RichmondWiki.org:ToDoList

From RichmondWiki.org

This page is a running list of the things I hope to accomplish related to The RichmondWiki Project, besides adding high quality content, of course. The items are in no particular order, and can be thought of as a “to-do” list:

[edit] Active Items

Can you help with any of these?

[edit] Site Updates

Upgrade site hosting. Currently the site is hosted on a shared Network Solutions account. RichmondWiki will eventually outgrow this. In fact, we are already having some performance issues.
Acquire the richmondwiki.com domain name from the current owner. This is not essential, but would be nice to pick up any traffic from people that assume we live at the .com instead of the .org.
Fix the Special:Categories page only counts categories and articles that were created AFTER upgrading to MW 1.13. Remedy if possible. I think it has something to do with the database tables but I’m a little hesitant to poke around too much. UPDATE I did some preliminary digging on this one. The Category table is new in MW 1.13. There is a maintenance script called populateCategory.php that I can’t run because I don’t have shell access. One option is changing hosts to get shell access, another is finding a workaround.
Upgrade to MediaWiki 1.14 - Will tackle when I have time. It was released in late February.
Think more about Information Architecture - Would like some expert help on this. I want to avoid (as much as possible) a bird's nest of categories, sub-categories, orphaned pages, etc. Before the wiki gets too big it might make some sense to put up some (very) high-level categorization of articles that still allows for flexibility and creativity.

[edit] Promotion

[edit] Organizational

Explore Nonprofit Status - What would we gain? This is intriguing because then we could solicit in-kind donations of time and resources for content generation, site updates, new features, etc.
Organize Meetups in Richmond for anybody that wants to get involved with The RichmondWiki project. Topics could cover content creation, strategy, promotion, analytics, programming, information architecture, usability, community tools in general, or anything else. Much like the wiki, the group(s) can be free-form and spontaneous.

[edit] Completed Items

The following items have been completed and update status is listed.

[edit] Site Updates

Launch RichmondWiki.org to the public. UPDATE Complete.
Create a PDF “Cheatsheet” to distribute with blogger outreach efforts and to encourage more people to edit and create content. UPDATE The sheet can be found here.
More consistent branding and design. I’m not a designer, so the logo and MediaWiki skin are not very pretty. UPDATE New RichmondWiki logo blog post.
Fix the footer issue once and for all. It tends to “ride up” on short articles/pages and partially cover the Adsense ads. Looks ugly and unprofessional. I don’t just want to keep pushing it down the page though, since it is useful. Just need to tweak some CSS to make the position relative. UPDATE I pushed the footer down a few more lines. It may disappear on some pages and ride up on others, but it’s better than it was.
Create and update a sitemap.xml file. The blog has one thanks to this plugin, but the wiki generateSitemap.php maintenance script is inaccessible on the shared hosting plan. Update 2.11.09 - I found a new XML Sitemap Generator Extension that works!

[edit] Promotion

A press release to the Richmond media once we get a few hundred quality articles. Update 12.14.08 Press Release was distributed on 11.20.08.
Create A Facebook group or other online communities. This may be premature, will revisit once general awareness increases. Update 03.16.09: Facebook Group created.