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Great Lakes Wiki :Community Portal

From Great Lakes Wiki

Welcome to Great Lakes Wiki!

Maybe you live on or near the Great Lakes. Maybe you lived there once. Or maybe you're fascinated with a region that contains more than 18 percent of the world's fresh surface water. This site tells the Great Lakes story. It explains its environment, explores its culture, celebrates its recreation, discusses the challenges it faces. It is a complex story told by a community defined by more than geography.

To help us with the work of doing the wiki, we're starting with a rough version of Wikipedia's "Village Pump". The norm here will be to add information or questions to the links below. Please sign your entries here, since that will help everyone involved...


Contents

[edit] News

[edit] Spammers

Spammers are hitting this wiki. It may be necessary to turn anonymous editing off, it needs discussing. This would require everyone to have an ID before they could edit. We have some valuable anon contributors, but we are also being hit by a bot or bots that truncates pages at the first ampersand. If you are looking through the recent changes list and you see a page that got a lot shorter, that might be what it is, please look at a diff to see, and if it is, roll it back (use the undo link). I block these IPs as I see them but they are on the increase. Thoughts? ++Lar: t/c 22:54, 15 June 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Spammers again

An interesting bit of spam on a talk page that gets hit a lot, quoted exactly as it was posted (before I deleted the page for the 7th?? time): 

If you want do delete your site from our spam bases - just email us with domain of your site:

abuse-here@inbox.ru

thank you!

I don't advocate actually doing this but I found it interesting. ++Lar: t/c 12:53, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Still more spammers

Spammmers hit the wiki hard ... I was trying to keep up, but I spent my time coding something up in perl that is a faster way to block, and aids with reversion. If you look in the recent changes you'll see a lot of stuff from me relating to that, I think I got every change and every IP. I have also done some range blocking, if I found a few IPs that are close, I (from their talk page) did a whois link to see what the ISP is, and if it's a range that I figured wouldn't have TOO much damage, I rangeblocked the entire ISP, anon only. Advise of collateral damage. The other wiki that was also being hit turned anon editing off completely but if I can keep up with this new tool and by rangeblocking I want to. If anyone else blocks, please use {{vandalblock}} or {{spamblock}} on the user talk page so that the user talk gets added to the Category:Blocked_Users ... this lets us see patterns in IP addresses as it is sorted by address. Special:Ipblocklist unfortunately does not. ++Lar: t/c 00:07, 14 October 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Policy

[edit] Licensing

User Lar asked me a good question about how we license the info on this site. Following Wikipedia's model, we'll license info under the GFDL. The basic idea of this license is that content entered here is allowed to be used by others for non-commercial purposes, but that users are also not necessarily liable for changes others make to their content. This is a strong license and seems to have worked well for Wikipedia. --Sysop 16:39, 6 Feb 2007 (EST)

HI... I think the policy on licensing might not be exactly stated right at this point.
The GFDL does allow commercial use of content. (you say above "non commercial"). What is restricted in the GFDL is to impose restrictions on others reusing or copying informaiton. Thus, Wikipedia itself has commercial "mirrors" (for example, answers.com gets a lot of content from Wikipedia) but they cannot restrict others from further copying whatever changes they may choose to make to content that started out as Wikipedia GFDL content. Hope taht helps clarify. (free == free speech, not free beer, as the saying goes)... ++Lar: t/c 16:25, 12 Feb 2007 (EST)
Along those lines you might want to change Project:Copyrights to point to, or have a copy of, the GFDL and some surrounding text that shows how you intend to use it. I'd do it but that might be overstepping a bit. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lar (talk • contribs) 10:31, 13 Feb 2007

[edit] Additional admins

Have you thought about your process for granting adminship to additional folks that can help do things? You'll probably want to at some point. Different wikis do things different ways, you don't need an elaborate process as on the English Wikipedia, that's for sure, but some policy is a good idea. ++Lar: t/c 11:31, 13 Feb 2007 (EST)

[edit] Bringing things over from the English Wikipedia

Muskegon, Michigan was copied copied over in its entirety from Wikipedia (Wikipedia:Muskegon, Michigan)... It needs to be decided if a complete copy (including many redlinks, missing templates, stylistic conventions, etc.) is a good approach or if, rather, something more like what I did on Thornapple River is better.. I think here on the Community Portal discussion page probably is the best place to discuss the general case of what to do... Thoughts? ++Lar: t/c 10:13, 28 Feb 2007 (EST)

Per discussion on that page's talk, bringing the whole thing over was probably not the thing to do. I've truncated the article down to just a stub of enough content to fix it firmly geographically (grin) and a link to the WP article. ++Lar: t/c 23:27, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Links vs. content

Conversely, Lake Erie Region Conservancy was recently added and is just a link. As were many other important orgs. While a link is a start, plesae consider adding more content than just that. Wikipedia may have information that is helpful, but put the org in context here, why does it matter? who does it serve? how does it help, etc... See Talk:Lake Erie Region Conservancy for some thoughts. ++Lar: t/c 11:56, 22 March 2007 (EDT)

See Talk:Michigan League of Conservation Voters... the mainspace page was added with just a link. I think we may want to make more formal policy against this perhaps. ++Lar: t/c 21:49, 23 May 2007 (EDT)
New template {{stubURL}} created and added. Feel free to use it as needed if you spot other ones like this. I'll try to remember to periodically go around and delete these. ++Lar: t/c 14:29, 27 May 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Images and licensing

I have enhanced the upload text that users see when uploading but users are not giving sources or licensing. This exposes GLW to liability. It is a good practice to always state where an image came from and what the license is. I ported the {{information}} template over to aid in that. How would people feel about my starting to tag images that don't have proper licenses and starting to ask users to help update the images they uploaded? Images that were not updated with license and souruce info might eventually be deleted if the community felt that was the way to go (the alternative is to possibly be liable to the copyright holder). thoughts? ++Lar: t/c 18:10, 6 May 2007 (EDT)


[edit] Spammers redux

The anon editing block helped for a while but over new years we got hit with a lot of sleeper account vandalism/spamming. Same pattern as before, short random character strings added, some bad character translations, etc. The accounts all have the same name pattern UllllUllll (2 upper case chars and 8 lowercase ones, random letters). I'm running my perl to revert most of it but if you spot any I missed after I'm done (I'll post again when that is) please advise. We may need to turn on email validation or captcha to prevent these sleeper accounts from being created. ++Lar: t/c 12:58, 1 January 2008 (EST)


[edit] Technical

[edit] Version

What version of MediaWiki is being run here? There are a lot of nifty things in later versions that don't seem to work here, like noinclude tagging, and #ifdef et. al. parserfunctions. It may be worth upgrading if it's not too much trouble. There are also a lot of good security features that got added as well. ++Lar: t/c 16:33, 12 Feb 2007 (EST)

We're using MediaWiki 4.1 or something very close to that. I know 5.1 has some great features, so I hope to upgrade that as soon as possible. I want to do another backup before then, but definitely that's a top priority...--Sysop 00:05, 13 Feb 2007 (EST)
Hi... The numbering is the other way round I think, as I think you probalby are running 1.4 based on features absent. The latest version of MediaWiki is 1.8.2something... see MediaWiki on meta. I would definitely advocate getting well past 1.5, which has known holes that sp*mmers can exploit. You'll definitely want to look into enabling some of these features, as it's only a matter of time before you get found and the amount of that stuff you have to deal with goes up. Personally I'd advocate going all the way to 1.7 or 1.8... ++Lar: t/c 11:28, 13 Feb 2007 (EST)
The SW has been upgraded to 1.9 by Cliff and the team. Some layout and settings things changed going to this version, if you spot problems please report them. In particular the logo went missing, at least in the skin I favour, as it's more configurable than before. I'm not sure quite where the old logo is. The sidebar/navigation got a few new items, let me know if more/different ones are needed. ++Lar: t/c 23:30, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Interwiki linking

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Interwiki_map#Great_Lakes_Wiki where I propose adding a prefix for this wiki. ++Lar: t/c 17:15, 2 Mar 2007 (EST)

I added it but it may take a few months to propagate... ++Lar: t/c 23:30, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

[edit] Proposals

[edit] Disclaimers

I suggest we crib the disclaimers from wikipedia:Wikipedia:General_disclaimer to use here Great Lakes Wiki :General disclaimer with some editing... much of the text can just be name changed, and right now there is no text at all. I'll do it next time I'm mucking about if there is no objection. ++Lar: t/c 18:02, 13 Feb 2007 (EST)

[edit] Assistance

[edit] Organization of information

[edit] Great Lakes Organizations

This seems to be a big list of organizations. A spot check of an org or two revealed that the org pages are basically free form text, and are not in categories. Lists and categories often go hand in hand, and in fact, categories are often a better way to maintain lists, as they are automatic. However, lists have the advantage of allowing the addition of redlinks (organizations, in this case) for things that don't yet have articles. A few questions:

  1. Should there be a category set up for these organizations as well as having the list?
  2. Should a template be created to allow for an infobox for each organization? Infoboxes allow for presentation and organization of information in a way that may be easier for readers to access than freeform text. For examples of this, showing the wide use these can be put to, consider these articles from various domains on Wikipedia:

So if there is interest, I could create a category called Great Lakes Organizations, and put all of the organizations on the list into that category. Or even do more categorization and break up by federal agency, or by state, or by public vs. private or any number of other ways. Categorization is an art... it's OK to not get it right the first try but the idea is to help the reader find things more easily.

Also, if there is interest, and if people talk about what are the most important or common things to capture in an info box template are, I could create an infobox organization template. Let me know. ++Lar: t/c 15:52, 14 Feb 2007 (EST)

[edit] Miscellaneous

The class that did much of the initial work to create content
The class that did much of the initial work to create content

[edit] Wiki Wednesday

Thought I would put this here... but we'd love to see some Great Lakes Wiki people from the Chicago area at Wiki Wednesday, Chicago on July 9. If you know of any other wiki people who might be interested in attending, please feel free to pass the link along. The details, for those not on FaceBook are,

Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Time: 6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location: Cosi
Street: 116 S. Michigan (near Monroe)
City/Town: Chicago, IL


If anyone has any questions, my contact info is here. Thanks! --LauraHale 17:30, 17 June 2008 (EDT)

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