A WikiGardener is a person who goes around the wiki, correcting typos here, rearranging things to be more readable there. In general, good WikiGardeners are liked and respected, since they have the magical ability to take a jumble of pages and create good, readable text out of them. Anyone can be a WikiGardener. If you see a typo or a spelling mistake, feel free to correct it! If you feel up to it, rearrange a page, or split a long page to smaller pages, or if you think some page belongs to some WikiCategory, add a link to it. If you make a mistake, don't worry about it, since everything you do can be restored. Also, remember to add a change note when doing your wikigardening.

See also: WikiGnome, WikiTroll

Important pages for gardeners#

• WikiEtiquette - read if you haven't already done so.
• IdeasContent unavailable! (broken link)https://jspwiki-wiki.apache.org/images/out.png - here is where all new ideas grow.
• Bug reportsContent unavailable! (broken link)https://jspwiki-wiki.apache.org/images/out.png - the weeds grow here, so it must be cleaned occasionally.
• RefactorMe - People link to this page, if they think that a page should be cleaned or reorganized.
• RecentChanges - Check this page for suspicious page edits. Suspicious edits are usually from anonymous users (ip address only) and provide no "change note".
  • Spam - occasionally spammers come to post their URLs. One of way of removing the spam is by restoring the page to its previous version.
  • Noise - occasionally visitors may add a few lines of useless text to a page. Other times, they may clear out an entire page for no reason. These can also be handled by restoring the page to its previous version. However, noise added to a personal page by the owner of the personal page shouldn't be removed since they might just be testing.
  • Testing - sometimes people use the wiki to test things. These could be called noise, but on the other hand, they're just trying to figure out what JSPWiki is. Restore the page, and if possible, put a note on the user's page that they should really be trying at the sandboxContent unavailable! (broken link)https://jspwiki-wiki.apache.org/images/out.png.

Directed WikiGardening?#

The atom wikiContent unavailable! (broken link)https://jspwiki-wiki.apache.org/images/out.png folks are doing WikiGardening so that everyone meets up on the IrcChannel and then you start the gardening. I think this is a brilliant idea, should we schedule one too?

I think that's a great idea. I also think this would be especially helpful with persistent chat. However, IRC is only synchronous. If someone says something in Europe and 10am and another person logs onto IRC in the US East Coast at 9am, they totally miss the comment. Perhaps we have our persistent chat channel within a page right here? I find that whenever I log onto IRC, no one is there to chat with me... It would be great if the chat would be logged on the server.

Yes, a bot that would a) log stuff on the Wiki, and b) automatically translate any WikiWord to a link to this site would be very cool. The time zone issue we just have to arrange somehow; Euroevening would be morning in the States, and thus something like 22:00 EEST (19:00 GMT) might be a good idea. -- JanneJalkanen

More than once I thought about testing my skills by writing an (irc) bot. But I did not find a reasonable thing for this bot to do... but this idea sounds cool. Are there already any volunteers to work on that? Would Java or Ruby be acceptable languages to code this bot? Please leave a hint at least at TomZ.

TomZ, take a look at pircbotContent unavailable! (broken link)https://jspwiki-wiki.apache.org/images/out.png. The work's pretty much done for you, and you can concentrate on your bot logic. -- ebu

Sure, if we will do it in Java i would use pircbot for handling the protocol stuff. -- TomZ

A forum would be more practical. - anon

Another thought: anytime either (a) an edit results in a wiki page consisting of a single line or a single token (that is not a plugin or setting a variable like an alias); or (b) the edit itself consists of a single line consisting of a single token (as opposed to a spell check fix), a NoiseBot could flag this as suspicious. What the NoiseBot would do is unclear. It could add a link to an auto-maintained SuspiciousPages page, generate an RSS feed or email, etc. But the idea being that there are some very typical noise edits that could be handled or at least flagged automatically. Just an idea anyway. Okay, I've added it as IdeaNoiseBot. -- MurrayAltheim