Tutorial:maintenance
From Faces Of Dover
Anyone can add to the Faces Of Dover wiki. That's its purpose and that's the point of open sharing communities. We define users as people who openly share and are bold enough to add, edit, and change the writings of others. At times, we get confused or misunderstand what the higherarchy of a page's purpose or formatting is suposed to be. That's where maintenance comes in.
Like the cleaning of a house, it never ends. There's always something that could be presented better; ways to deliver content to the reader a little better better. Keep in mind that unlike Wikipedia, this isn't a difinitive collection of terms and definitions. Faces Of Dover is a collaborative group of stories and events by an online community of historians - yourself included. Don't be quick to change opinion. That's not necessarily a task of maintaining the collection of stories. We have many other ways to give opinions and tell the "other side" of the story. Maintenance is like a good house keeper, tiding up loose ends, making sure spelling is correct, and the grammer is done good (<- Ah Ha! Task #1. Correct the sentences in this page.) Maintenance of a wiki is the task of organization. Being able to recognize mistaken page names or identifying when certain stories have run off topic and deserve their own page. That's maintenance.
Keep your eyes out for anything that seems to not be in format. Without propper headers, format syntax, and even the occasional template, dialog and text just takes over and becomes uncontained topics on a page. Treat pages like the drawer of a filing cabinet. In that drawer you have multiple sub-topics to be organized and grouped for display. In that drawer, most likely you won't place papers randomly and you certainly wouldn't put those papers in the drawer without a hanging folder. The Folder is headers and the papers are paragraphs. Sort them and make the page's "drawer" become something that everyone can flip through and read (<- Task #2: tidy up this page. Organize it!)
Additionally, maintenance includes tagging of terms. As an example, if a page references another topic, say another person's name, that name should be tagged. Tags give readers the ability to search deeper on topics that influence one another. Even if a page hasn't been created for that tag, it's ok. Your tag opens up the pathway for a new page of information, should someone have something to say about that tag (<- Task #3: tag this page.)
What else can you think of for maintenance? (Almost) Every page on the wiki is editable, even help and tutorial pages. If you think you have a better way to describe something, write it. Describe more. Be bold.
