Wiki Business

[Nigel Jones]

Max Spevack wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jul 2008, Nigel Jones wrote:
>
>> 1)  We now have a bot on the wiki, appropriately named Wikibot, this 
>> can be used for general repetitive tasks such as en-mass addition of 
>> categories to pages, and some general clean-up tasks that needs 
>> to/should happen once in a while.
>
> How do we use it?  Do you have any examples?  It sounds cool!
It's basically on a place a request and I'll find the best way to do it 
and then do it.  Thankfully I have a couple of machines close to PHX 
with a decent bandwidth allocation so the by request model will work for 
now.

Things that'll run on a regular basis are:
* Redirect fixes (when someone creates a 'double-redirect' Mediawiki 
gets a bit unhappy so it's a good idea to clean these up)
* Interwiki updates (this'll happen when l10n wikis are deployed, it'll 
basically create a cross reference of what pages in the different 
languages contain what information - VERY useful)
* Deletions (note these don't get attributed to the bot)

Other common tasks would be:
* Template changes
* Category additions/changes/removals
* Text replacement (note I'm only tentatively listing at the moment)

Also, anything else that you can see automated on the Wikimedia wikis 
via bots, you can let me know and I'll try my best!

>
>> 2)  Some pages are getting a bit too big, while some are getting 
>> useless as time goes on (information for EOL releases.  As such I 
>> propose the addition of two new name spaces...
>>
>> a) Archive: (without talk pages)
>> Purpose - To allow archiving wiki pages pertaining to EOL releases, 
>> and/or are no longer relevant to the general user
>> Benefits - With proper setup (not searched by default for instance) 
>> we can help speed up searches and remove old information from general 
>> end users, BUT still be there for those interested.  Pages like the 
>> old Extras and FSA pages come to mind immediately.
>>
>> b) Meeting: (with talk pages)
>> Purpose - Allow some separation of end-user based content and 
>> board/committee/group meeting logs
>> Benefits - Marginal, similar to the purpose of Archive though, 
>> basically, somewhere to keep meeting logs in a place where they can 
>> be optionally searched but not by default
>
> Definitely in favor of the Archive: idea, and don't have a strong 
> preference either way on the Meeting: idea.
K, thanks for the input Max!

- Nigel