can handle it, but if it increases substantially we'll have to take some preventative measures. What I would like to be able to do is implement a captcha system for anonymous posters. I was searching over at meta.mediawiki.org today and found only a teeny bit of discussion about this. The more radical solution would be to disable edits by anonymous users altogther. I don't think it's the best solution, but at least we can know that this would be the worst case scenario.

If the spam bots ravage the site too seriously, we can restore backup of the entire site from the previous day or week, and then lockout anonymous users from editing.

So, let's keep on the watch against spam! Besides exhorting you, I just wanted you all to know that there is a plan and spam won't destroy us! {the crowd cheers and runs exuberantly from the stadium).

Fr. John 18:00, 11 Feb 2005 (CST)