Dear Wikinews community,
dear interested individuals,
I would like to invite you to participate in an open, unmoderated
discussion about the future of the project, specifically the English
edition. Members of other editions who want to learn about recent
changes to the English version, and who want to debate whether these
changes could be useful for their project, are also invited to join.
Please sign up for a time that is convenient for you at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Future_Talk
The purpose of this IRC meeting is to discuss issues such as
* Should the DynamicPageList extension be used?
* Should the inputbox extension be used?
* How should decisions about issues like this be made in the future?
* How local can Wikinews stories be?
* How can we make Wikinews more accessible for newcomers?
Please feel free to add topics of discussion to the agenda.
Note that we should not be trying to make decisions at this meeting -
those should be openly documented on the wiki - but to reach a basic
consensus about how to proceed.
Best,
Erik
Relevant for wikis on MediaWiki 1.5 only:
I have coded and made operational an extension that can be used to add a
search box, or a "create an article" box, to any page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inputbox_extension
The search functionality is primarily of interest to Wikipedia, where
those Wikipedias that would like to now have the option to put a
prominent, Google-like search box on their Main Pages.
The create an article functionality is currently trialed on the English
Wikinews to make it easier for newcomers to start writing stories. It
supports preloading the newly created page with the source from another
page, and also adding a custom tag at the top. These two features are
independently available:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=FJADOVAFD&preload=Stub&action=…
loads the text of [[stub]] into the new page with the bogus title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=FJADOVAFD&editintro=Stub&actio…
gives you a modified introduction, which is useful when creating custom
edit pages. The two parameters only work when the page does not exist yet.
Best,
Erik