The Sinner's Guide - We Need You!

[sunil]

Hey everyone,

The Sinner's Guide has been on a Wiki since the site relaunch, which means that any registered user of The Sinner can log into the Wiki and add/edit content to their heart's desire.

At the moment, though, it's looking a bit bare in patches. It would be really great if more people could get involved with adding content.

Even if people only contributed a small amount here and there, the cumulative effect would be to have a lot more information than if one person slaved away on their own.

As an example, there are many, many societies and sports clubs. I doubt a single person in the Uni has ever been to every single one, and could add useful content to all the Society/Sports Club pages. But if one or two people who are involved in each society or sports club added content to their respective pages, it would be great!

The same goes for the Schools/Department pages, as well as for the Shops and Bars/Pubs pages.

In fact, we've even created all the Schools (though not all the departments, yet), the Pubs/Bars, the Societies and the Halls of Residence for you - they just need more content. [We think we've got all of these... if we've missed your favourite society/bar/other place, then we're very sorry - but you can easily add it].

So, please do get involved! Take a look at the Community Portal for some ideas.

Sunil

[RedCelt69]

The society list is one of the most disappointingly empty areas of The Sinner. The list is incomplete afaik and very few have any content.

Would it be a really silly idea to ask the societies to provide a description of what they do, why they do it, where they do it, when they do it and how often... (or, at the very least, a url to their site) otherwise, the entry will be removed from The Sinner's list? I appreciate you might be left with an even more incomplete list than you have at the moment, but at least those that are there would have meaningful descriptions.

I could offer my help, but as I'm in week 3 of my 1st year, I'm not really in a position to give information to anyone else (without first researching it).

[Verdandi]

I just made my first attempt to fill in some information and was informed by the site that I am not authorised to edit the page since I do not fall under the category of "users". Now, in some aspects of the term I think this a valid point but in terms of being a registered member of the Sinner this is not true. Any advice?

[Admin]

The Sinner is currently made of three main sections - the structure of the main site, the messageboards and the Sinner's Guide.

At the moment, you will need to log into the Sinner's Guide in order to edit it, even if you are already logged into the other sections. If there's still a fault with this, and it still doesn't recognise you, please let us know and we'll fix it.

[Verdandi]

Thanks but Nevermind. It was solved by reloading the page. I don't know what happened but it is fine now.

[Thalia]

I have made a page for Project Anime - it's a start at least. It isn't suprising really that the guide is so empty - it hasn't been there for very long after all

[munchingfoo]

I really need to write a review for that new curry house. Their student takeaway deal is really rather good.

[sunil]

The Societies pages are bare because (I think, but I could be wrong) on the Old Sinner, there wasn't a separate article for each society. There was only a list of a societies and clubs - when we set up the Wiki, we just copied this list to the Wiki.

I'm sure there are bits of it which are very out of date, but again this is where the power of community comes in. I probably don't know that <insert obscure society name here> shut down 2 years ago because of a lack of interest, unless I was directly involved. If someone else was involved, they probably know!

Its the same with information about current sports clubs and societies - we've provided the basic framework and templates, but can't do all the content ourselves. It's too much for one person in their spare time. But if everyone gets together and does stuff they know about - whether it's a society, club, bar, shop or School - things will move forward.

So: adopt-a-page that you know a bit about.

Sunil

[Fawksie]

It's sensible to keep the entire list of societies because red links are the easiest way to find out what pages need written, and to actually start the construction of the pages. It makes sure societies aren't forgotten about.

[zipporah]

I don't get the academic depatments pages - what is meant to go under 'Organisation'?

[Fawksie]

The internal structure, presumably. Departments, divisions, research groups.

[Bizarre Atheist]

It seems a shame to have so many empty pages - I think it would be more honest to have those with no content displayed as red links. That way when you click 'Random Page' you would get content immediately, instead of a steady stream of blank articles.

[eagle]

Or we should start filling in more articles!

[Fawksie]

Any page with any content on it whatsoever will get a blue link. There's no way that I know of to tell MediaWiki to redlink a particular page that has its infobox filled in and nothing else.

[sunil]

Regarding empty pages: the reason I went through and manually added the infoboxes to the society/bar/etc. pages was that a few pages had some information in them, but didn't have any kind of structure - and definitely none of the standard infoboxes.

Bearing in mind that we're hoping loads of people get involved with adding to the wiki, some of whom will not have used wikis before and have no idea about infoboxes or how to generate them (and have no real desire to learn), I thought it best to add them to as many pages as possible. Then it's relatively obvious where people need to put some place's telephone number (or whatever) when they're editing the pages.

As Fawksie says, though - that immediately marks pages as having "content" of some kind... I'm not aware of any way of avoiding this either I'm afraid.

Sunil

[Anon.]

What happened to all the content of the old Sinner's Guide? Presumably lots of it would be out of date, but if you copied all that across mightn't that be better than chocks of pages with nothing in them?

[orudge]

Some of the content from the old guide has been copied across. Some more may be in time, but the old guide didn't feature a lot of information on things like societies, so we do still need fresh content too.

[Bizarre Atheist]

In light of recent AGMs, reshuffles, depositions, installations etc etc, and as an aide to exam procrastination, dare I suggest that the guide could do with some sprucing up?

[eagle]

I daresay you (and anyone else with a Sinner account) could have a bash at updating it. The more the merrier, right?

[Bizarre Atheist]

Already have, though only the meagre areas of my expertise...