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.

• For the sake of grabbing attention with new notices, it's probably best to put new subjects at the top of this page after the "Useful Admin links."

• If you are not an administrator and would like to leave a note for the admins to see, please put it on the Talk page.

Useful Admin links

• OrthodoxWiki Yahoo Group - Low-volume closed discussion for OrthodoxWiki sysops. If you qualify, please sign up!
• OrthodoxWiki:Protected page guidelines
• Special:Listadmins
• Special:Listusers

Appointing Sysops

I just wanted to share some thoughts about how I've gone about appointing sysops. Basically, I'm looking for a few things:

• Some degree of sanity as well as a healthy dose of balance and humility in content submitted and dealings with other people online.
• A demonstrated commitment to OrthodoxWiki and a desire (or at least a willingness) to take on some of the administrative burden for keeping this site in good order.
• Finally, some ecclesiastical standing (as a cleric, seminarian, presbytera, recognized Orthodox personality, etc.) is desirable but not required. This is so because it is helpful to have those who are, in one way or another, "authorities" in the Church moderating things, and, of course, public recognition helps establish the credibility and status of OrthodoxWiki.

"If anyone aspires to the office of sysop, he desires a noble task" (cf.1 Tim 3:1) - If I've overlooked you or if you have someone to nominate for sysop duties please leave a note on my user talk page. Of course, I reserve all rights in terms of appointments and terminations.

So far, I've been pretty liberal in knighting sysops -- at this point we can use all the help we can get, and it seems to me to be a good thing to empower a robust band of trustworthy members to help manage the site. Fr. John 21:58, 27 Feb 2005 (CST)

Our new visitor

Take a look at Talk:Main Page, Talk:Western Rite, and the recent history on the Western Rite article itself (pay attention to edits made by IPs starting with 128.146.246.*), and you'll see who I'm talking about. Just for further info, someone recently forwarded to me an email that this fellow sent to a listserv denouncing us:

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 14:35:56 -0000
Subject: "Orthodox Wikipedia"

Dear friends in all jurisdictions of the one Holy and Apostolic
Orthodox Church, as we all know, the internet is a blessing and a
curse!  Anyone with an opinion can publish the most outrageous lies
with no editorial control.

I only discovered in the past two or three days an entry on alleged
"Western Rite" (flags go up!) Orthodox Church at this address:

http://www.orthodoxwiki.org/Main_Page

I have twice tried to edit some of the most glaring errors, but
aparently the original keeps reverting in content.

If this Uniat essay cannot be changed, someone better informed than me
must submit articles explaining the difference between the Orthodox
Church and the "Western Rite".

"Wikipedia" is often opinion disguised as truth.

Rdr. Andrew 06:55, 21 Feb 2005 (CST)

It appears he actually thinks we're talking about Roman Catholics here - and he's on a crusade to expose our attempt! Wow. That's impressive. I trust that folks will realize what this is all about and that the publicity will be good for us! I hope he can mellow out, grow in his attitudes, and make some good contributions in due time. Fr. John

It seems that Sputnik has had a change of heart. Glory be to God! --Rdr. Andrew 22:01, 27 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.

You can rollback an article by clicking on "diffs" from the Recent Changes page and then "rollback," or clicking "history" on that page, then "compare," then "rollback." Note that anonymous edits can never be marked as "minor" so they'll always show up on "Recent changes."

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)

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)

Okay. Sorry to ask basic questions, but I can't find the answer elsewhere. How do you know when a new user registers? Is there a log that can be "watched?" I noticed a new name show up on the Recent changes page, but could not tell whether or not he had been lurking for a while in the background. Fr. John sent him the welcome message, so I guess he's new. And then Rdr Andrew sent the Welcome message to a User that hasn't shown up recently in Recent Changes. How did you know if he was new? --DcnDavid 22:53, 1 Mar 2005 (CST)

What I do is scan Special:Recentchanges and Special:Listusers regularly. If I see a name I don't recognize, I send them the welcome. Eventually, I'll probably just scan Special:Recentchanges for such checking as our user base grows and my memory starts to fail.  :) --Rdr. Andrew 11:09, 2 Mar 2005 (CST)