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User:The Transhumanist/page4

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(...cont.)

Major contributions

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  • Meaning of life - it's amazing how many people edit this page, continuously transforming it. I got my feet wet on this article, developing it and maintaining it - it's a major maintenance task in and of itself. I'm less involved with it now, but I return from time to time to touch it up. I'm very happy the Popular views section has grown strong again - it had been decimated by someone demanding references (giving it the "WP:VER axe"). I saved the section from demise, jumpstarting it with a few references (those are not easy to track down), and I'm extremely grateful that others have completely rebuilt the section.
  • I've done a great deal of work on Wikipedia's internal hypertext-based user interface, including key navigational pages, nav bars, and menu items...
    • Main Page redesign - As User:Go for it! I was instrumental in getting the Main Page redesigned and approved, restarting that project after it had gone dead for a few months (back in the Fall of 2005), and helping to push it through to acceptance by the community early in 2006. In addition to participating on the redesign itself, I took the initiative to watch over the project, posting regular notices around Wikipedia to attract developers and feedback - and I created the Community Bulletin Board to help spread the word about the final vote, in which over 1000 Wikipedians participated. Throughout the project, I wrote project updates, created the procedural instructions. I encouraged participants to create multiple designs, and created the Wikipedia:Main Page alternatives page to display those designs which didn't become the default main page. This also provided a home for all the other main page alternatives that were floating around - serving people with special needs, like displaying Wikipedia on their PDAs or cell phones.
    • WP:CBB' - As mentioned above, I created Wikipedia's Community Bulletin Board, to provide a central place to post notices.
    • WP:HELP - I led the effort to revamp the help page, expanding its coverage immensely and chopping it up into its current menu/subpage structure. To improve its coverage, I scoured the Wikipedia namespace for every helpful page I could find, and piled them all into a "link dump" from which they were taken one by one and placed into the table of contents-like structure of the help page. Though we folded the whole thing into a menu structure, a one-page treatment is still available as the Help:Contents/Site map.
    • WP:TOTD - I resurrected a project that had been dead for over a year called Wikipedia:Tip of the Day, which is displayed on both the Community Portal and Wikipedia's help page. I wrote dozens of tips for the project, wrote the instructions for the department and invited others to join in on the fun of creating tips. I also built the schedule for displaying the tips, and the library displaying the tips by subject. Special thanks to CBDunkerson and RichardF for their help in automating the display of the tips, including a randomizing display template, and the repeating "yearless year" which removed the stress of the previously onerous chore of rescheduling the tips each year. Several templates are available which present the tip of the day in various formats, for display on user pages - including {{Totd}}, {{Totd-random-noborder}}, {{Totd-random}}, {{Totd-tomorrow}} (includes a section for the the project's announcements), {{Totd3}}, {{Totd4}}, {{Totd CP}}, and {{Totd b}}.
    • In the spring of 2006, I stirred up development on the Wikipedia:Community Portal, but was kicked off the page by a handful of others, about an hour before my design was completed.  :) The elements I was responsible for that were retained included the Community Bulletin Board, the Tip of the Day, and various links. The parts that were rejected I turned into another page (see below):
    • Rejected from the Community Portal, I transformed the bulk of the work I had contributed to that page into Wikipedia's main directory.
    • I was instrumental in getting the old side-bar replaced with a modified design that rearranged the links in a more logical order, and which included a link to Wikipedia's Table of Contents. I also posted and pushed the proposal that resulted in a Contents link being placed in the header of the Main Page.

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