Monday, July 9, 2012

Starting from Scratch

We have 3 new additions to Wikipedia all launched today.  They are all pages for skeptics and all were created from scratch.  Trust me, starting with nothing is a lot of work, at least when you rewrite a page you have a template. 

So here they are, just in time for TAM 2012.

Bryan & Baxter - written by Rick Duffy

Jennifer Ouellette - written by Lei Pinter

Tim Farley - written by Susan Gerbic

I asked  Lei if she had any insight or comments about writing new pages.  Lei answered that she realized the importance of the "what links here?" tab.  This is a blue link on the left side of every page.  It allows you to see what pages on Wikipedia have a hyperlink back to your page.  If you have seen a tag stating that the page is an "orphan" this is what they are talking about. 

One of the things I keep forgetting to do is to see if there is a family name page that needs to be added to.  In Tim Farley's case there is a page called Farley (family name).  I just edited his name into place and stated that he is a "blogger, podcaster and skeptic".  It seems that Baxter, Bonner and Ouellette needed to be added as well. 

Also just wanted to quickly mention that the Brian Dunning (skeptic) page is now the Brian Dunning (author) page. Also the Alan Melikdjanian page has new content available. 

If you like seeing the progress of Wikipedia improvements, please follow this blog or set as a part of your RSS feed.  Don't think just because many of us editors are off to TAM, Dragon*Con and the Skeptic's Toolbox doesn't mean we aren't still getting things done.

I know of many new improvements coming soon, so stay tuned!

Susan


2 comments:

  1. Fantastic looking pages! Definitely great models of what I'm aspiring to do with my first edit. Also, thanks for the note on the "what links here" link, I hadn't noticed that before. It's surprising the kind of things that link back to people. (Phallus links back to Mary R.!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks so much, Susan. Oh FYI, you should put a biography template and a skeptic template on the talk page. And because I also edit Wikipedia, there's a special template to call attention to that so I don't sneak in and evilly edit my own bio. It looks like this:

    {{Notable Wikipedian|Krelnik|Farley, Tim|editedhere=no}}

    The other two of course look like this:

    {{WikiProject Biography|living=yes|class=|priority=|listas=Farley, Tim}}
    {{WikiProject Rational Skepticism}}

    ReplyDelete