Difference between revisions of "Introduction for New Members"

Revision as of 21:39, 24 May 2011

Welcome to the introductory page for new or potential Members. You are all welcome as new Members or potential new Members. The purpose of this page is to introduce you to the design philosophy behind the My Big TIE Wiki and explain something of what your duties would be as Members and thus as creators and editors of pages within the Wiki.

This is not a free form, everybody is an editor who comes in off the street, kind of Wiki. I have done a little reading on WikiPedia about their success with that approach. Basically they are successful because they have a relative vast number of editors who are dedicated to what they do. If someone creates a page or an edit that amounts to vandalism, they have continuous monitoring of changes and that undesirable change can be corrected within literally a few hours. A lot of time of those editors is however spent in making that kind of correction on a continuing basis. We do not anticipate having such a large group of editors with that kind of time available in total so we have decided to make page creation and editing a much more regulated thing, limited to those who have been accepted as Members. Visitors can post and edit on the Discussion or 'talk' pages without even providing their names. The Wiki software provides a record of the computer from which any vandalism originated so it is expected that this will be readily controlled by banning further posting from that computer.

Those of you who become Members will be so selected based upon several things in the evaluation.

• Have you read the Trilogy by Tom Campbell, My Big TOE and more than once?
• Are you a Forum member and post regularly and with high quality posts on the Forum?
• Have you demonstrated a good command of the concepts within My Big TOE?
• Are you either a good speller or familiar with spell checkers and their effective use?
• Do you have an academic background or otherwise have a good command of editorial writing?
• Can you refrain from 'texting' shortcuts and general poor quality writing and chatting?
• Can you dedicate sufficient time to the project that you can also monitor Discussion pages?
• Have you read the Help Manual for MediaWiki that is our present standard for creating the Wiki?
• Are you prepared to try to overcome any deficits you might have to be fully effective?
• Are you prepared to work in relative obscurity without the ability to display your personality?

For your convenience, here is a link to the manual referenced above: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Contents

The above list is not an absolute determiner of suitability for Membership and editing the Wiki. Some of you have great strengths in some areas but English is not your primary language. Perhaps some of you could function better and happily so by monitoring the Discussion pages for problems and even more important, for gems of advice on improving the Wiki. There are functions within the Wiki software where you can monitor or 'watch' pages for changes just as you can request notification of new posts in a thread of the Bulletin board via an e-mail notice. Some of you could do an excellent job but simply do not have the time because of outside commitments of earning a living, caring for a family, etc. Please refrain from requesting membership if you simply do not have the time. You can actually perform a very useful and valuable function by coming to the Wiki as a Visitor when and as time permits and providing us with comments and suggestions for improvements on the many Discussion pages.

Above all, please do not be offended if you are not accepted as a Member of the Wiki. So many of you are long term board members that have become somewhat like family and are cared about. But you know yourself that you perhaps do not make an ideal Member as an editor and creator of Wiki pages. Or you simply do not have the time to consistently participate which is important. This kind of work requires the ability to apply a degree of compulsiveness in ones characteristics. Sort of like they say about earning a Ph. D. requiring a degree of compulsiveness or you simply won't be willing to take all the hassles and hurdles that are required to get that magic piece of paper.

So while we would like to welcome you all as Members to create and edit the Wiki, making the work load so much lighter, we know that realistically we are not likely to have a gold rush stampede to become Members. Just as all Forum members are not able to participate to the same degree.

Other pages are being created to help direct your initial efforts as Members. Please come back to this page on occasion as it is likely to be updated as we experience the actual Wiki operation as opposed to just our expectations for the future.

--Ted Vollers 19:22, 24 May 2011 (CDT)