Talk:Main Page

General thoughts on helping new people contribute:

Take notes about any communication, and share ideas and brainstorming, on the wiki.
Set up a Cafe (point the Community Portal there) for general discussion... invite a few newbies to chime in there so it feels more like a cafe and less like sporadic planning sessions :)
Include links to the cafe/portal and to RC from the top of the sidebar.
Move the search bar up in the sidebar -- hey, there it is!

[edit] How open to make this community

Open question : how open should this be? how large will it become? readers/editors/reusers? how should access to data be provided?

Spam control :
1. install the Captcha extension.
2. set up LocalSettings so that there is a minimum # of edits and seconds-since-logon before an editor stops being a 'newbie' and gains full privileges

How large :
1. At least a few people from each country listed. 100-1000? But how often will they edit?
2. Lots of readers, but perhaps mainly through reuse and not directly from this site...

Access to data:
1. Stats templates should link to the raw sources.
2. There should be sections of the site dedicated to the search methods, the data manipulation, etc
  NB - the above will introduce many new editors as well -- the audience of people doing such research / with comments or suggestions about how to improve results / with ideas about how to use open search algorithms, etc

This is important to keeping an active thriving body of users. Ways to make this painless:

set up captcha extensions so that anons have a hard time adding external links.
set up blacklists for IPs and URLs (using SORBS and global url blacklists) so that those IPs are automatically blocked and only admins can edit a page to include a blacklisted URL
set up 'newbie' flags so that anons and new user accounts are restricted in what they can do (just basic editing, just editing certain namespaces) until they've been around for a little while. There are two LocalSettings properties that define how long before one grows out of being a newbie. See mediawiki.org on Autopromotion criteria for details.
- Basic roles in a standard mediawiki: Anon/IP, Newbie user, User, Admin.