Talk:Main Page
Curator = JR
Contents |
General Issues
1. Not quite sure if documenting is actually the first task. It assumes that we have an established consensus of what resilience actually is. TMLutas 18:15, 27 June 2011 (EDT)
Not sure if we'd ever get to a full consensus. However, it appears that doing things locally is something most people think that should be part of resilience. If that's the case, a knowledge of the tools/products that help you do that as well as the inventory of places/resources you have at your disposal are very useful. JohnRobb 18:39, 27 June 2011 (EDT)
2. Can we drop "Resilient" from category names? The wiki itself is about resiliency, so any "Thing" on the wiki should be a "Resilient Thing"... --www.bobbymeyer.com 14:41, 13 July 2011 (EDT)
One benefit of having repetition of the word "Resilient" (especially if subheaders to things and places are added to the navigation bar) is that people arriving directly at any MiiU page will more quickly see the focus of the site. -- Openworld
3. Not sure about the top level categories. Is Places, Things and Skills the way to go? Or would going back to the Sixties be better like the old Whole Earth Catalog? http://www.wholeearth.com/articles.php --Paul James Harper 10:55, 7 August 2011 (EDT)
Understanding Whole Systems Shelter and Land Use Industry and Craft Communications Community Nomadics Learning Reviews Authors
Paul, agreed, at some point, we're going to have to reorganize, but with only three/four categories to start with, its less likely for contributors to put stuff in the wrong place, or any particular area to be noticeable anemic. Hope that helps. -- Shlok 9 August 2011
4. Can there be an IRC channel, or Google+ Hangout or other locale to discuss things? One nice thing is IRC is good for laggy conversations. Also I would have a page embedded with some live twitter widget style updates on various subjects. If we can extend this stuff beyond the usual mediawiki, would be very nice. HongPong 05:44, 9 August 2011 (EDT)
We do have a Google Group set up for coordination, but a weekly Hangout seems like a great idea. -- Shlok 9 August 2011
Improvement Ideas
Rapid Content Creation
- Basic forms/templates for structured descriptions of Resilient Things and Resilient Places <-an example of the latter is at Valeri LeBlanc's http://www.resilientplaces.com --Openworld // July 20 update: Congrats to Jon Burnham for detailed outlining of a model MiiU business listing at MiiU Business Style Sheet. Any chance of turning it into a live form template? --Openworld July 21 update: Here's a way we can start to test creation of forms and templates, as soon as the Wikimaster has a chance to download and install it: http://t.co/IzNxEwb --Openworld
- Online image compression for people who have large image files to compress. MiiU could offer links for batch uploading, compression, and retrieval of <2MB images. This could be a revenue generator for MiiU via placement of contextual ads (in the case of links to a free service) or directly through fee-for-service micropayments, based on the number and size of images compressed. --Openworld
- A color-keyed sitemap page that includes an expandable/collapsible network diagram along the lines shown at http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc/2889914711, or through a web-based free "mindmap" diagrammer such as http://MindMeister.com. A MiiU sitemap of this kind would let users click in/out of topic branches to easily find stubs (empty nodes/pages, marked in a distinctive color) that can benefit most from new content --Openworld July 26 Update: May be resolvable with http://www.MindMeister.com, if @Shloky can find a way for us to embed its free, interactive Mindmaps. Each page-creating team/tribe in MiiU then could create and maintain its own overview map in a dashboard page. Founding members of the team could then color code branches and twigs of the mindmap, showing where improvements to page contents will be most valued from their perspective. – Openworld
- A repository of all images for each user that would show lists (with a thumbnail view option) of all visuals uploaded by the user. Uploaded visuals that were not yet linked to any Resilient Thing or Resilient Place description page would be highlighted. Clicking on such "orphan" visuals would take the content creator to the image page. On that page, a button could launch a Resilient Places/Thing structured description form (see template suggestion above) that autofills the image name/link into the description. --Openworld
- We could use the "Single Point Lesson format used in Lean Manufacturing and Total productive Maintenance.
Do you have an example? - SV
- Number of photos (in parentheses) beside each subtopic and item heading. This # will give a cue to MiiU visitors as to which are pages are just stubs, and which have live content. --Openworld Good idea for downstream. However, the best way not to create a stub is to avoid linking to a page that you don't plan to create right now.
- Headers for "Resilient Things" and "Resilient Places" in the wiki's sidebar Navigation menu. This would make them readily'visible on all pages – a timesaver for users (and content creators) trying to navigate the site for resiliency-related resources. --Openworld I'm not sure that we're going to stick with that categorization for much longer.
- A way to insert (editable) tables into MiiU pages - ideally, something like the wiki-style comparison charts created by http://socialcompare.com. This can be a useful springboard for users to see side-by-side conparisons of resiliency-related resources for a given topic, and follow links in the table to the information they feel will be most relevant. --Openworld July 21 update: There are some new sample tables that can be adapted by MiiU users in the interim at OpenworldWorkbench --Openworld Working on that.
Increasing pageviews
- Policies on updating the 'Hot Pages' section. To ensure fresh content and rotation of MiiU links on the main page, it would be good to have one or two day limit when featuring any given "hot page" item. Also, a curator for this section might ensure only two or three "hot" items are posted for each subcategory (things and places). Fresh items in the featured content will help in bringing repeat visitors to MiiU. --Openworld
- A dashboard for each user to easily see his/her most and least popular MiiU pages. This would let the page creator spot pageview patterns, and take steps to improve visibility of pages with few hits --Openworld
- Links to tools for increasing MiiU page views (on the user's dashboard page). The user's personal dashboard might offer links, auto-created through keyword matches for each of the user's pages, to influential topic-related blogs and/or active Twitter users with related hashtags. MiiU users could follow these links and introduce the aligned bloggers/Tweeps to relevant MiiU pages --Openworld
- A MiiU Productivity forum could be set up for users to share tips on preparing and posting MiiU content (eg http://miiu.org/wiki/Fast-track_creation ) --Openworld
- A MiiU Benchmarking and Improvement forum could be set up for users to benchmark competitors (eg http://t.co/1quqxhI) and propose improvements to the MiiU wiki (an early draft page for this is http://miiu.org/wiki/Improvement_Suggestions) --Openworld
- A new "OpenVentures Lab" forum could be a place for users to propose, and map opportunities for, future resiliency-related Open Ventures --Openworld
- Amazon Affiliates Revenue Can we use Amazon Affiliate on the wiki? Not mine (esp. as I'm in CA and thus no longer eligible...), but maybe a group one, used to help generate revenue... I got some book links to add, seems like a easy-ish way to make some cash. --www.bobbymeyer.com 21:27, 22 July 2011 (EDT)
- I'd like an answer to this, too -- especially considering some users are going behind me and sticking THEIR Amazon affiliate code on pages I've created... --Axmangeorge 12:32, 29 August 2011 (EDT)
The shared code is mi0c0d-20 . Ax, can you email me regarding the affiliate replacement? ShlokATMiiUDOTorg
JR: You should be putting your code into pages you build and maintain. Make sure you note that you are maintaining them. I'm adding a curator label to some of mine (see: Israeli Battle Dressing at the bottom of the page)
Spam prevention
- watch Special:RecentChanges for suspect edits and pages
- enable anti-spam features
- inform new users on how to deal with wiki spam
How-to requests
1. Anyone know how to embed a youtube video? --www.bobbymeyer.com 14:16, 13 July 2011 (EDT)
Issue resolved (thanks @shloky) - go to Openworld Workshop for a simple line of text you can use for video insertion.
2. Anyone know how to embed a Google or Yahoo map? --Openworld July 20 update Thanks to Jon Burnham for posting a great answer at Embedding Maps. July 21 update After testing, I realized that the above answer generates a text-only link to Google maps without an embedded small version of the target map. It looks like a download and installation of http://t.co/kg5SAOB on the MiiU server will make interactive small maps visible on MiiU pages. -- Openworld
3. Anyone know how to fix this technical glitch? When link masking in a boldface entry, the "|" separator gets automatically attached to the URL, making the target page unreachable.
Issue resolved – the separator is only used when you are creating the mask for the link to an internal (MiiU) page, using double brackets. In other cases (such as when you want to launch an external web site), no separator "|" is needed inside the enclosing brackets. Instead, you start with a single bracket, copy in the target URL, put in a single empty space, and then add the masking text and enclose it with final single bracket.
4. Is there a way to disambiguate the automatic search tool in Miiu? When in edit mode, I'm glad to see that a pane containing related Creative Commons images, web links, etc. comes into view. The problem is that lots of the content that appears is for communities with an identical name (e.g. Dayton, OH, rather than Dayton, VA). Perhaps the script that executes the searches could be modified, to include the name of the community and the state? Eg "Dayton, VA" --Openworld
Issue resolved You can alter the search term.
5. When writing articles specific to the operation of MiiU, please categorize it as MiiU.
Amazon.com
I know that miiu has to pay for itself, but is anyone else annoyed by all the ads for Amazon.com products? Especially since many of the links are posted without any thought at all as to whether the item being advertised is resilient or not, and the text is often verbatim from ad-text that does not belong to miiu. Josephsgarden 17:17, 3 September 2011 (EDT)
The term "resilience" refers to more than "two mules and a plow" and includes the resilient product links previously posted. Linking to the products via Amazon makes them available to a great many people who otherwise may not have access to them due to their geographic location. At this point in MiiU's early development, our focus should be on planting seeds (posting pages) not pulling weeds (deleting pages). Jon Burnham
- Tools and gold coins can be purchased anywhere. If miiu is simply a skin over top of Amazon.com then there is no reason for miiu to exist. Ebay doesn't display every item that's for sale on it's home page... It at least makes people do a search first, so that the ads that are eventually displayed are at least somewhat relevant to what the person is looking for. And many of the things linked to on miiu.org are not the slightest bit resilient, for example most of the pressure cookers that were previously listed have rubber gaskets with a very limited lifetime, and they become useless for their intended purpose after the gasket breaks and can't be replaced. If we have to advertise for Amazon, does the content of the home page have to be 90% ads for amazon? Can't the ads be folded into the content or relevant pages? For example how about a review of Axes for resiliency and then an amazon link as an afterthought? Nobody even notices one or two advertisements per page, but when most of the page is only advertisements, or even the whole page is just an advertisement it's most off-putting Josephsgarden 00:49, 10 September 2011 (EDT)
- I'd like to suggest that rather than creating a new page for every Amazon product that we create generic links using the amazon search facility so they look like this: Gold American Eagles Then we can create one generic page for usa gold eagle coins instead of a page for each year as listed in the Amazon catalog Josephsgarden 01:46, 10 September 2011 (EDT)
- Agreed, MiiU isn't a skin on Amazon. Also agree that the real value of the site is in the information pages. That said, I don't necessarily agree that we need to remove all things. For example, if that cheaper rubber gasket pressure cooker gets someone hooked to canning, some degree of resiliency is achieved. Anyway, here's a compromise that I think addresses the concern. Product pages don't get top level visibility anymore. It takes at least three clicks of looking to see them directly. As part of an information page, they can be bumped to two clicks from top level, but that's it. That way the two kinds of pages are balanced. Products that are contextualized are rewarded for the effort. Randoms are not. Plus, it requires readers to click through to what they're interested in, and not be bombarded by what they're not. Does that work for everyone? Shlok 09:51, 10 September 2011 (EDT)
