OLPC:Community Portal

This page is for the discussion of this wiki and how to better inform those interested in the OLPC project. Wiki technology and etiquette are also the subject of How to use a wiki.

• For ideas and general discussion about or feedback from the community, see the OLPC:Village pump
• For questions, see OLPC FAQ; or the Ask OLPC a Question Page. The wiki is an evolving effort; there is lots of work to do: Please help!
• discussion: see the Talk page for general discussion about this portal and organization of ideas. Organized, concise entries are for the portal itself. Please sign your posts.
• Problems with the Wiki itself: the Wiki page.

Discussion also occurs on IRC.

Overviews and lists

For links to many relevant pages on the site, see Table of contents.

Certainly, as the project develops more and more content is going to be posted. But in order to make that content accessable and easy to use, a lot of work is going to have to get done.

Categorization

Every page should have at least one category. If you find one that does not, please try to find one for it and categorize it by adding a [[Category:some category]] to the bottom—preferably an existing category.

How to categorize a page: Note that pages whose names begin with "Category:" cannot be directly altered to add additional cited pages in that category by clicking on the edit tab and proceeding. The actual method of categorizing a page is to add an appropriate tag at the bottom of that page which looks like [[Category:categoryname]]. (Note that preview will not show the effectiveness of this action, but it will work.)

Check Special:Categories and Special:Unusedcategories to see what categories already exist. It can be difficult to find categories though, so if the situation permits, you can make a redirect page which will point to the category. For instance:

There is a category "Category:File formats" which has a collection of different kinds of File formats "JPEG, Ogg, PDF, etc." and there is growing number of pages about these file formats being created. It wouldn't make sense to have a page dedicated to file formats, because there is already a collection of them in Category:File formats, and it gets updated automatically. So instead, create a redirect to the "Category:Xyz" page. This will make the whole collection searchable. Just remember- the redirect automatically becomes part of the category it's redirecting to unless you put a colon in front of the Category, so format the names carefully!

Consolidation

• Sometimes writers ramble on or they pull together content from several authors with a few glue words. For instance: there's a lot of information on the Software Ideas page that can be moved to other pages in Category:Software ideas If you see pages like these, Please do what you can to consolidate them. If you see such a page on the Wiki, add a link to it here so that someone can go and rewrite the page in a more condensed and understandable fashion. Check out the Special:Long pages for more ideas.

Formatting

• This may seem nitpicky, but it really isn't. Pages need to be formatted in a logical, consistent manner. Otherwise it becomes very difficult to navigate and find information, and we end up with pages which aren't categorized and/or need to be consolidated. This results in a lot of extra work for everyone involved. More importantly even, is the correct capitalization of page and category titles. Unless there is a proper name or acronym in the title, the only capital letter should be the first letter. "Kinds Of Laptops" is not correct. "Kinds of Laptops" is also not correct. "Kinds of laptops" is correct. The reason for this is that if the title is "Kinds Of Laptops" and someone searches for "kinds of laptops", the search won't turn up any results. In a similar vein, if there are capital letters in the middle of the title and there isn't another potential article without that capitalization style, you may want to make a redirect. For instance:

"Ancient Polynesian laptops" might necessitate a redirect titled "Ancient polynesian laptops". This is solely because not everyone who searches is going to use the proper capitalization. NOTE- this is not appropriate where there may be a unique page with the alternative capitalization ie "List of Free software" would NOT require a redirect titled "List of free software" because there may potentially be a page with that title.

Furthermore, try to keep the number of headers to a minimum. Wiki authors love putting in unneeded headers. If you need to make an addition to an article, try to see if you can fit it in a preexisting header. You might have to rename the header to make it more appropriate for a more general topic. The goal of this is to give the article flow, and keep it from getting all chopped up and disorganized. If you have to make a new header, make sure to keep it in the style of the rest of the page.

So you want to create an article...

several things to keep in mind.

1. make sure the page is not redundant.
2. make sure other pages link to it. In particular make sure you can find it through one of the categories under navigation. If no one can find your page no one will go to it.
3. make sure that your title is formatted correctly. If there are unnecessary capital letters, the search will not always turn it up as a result.Please see the formatting conventions on [1] for formatting conventions, particularly Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters). There are a lot of pages being made with a nonstandard capitalization convention, and this needs to be remedied. Titles of pages without a proper noun or acronym should only have ONE capital letter at the beginning of the title. The pages for which this is not the case need to be changed.

Copyright License

Note that all material on this Wiki is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. If you are not the copyright holder of any contributions then please clear it with the copyright holder. Every page has a link to the license at the bottom.

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode