HomePage RecentChanges

Policy

Use a summary line and sign your edits

When engaging in a discussion or filing a bug report or feature request, please sign your edits so that people will know who to follow up to. If you sign your edits, you can add the date immediately behind your username, and that can be handy too.

Even if you don't sign your edits in the wiki page, we'd really, really appreciate it if you would attach your username to the page edits you make. This is easy to do:

   Summary: describe your edits here!____________________________________
   [ ] This change is a minor edit.
   Username: jcorneli____________
   Save Preview

Of course, you should use your username, not mine.

General organization

This wiki is currently mainly about Free Math and some Free Math Projects, as well as some related projects that aren't about math at all. We'd like to see more different projects start using this wiki to share ideas.

Also note that projects are typically full of Tasks that you can help out with.

Users of the wiki should make an effort to record the tasks they are working on on their [AsteroidMeta:Users AsteroidMeta homepages].

Adding a new project

To add a new project, please make sure first of all that it qualifies as a free project (see What is Free Math for some ideas about what "free" means in this context). It is advisable to give us a few days to corroborate your claim before going wild with the edits (links to the project's homepage and licensing terms would be nice). If it looks like it is all systems are go, update the Tasks, Bugs, and Feature Requests pages with sections for your project.

"Made up" free projects are OK to add. (Brainstorming is good.)

Todo items

Maintain a list of your todo items on your user page so that people can know what you are working on. If you're looking for something to do, check out the Tasks page.

Note

This policy item is somewhat obsolete, since it is a bit of a pain to use the wiki system to do this. Maybe you can help us design a better system.

Commons

You can also use the Commons for general announcements about your activities, or for other random questions. For things that you want to take in-depth, use the Discussions page.

Bulletins

Weekly Bulletins of activities on the Asteroid will be published. It is strongly encouraged that users add at least a short summary of their activities and a few comments on how things are going to these bulletins. Additional content (editorials or whatever) is welcomed too. (The bulletins are edited by jcorneli.)

Spam deterrents

You can use, but don't please don't bookmark this page: HomePage2. I don't really care if people spam the homepage (if it doesn't get beyond that). I'm curious to see what happens if we let them fight it out.

In the mean time, please send a copy of all spams you remove to jcorneli via email. This way their content can get blocked in the future (from AsteroidMeta and other Oddmuse wikis that use the Emacswiki BannedContent? page).


Note on Enforcement

As much as it pains me to do it, I may begin rolling back edits that are made that do not comply to these rules, unless the author can justify their reasons for not adhering to this policy. (In which case I might change the policy…)


Discussion

I really wonder if we should switch to a bit more convenient wiki software, like mediawiki. For one, I find the "toolbox" it has for edits very handy, as well as some really handy things in markup. For example, there is a shorthand code for "sign here with a link to my user page and the current date and time" (upon saving). I don't think it is effective to chide people for not complying with policy that the system lacks features to support. Even if they comply with the policy, without convenience, it is like a little punishment every time they do so, and negative reinforcement is a bad thing. Anyway, I am trying various wikis out on a number of projects now, and will keep the folks here abreast of what I discover. --akrowne Wed Feb 23 21:10:03 UTC 2005

There is an extension to do the specific example you brought up with Oddmuse, see Oddmuse:Signature_Extension. And there are various other extensions as well. Of course, we can't install any of these on the current AM site. I would tend to agree that it would be better to make AM more convenient. I think the first step would be to migrate it to the "planetx" server (see Oddwiki:Migration and Copying AsteroidMeta.) From there we can either modify the Oddmuse settings to make the site more convenient or port to some other platform or both. I'm not opposed to porting to another platform, however, I don't have any gripes against Oddmuse per se either. If you want to talk about specific wiki (or non-wiki) features that you think would be good, I've got a discussion started about that, I'd love to get more feedback from you – see the relative merits of wiki and other workflow management media. Thanks, --jcorneli Wed Feb 23 22:41:00 2005 UTC PS. In the mean time, whatever platform we use, we should probably have a page that gives some usability tips.

Maybe when Matt's and Brian's collaborative hypertext system comes out (perhaps cross-fertilized with the scholium system) that woud be the way to go. In the meanwhile, we seem to be getting along not too badly with the curent platform. --rspuzio 15 June 2005

Another thing to check out is Xwiki - but I like the simplicity of oddmuse as a wiki. I also think that when the scholium system is ready we should try to use that! It combines simplicity with extensibility… --jcorneli Wed Jun 15 16:21:15 2005 UTC