User talk:HarrisonB/Archive2008/July

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What is Around the World?

It's a collaboration!

A collaboration using advanced wiki-tools!

The event is being co-sponsored by Wikiproject Lists of basic topics and WikiProject Geography, and participants will be "traveling" all around "the World" visiting each country online (here on Wikipedia and perhaps beyond) as they apply advanced wiki-tools to improve pieces of the profiles of each and every country on Earth!. Each pass through these pages is a "trip around the World..."

The set of pages we are working on is currently located at Wikipedia:WikiProject Lists of basic topics.

Each page presents essential information on each country in a topic outline format, for ease of overviewing and navigating. Most of the topics presented are linkified, which turns these pages into a hypertextual map to material about each country on Wikipedia. When completed, they shall all become part of Wikipedia's contents system.

The pages share a standard format, with the information on each country presented in the same general order. So rather than getting stuck on a single country trying to complete it, each participant works on all 200+ political entities, completing a single data item or detail across all of the pages!

For this they use advanced tools like WP:AWB, Linky, etc. It goes fast, and since others are doing this at the same time, it makes "the World" feel like a beehive, and the participants are its bees. :) The energy is contagious.

And since you are moving from country to country, the tasks make it feel like you are traveling around the world, and you get to learn a little about every country as you do so. This approach also allows for greater efficiency, because by the time you've done 30 or so of a particular item, you've figured out how to finish it faster and more effectively (such as where to find the data or how to make adjustments), and this specialization speeds up development - but more importantly it reduces errors.

The tasks are varied, which adds even more variety to the project. Some tasks are look-ups-and-fill-ins, some are copy and paste, some are image hunts, some are maintenance adjustments, some are link fixing, some are blue-linking (creating an underlying redirect so a link turns blue), some are fact checking, etc.

For an example of what a nearly complete page looks like, see these:

There are only about 200 more pages to go!

Standing by to help are co-coordinators, who can lend a helping hand to participants, provide instruction and tips on how to use the tools, and help them find what they are looking for. Co-coordinators also use advanced tools to inspect the work of participants, and touch it up as needed, or if a task was done wrong throughout, point this out to the participant so he or she can make the necessary corrections.

Co-coordinators are working on the set of pages right now, to familiarize themselves with "the World" so they can help more effectively by the time the main event starts. But there's still lots of preparation left to be done, and we are looking for editors experienced in advanced wikitools who would like to become co-coordinators.

The Transhumanist 03:39, 2 July 2008 (UTC)