OLPC:Cleanup

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   This page is part of the Wiki Cleanup Project.   [[ Wiki SEO | Cleanup | Wiki tasks ]]


As information sprawls across the wiki, we're in constant need of help and efforts to keep it tame, trimmed, and usable - purging old/broken information and links, creating and updating portal pages for various user groups and topics... I'm sure you can think of more.

If you'd like to help organize knowledge here, please jump in and edit.

Basic cleanup

Getting started

The first, easiest, and largest tasks on the wiki are ones that anyone can do. Some suggestions:

Mark pages that need work

There are several thousand pages on this wiki. Many of them were created in a hurry and need to be cleaned up. There is a page here on the wiki that contains a large list of pages that have been marked {{cleanup}}: Category:Cleanup. There are two tasks that can be done with this:

  • Go to the Special:Allpages page, and look for pages that need {{cleanup}} added to them.
  • When you find a wiki page that needs cleanup, click the 'Edit' tab and add the {{cleanup}} in the top of the edit box.

Mark obsolete pages

The wiki has thousands of older pages; you can tell them by dates from before 2007; if you see something that looks like a duplicate or older discussion of a highly-linked page, it may be one of them.

There are special templates that flag such pages more specifically than just "cleanup". If two pages seem to cover the same ground, figure out the worse page — the one that's less useful, has less 'What links here', hasn't been significantly updated recently according to its [History] tab, and has the less obvious title. Mark it either 

{{merge|Better page}}

or 

{{obsolete|link=[[Better page]]}}

Fix pages that need work

It's useful to readers to indicate pages that need work or aren't relevant, but it's far far better to improve or eliminate them.

When you're done and the less good page has nothing relevant and nothing besides old talk pages link to it, remove categories from it and change it to a redirect to the merged page: 

#redirect [[New Page Title]]


Major areas needing attention

  • Sign-up lists need to go away. People don't actually reply to them when they set up the lists for people to sign up. People who sign up expect to be contacted and they aren't usually.
  • Glossary could use some thoughtful expansion. Jargon serves a useful purpose as shorthand for technical discussions, but it also poses a substantial barrier-to-entry for new contributors. A more extensive Glossary would be very helpful in allowing outsiders to become insiders.
  • Category:Linux software
    • create standardized format for these pages for consistency, and remove duplication
    • find all standard linux software, tag w/template
    • search wiki for 'yum' and 'wget', likely they need this tag.
  • Examine core wiki pages, (i.e. top pages, or ones in Site map ??)
    • Check for current/correct information
    • move any 'beta' or 'prelease' information else where.
    • Consistency: headers, format, structure, etc
  • review all templates
    • check for duplication, merge if needed
  • review User boxes
    • create consistency,
    • establish best order, if lots on same page
  • review Headers (i.e. page headers)
    • create consistency,
    • establish best order, if lots on same page
  • review Software, and sub-categories
    • Some pages cross over, separate into categories
  • retire Common Rooms in favor of the Talk: pages of actual pages
  • merge all the guides and intros to grassroots and community building pages

Specific projects

supporting 8.2.0 and earlier releases

OLPC wants to support earlier releases for a year (citation needed). And earlier G1G1 2008 recipients got 703 (8.1.0), not spiffy 8.2.0.

  • Suggest a section "In/for earlier releases"
  • use {{consider upgrading}} on pages that describe either 8.2.0 or earlier.
  • Come up with consistent language. Suggest
In [[Release notes/8.2.0|Release 8.2.0]] you ''blah blah
blah''

=== In earlier releases ===
In releases prior to [[Release notes/8.2.0|Release 8.2.0]]
(see [[What release am I running?]]) the commands/instructions/ are different
''blah blah
blah''
{{consider upgrading}}

Green/red country & language lists

The queries for numbers and status in Deployments are the final word on what countries are doing what.

The 2007-era complicated framework of colored countries is dated... kill or replace it (see e-mail to wiki-gang mailing list).

Activity replication and data

Activity versions appear in three or more places

Ideally the last can generate all the others.

Put semantics on all activities

See Semantic MediaWiki#For features for ways to clean up the above.

Some supporting tasks:

Activity Template, Comic Maker, Firefox, Games/Productive, HablarConSara, HelloMesh, Image Viewer, Lambda, OBX proposals, Pacman, Physics, PlayGo, Rollcats, Turtle Art/lang-es, XO-GCC, Xo-get/Xo-get-gtk, XoIRC
  • Test whether a semantic form's template can be at the top of a page, so that {{Activity page}} can generate badges.
  • Activity queries shows there are many activities without semantic info, so if you query for activities, they are not displayed.

A subset of this is activities that have ...? (unfinished sentence by a semantics lover :)

Fix broken external links

from pywikipediabot's weblinkchecker.py

Tasks requiring an admin


Mission Accomplished

Celebrate what we've done.

  • "XO Giving" and "OLPC groups" merged into Regional groups (November 2007)
  • the weird OlpcProject: "fake namespace" mostly retired" (November 2007)
  • Python game stuff cleaned a bit, moved into Category:Developing games
  • the activity pages that claim to be in the G1G1 activity group in Form:Activity and [[Template:Activity page] exactly match the activities listed in Activities/G1G1/8.2. (Some day one might be generated from the other.)


Advanced wiki organization (merged page)

Open tasks

Add a lot of this directly to the opentasks template:

+/-


Pages desperately needing help


February 2008 barnraising

1) Sitemap[s] (good consistent/maintained/watched pages for the public), 

- update Table of Contents and other metapages
- organize a "wiki getting started" section similar to that for the XO; at least in outline
-- longer-term : provide a community site map of contributors and projects

2) Categorize outdated pages, archive long pages 

- "needs update"  "deprecated" and "archive", "to be avoided"

3) Collections of 'User information' boxes and badges for self-identification of interests and areas where they want to help. 

- OBX proposals  (last updated by Xavi and MitchellNCharity)

4) Cleanup of orphans, stubs, and more 

- OLPC:Cleanup
- OLPC:Pages for review for pages that get {{delete}} and other tags
- OLPC:Reviews (content review and project review)
- OLPC:Features (featured collections, activities, projects, and media) 
- a stub-sorting/merging/removal campaign

5) Project organization and sorting 

- Category:Projects, Category:Software ideas, Category:Content ideas, Category:Hardware ideas
---- add a Category:Ideas to contain the above?
- make navigation-templates, categorize the above into "ideas" "active projects" "inactive projects" and "in use"
- make page-templates to help people generate new pages more easily (See the top of the activities page for an example)

6) Category and template organization 

- review/prune the category hierarchy
- review Special:Allpages

7) Newbie-welcoming pages 

- OLPC:welcoming committee  
- OLPC:About, OLPC:Welcome, a "why make an account" page
- Help:Contents and links to tutorials
- connection with meta-wiki, wikieducator, wikiversity, wikipedia, wikibooks, curriki, and connexions (a bus stop tour?)

Wiki on-going restructure

You can help with cleanup activities by tagging pages for:

  • Deletion as a consequence of a {{delete}} tag. Caveats apply meaning that it could be deleted - not necessarily that it will be deleted. A sub-category for deletion is specific for #REDIRECT pages tagged with {{deletere}}
  • Merging as a consequence of {{merge}} (seeing all those bits-of-pages, siblings could be found to merge with, or other central pages.)
  • Clean-up as their current state is sub-standard in some way and needs work.

If you can't find a page, check the:

  • Move log - many pages have been moved leaving redirects (that could've been deleted later)
  • Delete log - many things have been deleted...

NOTE: Given the amount of editions (flooding the Special:Recentchanges) you can parameterize the URL in the navigation bar http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&limit=250 changing the limit as stated below.

Restructuring resources

The wiki provides the Special Pages of which the following is an extract that could prove useful.

NOTE: the built-in search is a bit spotty in actually finding things. The obvious alternative would be Google using a site search limited to wiki.laptop.org or just laptop.org.

Long pages Long means usually means too much to read - note: it doesn't compute embeded pages
Short pages Empty or stub pages should be reconsidered
Orphaned pages Unlinked page should fit within the corpus - note: it could be categorized
Dead-end pages Although valid are also pages that don't invite further exploration of the wiki]]

Maintenance resources

Broken redirects When deleting pages, redirects may have slipped
Double redirects When moving pages, previous redirects don't change
Uncategorized categories Categories should form some kind of hierarchical tree of specialization
Uncategorized pages Pages should fit into at least one branch or area discussed in the wiki
Unused categories Categories should have articles to hold on to
Unused files Files (images and others) should be linked / used somewhere
Wanted pages Is a mixed bag, as it includes mispelled links (ie: upper/lower case) together with close-but-not-quite pre-existing pages, and truly wanted pages. Noise here is rather high due to users never having edited their page and many non-existant Talk pages referenced via templates.
soon I'll add a bit about the special categories, but in the meantime refer to the ones mentioned above in the ongoing process.


Ongoing projects, things to note

Categorization & OLPC boxes

For examples of OLPC box templates in use, see e.g. User:Xavi/Test The liberty the wiki provides in creating pages is wonderful, albeit a bit anarchist; particularly if pages are orphaned or if they are simple dead-ends. Even if they are isolated, categories can help. Finally, templates are a way to systematically format data, and possibly categorize pages in some structured way.

Useful templates should be simple to build and to use. As {{Status box}} and {{Educator}} have somewhat proven, their evolution and ability to incorporte both broad and specific details that are relevant and meaningful hasn't been that easy. My conclusion is that they will systematically fail until we have a comprehensive and structured understanding of too many things that are currently highly volatile.

The solution proposed is a set of atomic templates and a way to group them in a visual way. Needless to say that this is not intended to be just a 'visual effect'; the real purpose is to categorize pages so that they can be retrieved. Although the practice is not much different than normal categorization (ie: making sure the appropriate [[Category:whatever]] appears in the pages) it does provide a more consistent (and easier) way to:

  • Provide not only a category, but also some contextual information about it's belonging there
    For example, a user using the {{user teacher}} box, will end up in the Category:Educators, the same as another user using the {{user teacher primary}} or {{user teacher university}}, but visually you can tell the difference.
    If in the future we want to 'split' the categorizations, modifying the appropriate OBX templates will result in them being sub-classified based on just the template itself, or maybe some parameter required by it.

Not everything will be nice and comfy with them olpc boxes but hopefully they will provide the incentive to create simple templates that address a specific need, for example providing links and categorizations in a visually consistent manner so that the readers and users of the wiki can profit from them.

Also, they are supposed to be nice and cool looking :)

Please take a look at the proposed / possible boxes being thought so that the initial set of useful boxes can be built and used. --Xavi 21:00, 6 July 2007 (EDT)

FAQ subpage structure

I'm trying to beat the FAQ back into some usable shape. Some short instructions are at Answering questions - the associated talk page is the place to talk about how this is working. Homunq 14:10, 30 January 2008 (EST)

See also

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