CNUpedia:Planning the Future of CNUpedia/Archive-Oct-23-2006

From CNUpedia, an IEEE Innovation.

Working Group

Flow (talk · contribs) proclaims:

aim:GoChat?RoomName=cnupedia paste that into an AIM hyperlink to join

Flow says:

When would people be available to get together for a working group meeting and to meet each other? I would like to see a set working group who can make policies and help CNUpedia change and adapt to the campus over time.

TOPICS

• Advertisement
• Terms of Use
• Getting PCS more involved
• Possibly creating a Board of Directors

Somewhat less sluggish from the furtive, arcane works of the last few days, TwoFlowers (talk · contribs) murmurs:

I'm available almost any time Tuesdays and Thursdays, but relatively busy on the other days. For purposes of communication, I could come by in person or chat through AIM or Jabber.

Fall Semester 2006

Marshall, what are we planning to do for the Working group? -- TwoFlowers 15:21, 31 May 2006 (EDT)

CNUpedia Wiki-Events

Teacher Depictions

TwoFlowers wrote:

Perhaps a challenge in which creative and interesting ways of drawing/displaying/etc. teachers could be hosted here. Consider, for example, the post by pmains: Riedl on ASCII. It would be fun and something neat that people could look at when they come to the site, something uniquely offerred by us. With luck, we might show that this wiki is capable of being more than a presentation of info, but a rallying point for student interests. Of course, this would also generate an opportunity to discuss appropriate articles and to establish the kind of boundaries our E. VP and such want.

Flow agrees:

I'd love to get some events or contests going on this. Maybe we can form some type of competition and get CAB involved. Scavenger Hunt, something with campus, be sweet to do something that involves CNUpedia and the campus.

Game: Paparazzi / Assassins

Please refer to the main page for this topic: Paparazzi.

TwoFlowers chuckles:

It has been suggested that CNUpedia could sponsor a game of 'assasins'. In this game, participants are each assigned another player as a target whom they must eliminate through some form of innocent but tactical action (such as hitting with a sock). Every player is a target of some other player, meaning everyone must play both defensively and offensively at the same time. When a target is successfully attacked, he or she drops out of the game, and his or her target becomes the attacker's new objective. This game has been hosted by CAB, and, I believe, the Residence Hall Association of York River West.

How it might be managed, whether it will be sponsored in cooperation with any other entity, and such like has not been decided. It has been thought that it might take the form of some kind of posting on the wiki of pictures taken of the target (with some kind of restriction to make it challenging). Since it is possible to tell between two edits which came first, the wiki is potentially a good system for keeping track of the sequence of attacks.

Active Agreement of Terms of Use by Editors Required by School

TwoFlowers informs:

The administration has asked IEEE to clarify to contributors that their posts are being made on school equipment, and as such, must follow the proper regulations and usage guidelines. It is necessary for the site to make some kind of statement; in fact, it has been put forward that every post should require some form of consent to this jurisdiction.

One suggestion that has been made (by me) is that the "Save page" button be replaced with "I agree" and that the text around it be modified to have some form of agreement terms, containing ideas such as

The site is hosted on school property and is subject to the regulations regarding the use of information systems and inter-student conduct in general at the school. Subject to a review by student moderators and University staff, content in violation may be removed (blanked).

Ultimately, it should sound legal and fairly represent the interests of students, faculty, and administration alike. This is where you come in. You should suggest what you think is fair, what rights you feel you deserve, what you rights you think the school deserves.

The school has been kind enough to give us use of its equipment in the first place. The content is on a page with their name in the URL. Since we can move the site to another machine unmanaged by the school (in theory), we are not so much finding the school deciding our rights as defining its expectations of us as tenants of its systems.

Flow put in the following suggestions:

Draft 1:

A little too threatening for my taste. -- Flow

Draft 2:

Technical Considerations

How are the ToU to be displayed? Rather than editing the software itself, it is possible to edit what at first glance appears to be unchangeable text (such as that on buttons). These pieces of text are actually drawn from special articles that only administrators can edit. To see these articles and the text that corresponds to them (default and current), please refer to Special:AllMessages. Please also see Meta's Article on the topic.

The Question of Placement

Flow has experimented with placing text in between the "Watch this page" and the "I Agree"/"Save article" button. This appears not to be directly possible; rather, Flow edited the article corresponding to "Watch this page" so that it came to include the Terms of Use. Using certain formatting, it is possible to make it appear separate. However, it remains part of the "Wath this page" text.

TwoFlowers has experimented with playing it afterwards on the copyrightwarning text. An attempt to make it noticeable has been employed, since the drawback here is that it is not directly correlated with the "I Agree" button, rather below it.

Flow says:

I like what you've done. I just started goofing around with it to get it rolling. You guys know MediaWiki much better then I do so have at it. Check with Riedl and Wang to see if they're happy. If they're happy I'm happy.

TwoFlowers blinks...

I'm not sure I know it that much better than you. I knew next to nothing before this site came up (only a little bit from a UVA wiki). Although I have been doing a lot of research, it's been relatively recent at that. And even with that... Mediawiki tables, difficult they remain.

Update

TwoFlowers promulgates: I did some updating to the various wordings. I extensively modified Flow's suggestions so that it is now in the following form:

So far the following 4 pages are relevant:

1. Page for new document creation: The above is directly placed in it.
2. Page for copyright warning 1 for editing pages: indirectly includes ToU page
3. Terms of Use (ToU) page: Contains a concise description of our Terms of Use
4. General Disclaimer page: Contains our site policy: The detailed, the long-winded, the inexorable.

The site General Disclaimer may be moved to have a name like Site Policy.. I'm not sure how we want to connect the web of pages. There seems to be a need for 3 kinds of paging: 1. mediawiki namespace pages 2. concise description pages (transcluded into the namespace pages) 3. Detailed, lengthy etc. pages.

Any thoughts? I prb am making this too complicated.

Anyway, the main thing now is to review the wording for legality, comparability to CNU's writings, and clearness.

Categories

The mediawiki software supports Categories to help organize articles. Does anybody want to weigh in about how to do that on our site? Any suggestions? Thoughts? If not, then I suppose I'll bring it up at the Working Group meeting -- TwoFlowers (talk · contribs)

Flow (talk · contribs) likes:

Good idea, it will help it remain organized as we grow. Another thing we need to talk about is advertising. I think there are many people out there who don't know about it. Everyone put a link in your profile. Suggest people write articles that interest them like clubs they run, opposing groups. Send funny stuff to people and get the AIM effect going.

TwoFlowers (talk · contribs) reveals/unleashes a rough draft:

A (B (C)) Means that A is a subcategory of B, and B of C.

    Article             Category
    -------             --------
    
    344                 Social (Student Life)
    Alpha Phi           Greek Life (Student Life)
    Animal Welfare      Club (Student Life)
    Coalition
    ACM                 Club (Student Life)
    Eric Pasch          Student (Social (Student Life))
    
    CNU                 University
    CNU CS              Gaming (Club (Student Life))
    
    
    Campus Food         Facilities, Student Life
    Hunter Creech       Facilities
    
    The Tree            Grounds
    CNU Village         Grounds
    Schooners           Facilities, Student Life, Grounds
    IT Services         Department
    
    Virginia            Region
    Mariner's           Recreation (Local Community (Region))
    Museum
    
    Robocode            Projects
    Tutorial            Help, Projects
    Paparazzi           Projects
    Japanese Tea        Grounds, History
    House
    
    TASER Talk          Academics
    
    Top 10              Humour, Projects*
    CNU Confundium      Profile, Projects*
    Glebe               Religion, Projects*

* I'm struggling for a word to describe things like CNU Confundium and Top 10. Both of them are not merely descriptions of pre-existing structures of our campus, but rather, ventures of their own. Projects is a little too lame a word for this. It connotes not the exciting interpretation and anaylsis, the creative outlook, nor the growth of culture and community. Perhaps Culture is a better choice?

TwoFlowers notes:

Pages that might need to be categorized can be found at Special:Uncategorizedpages. It seems to me that not all pages really need to be given categories, for example, subpages, disambiguation pages, etc. I've been adding them to more pages. This is a good point to start discussing what individual categories mean.

TwoFlowers happily informs:

I set up a page as the top-level place for starting a meaning-based browsing at CNUpedia:Browse. It needs prettification, if anyone wants to help, but I feel it can be added to the main page, as another (possibly more convenient) way to look through the site for those just wandering through.

TwoFlowers (talk · contribs) struggles:

I'm trying to figure what we might categorize the following as:

• CNU Police
• Judicial Affairs
• Gosnold Commons

Facilities seems to have turned out to be a rather vague category. Any suggestions of specific ones to replace it? There should be something for things like Police and Judicial which involve safety and regulation, ones for the different kinds of services provided (e.g., Dining was added for those involving food), and ones for other kinds of departments.

We also need something for those not directly related to students but meaningful structures of the University, such as the (something) for Academic Excellence, for the Tech company in Suntrust, and for Continuing Education, etc.

Also, I propose we added the following categories: Student, Faculty, Staff.

Perhaps we should also subdivide Academics at some point. (.......in the not so near future).

Flow (talk · contribs)

Hmm, i've been trying to think and these are hard to catagorize, maybe we should go with multiple subcatagories. We should also have maybe a Miscellaneous, I don't like using uncategorized.

Categories, cont.

TwoFlowers suggests,

Let's do away with the Facilities category and find some better ones to replace it, like Computing for IT Services and Hunter Creech.

Spam and how to react

As you might know, CNUpedia has been subject to spammers attacking the site, presumably with bots. Since they were coming from unregistered (and somewhat random) ips, we decided to force registration, but this did not stop the problem, as the user Aaa was created and continued the spamming.

While we can block IPs and User names, this is has a number of problems:

• A given IP might be shared by multiple people, or change status.
• The spammers are able, generally, to switch to new ips, or users, without being too much impeded.
• It's a reactive, not a pro-active approach: We stop them AFTER they've done something.

So a few alternatives have been suggested:

1. Email registration
2. CAPTCHA user registration (+for anon writing external links)
3. Add a non-standard reg form, or such like, to confuse the bot.
4. Whitelist cnu ips, and OpenVPN the rest.
5. Anti-spam Wiki-bot isms!

Currently 2 and 3 seem the best solutions, since they don't seriously inconvenience any users. 3 assumes the spammers aren't specifically targeting our site. (So thinks TwoFlowers 20:09, 28 March 2006 (EST))

I can assure you, we are not being specifically targeted - I monitor the various mailing lists for the software, and we are not the only ones with the problem. Also, I have implemented #2 for both user registration and anons adding external links. – ABCD 17:54, 7 April 2006 (EDT)

Spam Notes and Open Thoughts

Just thought it would be interesting to note the wikia blacklist. Not that we are experiencing any great difficulties, since enabling CAPTCHAS seems to be working quite well. But I thought it is worth mentioning and being aware of, if for no other reason than technical interest. - TwoFlowers 15:16, 31 May 2006 (EDT)