Volunteer editor tasks

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Revision as of 11:31, 7 June 2007 by Tim Bird (talk | contribs) (Organizing existing material: add section on linking orphans)
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Hi there! I assume you have come to this page because you want to help edit the embedded Linux wiki. Thanks for your interest. Depending on your skill level and available time, there are a number of different things you can do to support this site. These include:

  • Reviewing material
  • Adding new material or links to the site
  • Organizing existing material on the site
  • Working on Special projects

Please see the sections below for information about how to do these things.

By working together, we can create a great resource for all of us!

Reviewing articles

Flagging material that needs review

One important thing you can do is to mark articles that need attention. This can be deficiencies in style, content or just out of date material. It may be because of a broken link, missing attachment, or some other problem.

If you see something that needs work, and don't know how to fix it yourself, please add a comment to the discussion page for the article. This is helpful for those watching the page, to know what the issues are with the page. To mark a whole page as needing editing help, add the NeedsEditing category tag to the page. To do this, edit the page, and add the following text at the bottom: [[Category:NeedsEditing]]. You can look at the bottom of this page for an example:

A list of pages that have been flagged as needing editing is at: Category:NeedsEditing

Adding new material

If you know of something related to a topic discussed in an article, and it is not covered (or covered adequately) by the article, please feel free to add the information yourself. See Help:Editing for information about the basics of editing an article, as well as help and examples of MediaWiki markup (the formatting language used to write and edit the articles).

Organizing existing material

On of the most important things you can do on a wiki is to help with the organization of the site. Because there are numerous individual contributors to a wiki, most wikis have a tendency to grow out in different directions over time. To help people find material on the wiki, even if it hasn't been placed originally in the most obvious place, it is good to add links between articles, and to put articles into categories.

Adding links between articles

To add a link to an article from another article on the site, just put it's name in double-brackets in the article you wish to create the link in. If you want, you can add explanatory text for why the two articles are linked, but often, the article text itself will provide enough context for the link.

Linking orphaned articles

A lot of content have been moved to this site from other locations (like the CELF wiki), or has fallen into dis-repair. There are, unfortunately, a number of pages which don't have any other pages linking to them. This is referred to as being "orphaned". It would be very valuable add links to these orphans to the appropriate areas of the site.

The list of orphans is available at Orphaned Pages To link one of these, look at the content, then browse through the wiki and find a place to link it to, and just add the link.

Adding Category tags

The MediaWiki system uses the notion of Categories to group related articles together. A user looking for information on a particular topic can look at the category page, and see all the articles which have been flagged as relating that that topic.

To add a Category tag to a article (which adds that article to the Category), just place the text [[Category:{Name}]] to the bottom of an article. (where Name is the name of the category.)

The list of categories supported on this site is at Special:Categories. Try to use an existing category if you can, or add a new category if one does not exist, but there are multiple articles which you think are logically related to each other or a general topic.

Special Projects

There are a number of special projects that we want to pursue for the site. Some examples of these are:

  • Building a comprehensive list of known embedded Linux-based products
  • Building a comprehensive list of embedded Linux development boards (with links to support information)
  • Monthly articles on special topics of interest to embedded developers
  • Interviews with leading embedded Linux developers
  • Collecting links to ALL previously published talks, presentations, and papers on embedded Linux topics
    • (also known as the "big sweep" project)
  • (more...???)

If you are interested in helping with one of these projects, see the page describing that project (or contact Bill Traynor or Tim Bird directly).