User talk:Steven Harrison

Getting Started[edit source]

Welcome to the site, I wanted to first give you a quick rundown of how to get started. First, if you haven’t checked out these pages, please open them up and keep them around, as they’ll likely be helpful:

Getting Started - includes how to create a new page
How to create a great article
Wiki Formatting

The most important may end up being that last link on formatting. Another great way to get familiar with the formatting is to look at the technical version of any article. You could look at the backend of this message to you to see some basic coding and how that works. Also, for example, since you will be writing lots of ICANN meetings, take a look at the ICANN 40 article:

http://icannwiki.com/index.php/ICANN_40

If your logged in, click the “Edit” tab, and you will see the backend of the article, which is what you will be responsible for making. Each article begins with a template, which is that info found between the double {{ markings. This template makes the right-hand info box you see on the finished page. I'm still trying to find where we hid the blank template for the ICANN meetings, but until then you can just copy the template from a completed meetings page (i.e., ICANN 40) and then delete the information applicable to that meeting only.

A big hurdle will be learning all the ICANN lingo, but our site has pages on all the confusing acronyms (SO when you come across something like “The GAC consults the RSSAC”, don’t worry, we have pages on both the GAC and RSSAC). It could help to read our general article on ICANN.

As far as the general layout of the ICANN Meetings articles, open up those example pages I already forwarded you on vWorker, they are found as blue links on the following master page on ICANN Meetings. The only ones that are fully completed are ICANN 41, ICANN 40, and ICANN 1. The other blue links are pages that have been started but not finished.

A note on the meetings, There will be less information on meetings as you go back in time. So ICANN 2 will have less info than ICANN 39. One source you’ll be using a lot is ICANN’s own archive of all meetings, found here. Before 2008 the meetings do not have individual websites and logos.

A very basic outline of how to map out a new page on an ICANN meeting:

TEMPLATE

‘’’ICANN # in <location>’’’ took place from ___ to ___. It was hosted by [[link hosting organization]]. The major topics of discussion were: (list with links of appropriate articles).
==Major Events==
===Subhead===
Explanation
===Subhead===
Explanation
==Newly elected officials==
List any newly elected officials and, if applicable, who they replaced.
==Sponsors==
List meeting’s sponsors and note level of sponsorship.

SO. that’s a lot already. I imagine you already have enough to look at and mess around with. Please let me know if you have any questions, preferably via on-site communication. The way to do this is to click on my Blue username (Andrew) and then go to my discussion page, that is the “Discussion” tab found off of my User page. Just add to the bottom of the page and it will notify next time I am logged into the system.

GOOD LUCK! Andrew

batch 1[edit source]

So I just added the beginning of Batch 1 to your User page, we use the user pages as a way to list out work and also to discuss the editing process when that time comes. As it's your first batch, it's batch 1, but we are constantly creating content here, so I hope you have the patience to learn the wiki so we can continue to work together! Andrew

Great, I understand it's daunting. It may help to just star with some of those Meetings that already have pages created but that are not finished ICANN i.e., ICANN 38. I wish you the best of luck as you try to get a grip on it, and I hope you do because we love to continue to work with our authors once they've figured out the hard part of how to format and write a good page. Andrew

ICANN 2 Article[edit source]

Okay, so I think the best thing for me to do is to just bullet out the edits I would make to this page right now.

First, I imagine the template and the UNDER CONSTRUCTION were imported and already there, but these are important things that should be at the start of EVERY article. Once we have edited the article we remove the under construction image.
The first two paragraphs are unnecessary ("ICANN was formed in 1998..."/"ICANN doesn't control the Internet...") This is important to know as background, but we assume that 90% of the people that would be on this page already know what ICANN is, and if they don't then they can click on a blue internal link.
Speaking of blue internal links, I don't see any of them. This makes sense because you likely don't know what kinds of pages are on our site and what you can link to. But the word ICANN for example, should be linked the first time it is used in an article, and occasionally after that.. (No need to link it EVERY time, that is just too much)
We are entirely neutral, and try not to use language that implies any sort of partial evaluation. So I would edit out the line that "meeting 2 would prove to be better than the first one".. It could be something like, "This meeting was reviewed as successful, especially since it was only the second meeting of the organization"..
We present what we find, not what we don't. So there's no need to acknowledge that you can't find find certain info at this time.
No need to be specific with times, i.e. (at 1:30 pm they met), if you have a full schedule then it might be worth repeating. But, in general, think about what people might want to know about a meeting that happened 10+ years ago, at this point they don't care what time of day they met but what they met about.
The formatting of breaking it up day by day is fine. That looks good. There isn't only one way to format, so maybe for a different meeting you won't break it down day by day, but when you have more info for each day you might.
We try to avoid external links whenever we can sue internal links instead. But to add external links is done like [http://www.icann.org/en/meetings/berlin/ this]. that is, you use one bracket [ThenTheLink.com then1spaceForTheLinkTitle]. Internal links are double brackets like [[this]].