Talk:Main Page
From WikiForGood
rberridge To keep the introduction on the main page brief, I left out some things I want to add here.
Many sections of wiki for good could be their own wikies. A major benefit of having each of these sections under the WikiForGood unbrella is that we can encourage cross fertilization of ideas. So, if an ecotourist visits the site, and stumbles across environmental art, he/she might learn something new and valuable. Also, perhaps having a network of wikies will boost the search result rankings for individual wikies under the umbrella. And lastly, I hope we can have a really big impact covering a wide variety of interests.
Wikiforgood is still very young, and many sections have only a few entries. My goal in posting the initial content in these sections is to provide concrete examples of the kind of text that might go in each section. Over time, I think each of these categories has potential to cover the topic in a much deeper, more thoughtful way.
An idea I'm very excited about now is the Ecotourism Wiki. I can envision the structure easily...each ecotourism site has an article, and the articles loosely follow the outline I laid out on the inro ecotourism page. The target audience of readers is obvious, and I think there are plenty of potential authors out there. The 'eat local' pages also have great potential because each college or city or town can enter resources to help find locally grown food. Plus we an have pages that help to build political support for policies that will help locally grown food compete.
Another wiki that has great potential is Celebrities for Good. It would be so great to see fame used more effectively to create positive change. And the structure if the wiki is obvious with an article for each celebrity. The target audience is people who are influenced by the stars, and there seem to be plenty of star gazers! Of course, many are interested in love lives etc., rather than green homes or who drives a prius, but I think the frenzy for celebrity info is so intense that plenty of people will want to read this stuff. Also, readers might stumble upon it during web searches and then we'll be preaching outside the choir. Finally, celebrities might be motivated to do more good deeds if they know the public is tracking them!
Jan, Thanks for your entry below on spam. I have implemented spam defenses and WikiForGood has been spam free for several months now!
Rob
You've just been hit by spamdalism. I removed it, but I quickly tire of doing that. I've seen so many good sites deteriorate this way! If you don't take action, this site will get filled with invisible ads for body-part-enhancing links and other crap. They do this to boost their Google ranking, but there will be an ominous bad side effert: YOUR site will show up when people Google for words like "penis" or "breast enhancement" or "dwarf sex with great danes", etc. AND when people Google for "WikiForGood", they will see lots of pages for the same crap! GREAT PR -- NOT!
There are a few ways of dealing with this:
- Appoint or become a "vandalism cop". Be prepared to spend hours a week cleaning things up.
- Secure so that only registered users can edit, then implement some controls:
- a CATCHPA scheme, where you have to enter the characters in a random image,
- mail-back verification,
- change the registration page so that bots can't create accounts.
I inadvertently did the last one, by having separate first and last name fields, which I then concatenated with a space to make up the user name. This apparently confused the bots enough that I NEVER had vandalism, until the site was transferred to a wiki farm, where it went back to the standard registration form, and now nearly every page is cluttered with referral spam.
