Google donates $2 million to support Wikipedia

[Sam Fraser]

Google Inc., the Internet's most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web's most-read sites.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hDY41ubQIWGVE-O9Fhi0NuLhmL4gD9DU5MF00

Hey, PERMANENT is the web's most-read reference on asteroid and lunar resource utilisation, right? We're volunteers, right? Any ideas on how we can approach Google and get oodles of cash? :cool:

We gotta switch PERMANENT to some kind of restricted wiki so it can become up-to-date and relevant again. It's so out-of-date now and there's too much info out there for one person to organise and incorporate.

Where's that Mark Prado gotten to? :rolleyes:

[Rhyshaelkan]

I think one of the members here suggested that we turn PERMANENT into wiki format. I would be all over that if editing is easy on wiki.

I use wiki for so much it is silly. I also like wiki's style of providing references. So you can check to see if people are blowing smoke or have real info.

I have seen other forums bring up a topic of space of some sort. Occasionally they will refer to the pages of PERMANENT.

Learning a bit more about search-engines. And watching those that traffic this site. Spiders are sent to every web-page on the net looking for info. I see them on the forum at least once a day.

The more info we compile in one area the more exposure PERMANENT could receive, including white papers on research.

In further. We need to allow google ads at the bottom of our pages somehow. It is a viable way to earn a few pennies. I see google ads at the bottom of near every forum except this one.

While it will mean having adware on your computer which needs daily cleaning with AVG anti-virus/anti-adware. It could earn monies for PERMANENT.

[Sam Fraser]

Good points, Rhy. I've already asked Mark just now about the CMS he had been working on. I've suggested just keeping the current website as is and building a wiki from scratch in parallel using a subdomain like wiki.permanent.com might be faster. Wikipedia gets huge traffic from Google, and a wiki-driven PERMANENT reference section should get higher rankings than the website does now. Good you're learning more search engines, including search engine optimisation, presumably. I did a little SEO myself many moons ago and still remember the very basics, like:

1. First deciding the topic/theme of a webpage and then selecting certain target keywords and similar key phrases you'll work into the content of that page.
2. Writing 300-500 words and not be too repetitive with those selected keywords. If you want to write 1100 words, best to split into two pages each with a slightly different theme and similar but not identical keywords.
3. Use < h1 >< h2 >< h3 > etc. tags appropriately to give the webpage structure so the spiderbot can drill down and read the content easily (usually at least one keyword word per <h> tag is best).
4. Adding proper descriptions to pictures and outgoing links in the alt part of the image/hyperlink tag, hopefully including at least one relevant keyword.
5. Linking to similar themed relevant pages in external websites with high SE rankings - or is it getting inbound links from external websites with high SE rankings? (I have NO idea about this in 2010.)

Am I pretty behind the times now, Rhy? :eek:

Oh, Google ads wouldn't hurt, either! :p

[Rhyshaelkan]

Google ads are funny, but made rather well. They will take the current topic of the thread and try and find an advertisement suited for the topic. Then display it at the bottom of said topic. Seems to work well, but I have never clicked on the ads personally ;)

As to html, I am all thumbs. If wiki works on html I am sunk. However I think I have an xml and html book laying around that I could refresh on.

Even now I try to research something from another forum on space and lo and behold I am referred to a page from PERMANENT. But there is much new stuff going on that could be added to a PERMANENT wiki.

[Rhyshaelkan]

On the topic of google ads. I used the Firefox "view source" function to find this bit of code.

Oops it will not allow me to post html here.

I know very little code. But I like copy + paste ;)

Google ads seems like a very simple thing to add.

[Mark Prado]

I have installed MediaWiki, the same software as Wikipedia uses, allegedly the most popular package on the internet, blah blah blah. (For such a popular package, it leaves a few key items to be desired as regards documentation for setup, e.g., it discourages using a subdomain like wiki.permanent.com and implies it may not work as such which is what I found by trying, it doesn't tell you how to prevent a major and very basic security breach in the end which I had to figure out, and some other things, but here it is ...)

Who wants to take charge of getting the Wiki set up and managing it?

www.permanent.com/wiki

Ask me or Sam for the login username and password. I am very open to all historical contributors here going at it all guns.

The main issue to me is getting some decent navigation on the left side, such as an expandable menu tree similar to what I have on www.thailandguru.com (it doesn't need to float, but take a look and you'll get the idea). We need some decent way to navigate, whatever that may be. If we need to search for a third party plug-in, fine, whatever, just find a solution and if you need it installed then tell me. Identify it and send me the details.

A cursory search turned up this example of having a tree on the left:

http://semeb.com/dpldemo/index.php?title=Main_Page

which uses this extension:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TreeAndMenu

So that would probably seal the deal for MediaWiki unless somebody else knows something I don't (which isn't much of a challenge at all since I know almost nil about Wikis!).

I have added this extension, but I haven't edited it yet. I am not a programmer (CSS, etc.) though it looks pretty simple. If somebody wants to edit this, I'd need to send you the FTP username and password for the entire permanent.com site.

I've looked at a lot of Wikis on the internet and they all lack this basic element of usability -- a &#%@#-ing decent navigation bar on the left. I couldn't find any other tree menus. Wikis like Wikipedia are fine for simple 1-page articles, FAQs, and websites with a dozen pages. For content-intensive websites with 50-100 pages or more, they fall flat, so you hit a wall with growth unless you don't mind an RTFM poke around attitude towards internet users (not a prescription for success). If you look for pages by a search engine like Google, fine, e.g., Wiki lunar fiberglass. But if you want to navigate all lunar base items, how do you? That's what a tree menu is for.

MediaWiki is not the only option, as there are many Wiki packages. It would be good if somebody assessed them all. I checked out many in one evening and was not impressed with them.

Comparison issues are:

User friendliness (usability)
Features
Management
Security

Which Wiki package would you all recommend? If it doesn't have a tree menu, and if I don't see a decent alternative to a tree menu, then I think we can save time by putting it on the blacklist.

I get tired of hearing the suitcase words & phrases like powerful, expandable, unleashed, etc. Then I use it and I find myself on a short leash ...

At this point, I would like to set up two parallel websites and see which one does better, the Wiki one vs. the main one. I hope the Wiki one wins, of course, but if it turns into a mess, at least we still have the other one as an established alternative.

You can copy all the content from the main website to the Wiki.

It wouldn't take much to beat the main website simply because it's outdated, but the existing website is definitely not going anywhere unless and until the Wiki one takes off and is user friendly enough for a newcomer to navigate intuitively. The old website is a fallback position in case actual participation in the Wiki doesn't actually come about...

I'm also VERY open to somebody taking over the setup. I can give you the FTP username and password. However, it's for the entire permanent.com site (since MediaWiki doesn't work on a subdomain).

It's time now for:

(1) inputs into the /wiki
and/or
(2) help with the coding of the menus
and/or
(3) suggestions for alternative wikis with sample sites and reasons why it might be better than MediaWiki with the TreeAndMenu extension.

Any of the above 3.

Mark

[Sam Fraser]

This is an informative post. I didn't know wikis had such limitations, like the lack of a way to develop a tree structure for navigation. Having a simple expandable menu is a pretty basic requirement for an encyclopedic website that will contain hundreds or thousands of pages that need to be organised logically in sections and subsections. A left-hand expandable menu should be easy to do in this day and age of advanced CSS and AJAX.

Maybe a CMS (Content Management System, a simple interface/system for allowing non-techies to update webpages without knowing anything about HTML programming) is a better way to go after all. There are so many options nowadays, and it takes so long to evaulate just one or two, never mind the dozens available.

Either way, it's definitely not necessary to trash the current website, which does bring in visitors through search engine results. Maybe a wiki version can be developed in parallel, or a CMS-built version of the website built from the bottom up, HTML and CSS compliant with modern web standards. The only weaknesses of the current website are:

1. Lack of up-to-date content
2. Creaky code from 2001 that has to be edited manually whenever content is added

Any wiki or CMS must allow us to search engine optimise or SEO the webpages we add so our pages appear on the first page of Google search results whenever someone searches for something asteroid/lunar related. SEO basics are, well, basic to understand e.g. the importance of writing a descriptive "title" for the webpage, using < h1 > < h2 > tags for writing main headings and subheadings through the page. A wiki and CMS is useful to us only if it also allows control over aspects of the webpage's code and programming, not just the content.

Maybe one aspect of this I could research and develop myself are basic guidelines on how to SOE a webpage for maximum benefit. (There are two main aspects to SEO: writing quality relevant content that's search engine friendly and writing efficient modern code that's search engine friendly.) We can then see which CMS and wikis allow us the greatest flexibility to that end.

[Mark Prado]

The main advantage of the Wiki, as I see it, is that it has the back office already in place to log all additions and edits from all contributors, and manage all that.

The main challenges of any user supplied content are quality and assimilation, especially in view of spammers, overly biased people, poor content writers, and the like, the usual human issues.

In my opinion, it's better to have an easy way for people to submit input to the curators / editors, and to have a core set of curators / editors who process everything that goes onto the site, with thank-you credits to submitters at the bottom of the page.

Raw user supplied content can go into the forum and to comments at the bottom of pages.

Nonetheless, I do want to try this MediaWiki with the TreeAndMenu extension.

[Rhyshaelkan]

I like the tree/sidebar as the current PERMANENT site has it. It allows you to preview the various topics available.

If we could combine a good sidebar with cross-reference links inside the material it should be a nice system. More than anything I like about wiki, is cross-reference links.

Does wiki automatically set up those links? Or do they have to be placed manually?

If I become an editor I will have to dust off my old keyboard express to run standard macros. I am an lazy typist. Heck I even set up my font with a hotkey to avoid typing it all. :lol:

[moonus111]

Wikis are very powerful tools, It would be very sweet to have one, but there are a lot of caveats and pitfalls.

A wiki is a CMS of sorts... but that is somewhat open to debate. I use Drupal 6(a CMS) and it took 6 months of research in order to learn the basics. I would imagine that learning how to use a wiki would be similar.

There is code available for many of the types of websites out there (CMS's, Wiki's, Forums, etc.) that can automatically do SEO, submission and keywords. However one important thing to note, is that SEO does factor in the age of the website as far as ranking goes, so PERMANENT has a lot going for it in this area. I wondered why the forum was outsourced rather than sub-domain"ed", but it's probably because of management reasons, easier to manage.