BITPlan waihekepedia Wiki:Community Portal

What Is a Community Portal?

Who indeed is this page for? By the name I'm guessing the community of Waiheke. What should go on this page? I'm not sure but I'm hoping the community of Waiheke Island can tell me

Join for free and have your say right here ....

Self Reliance Initiatives

By the time our supplies of cheap and abundant oil become expensive and scarce will we have made smooth transition to forms of society that allow us to meet our needs with grace and style?

There are a number of initiatives on this island already which acknowledge that Peak Oil, along with climate change, are issues that are likely to impact us in the near future, we are talking years, not decades. In a meeting held at the Palm Beach Hall on September 25th, 2007, people watched some video clips of Rob Hopkins speaking about Transition Towns. It seemed to the circle gathered there, that an inventory of these initiatives would be a useful thing to record.

An exciting development in the world of planning for a lower energy future is the Transition Towns movement - see www.transitiontowns.org.nz and in particular the Waiheke page of this site.

Deletion review

You've probably noticed me deleting outright spam and blocking the spammers. I regard these actions as uncontroversial, because the spam is entirely unrelated to Waiheke.

Today I made a more controversial deletion; of User:Koiroc, which was a user page advertising Waiheke accommodation. The user has made no other edits so far. I feel we don't have clear policies on what degree of advertising is acceptable on Waihekepedia, so I welcome feedback from the other admins on whether my deletion was appropriate. Other users probably can't see the text that I deleted, but I'd welcome feedback on the policy anyway.-Gadfium 18:36, 10 January 2008 (NZDT)

Gadfium: I did have a bit of a conversation about this with User:Hackademic on his talk page a while ago about another similar page, Concept Digital which he edited a bit to sound less directly like advertising. In that case I think that Concept Digital is a legit page as it is a business that people on Waiheke may find useful to have access and information about, but the tone of the article should tend towards the informative rather than being copied from the marketing spiel of the business. There is also a Category:Commercial that has been used for some pages. In regards to this blanking, perhaps creating a page for the "business" and directing the users attention to that page instead of using his/her user page and providing some guidelines on what kind of content for commercial ventures is acceptable is what we need. The Guidelines page does have a bit to say about this, "This doesn’t mean, for example, that someone who owns a business or is involved in an issue or project can’t contribute or edit copy about that business, issue or project. Often on the island they are the very people who hold the most knowledge about that business, issue or project. But it does mean they cannot advance one point-of-view or opinion over others at the expense of neutrality." which would exclude most of the marketing stuff that was present on that page. Countrymike 16:42, 11 January 2008 (NZDT)

Thanks for the feedback. That page was just an advertising blurb. I don't feel like creating an article for the business, but if one is created in reasonably neutral terms, I won't delete it.-Gadfium 14:24, 12 January 2008 (NZDT)

Shared account

User:Waihekesubmission posted their password on their user page (they posted their username incorrectly though). It's my understanding that wikis don't allow shared accounts because there's no way of tracking edits to any given user, and anyone can change the shared password thus taking control of the account. We don't allow anon edits here, so I think we certainly wouldn't want shared accounts.

I've blocked the account until such time as we can agree on a policy for such accounts. If anyone thinks blocking is premature, feel free to unblock.-Gadfium 20:10, 28 February 2008 (NZDT)

Gadfium: I think you're right and that a shared account is not a good idea for accountability or the type of discourse that they're trying to solicit with this gesture. There was a story in the Gulf News (I think it was the Gulf news) today about it. I'm not sure what to do about this though as the password will now forever be in the history - so blocking the account is really all you can do. I'll try to leave some notes on the user page and perhaps a link to the instructions on how to sign up. Countrymike 20:36, 28 February 2008 (NZDT)

Thanks. It would be possible to delete the user page and then selectively restore only the versions which don't have the password; since the first revision did have it, that would leave yourself as the apparent only editor of the page, which I don't think is desirable.-Gadfium 21:37, 28 February 2008 (NZDT)