OrthodoxWiki:Community Portal
Welcome to the OrthodoxWiki Community Portal! We're glad you've chosen to stop by, explore and take part in the ongoing work of creating and developing the world's first online community-edited encyclopedia of Orthodox Christianity.
Whatever else a wiki is, it is fundamentally about community, about bringing a group of people together for a particular work or conversation. You are formally invited to join this conversation and to take a role in shaping it. Your host is FrJohn, assisted by a team of sysops to help with the management of the site. Our sysops hail from many jurisdictions all over the world. Many thanks to everyone who has devoted some time towards making this place a valuable resource for people!
Contents
Join in!
Please feel free to start a new discussion by creating a new article or category. What do you know about? The life of a saint? Do you know some excellent Byzantine chant CDs? An episode from Church History? Share the knowledge! Have you read an excellent book? Post a review. See something missing? Add it! Want to adopt OrthodoxWiki in a language besides English? Let us know! Driven to submit a new logo? We'd love to see it!
Take a look at the numerous articles we now have in multiple categories for some ideas for what we've already been developing, but don't feel limited by what you see there, either.
If you're serious about helping us, please register. Then click on your user name at the top right of the page to create a custom profile page.
How to contribute
Hop right in—just click edit (at the top of any page or section) to begin. Read the help files for details on creating and editing articles. Be sure to take a look at the Style Manual for our official community standards and guidelines for articles. Test and experiment in the Sandbox. Also be sure to take a look at the Community Portal for news about ongoing projects and as a gathering point for our work here. There is also a help wanted page to learn about projects that other users are working on and are looking for help.
Don't worry about messing up or breaking OrthodoxWiki—your work can always be cleaned up and honed by others, which is part of the spirit of this project. Take a look at existing articles which may be similar to yours, and model yours after those. You may also feel free to grab relevant content from Wikipedia (it's under a free documentation license), "Orthodoxize" and expand on it, and then put it here (be sure to leave in only the links relevant to OrthodoxWiki). A lot of our starting content came from there.
The WYSIWIG editor helps with most browsers. We also recommend the Wikipedia Extension for Mozilla Firefox. If you're using FireFox, you can also make use of Live Bookmarks for quick access to Recent Changes, New Pages, or many of the other Special pages. An OrthodoxWiki search engine plugin is now available for Firefox and related browsers (see OrthodoxWiki:Searching for details).
This site is shamelessly modelled on Wikipedia. Please visit their Meta-Wiki for lots of information about how things work around here.
Community life
Add your photo or browse the OrthodoxWiki:User gallery to see who's around these pages.
Some notes about wiki community living in general can be found at Meatball Wiki (and Wikipedia:Barn raising)
To get a sense of how we're doing here at OrthodoxWiki, check out OrthodoxWiki:Statistics and Special:Statistics.
An OrthodoxWiki IRC channel, sponsored by User:Joe Rodgers is now available for community chat. Please contact him if you have any questions.
On Facebook? Join the OrthodoxWiki group.
Discussion pages
- OrthodoxWiki:Trapeza (The main discussion page, intended to serve as the focal point for community talk)
- OrthodoxWiki:Inventory (Taking stock of the wiki, optimization discussion, etc.)
- OrthodoxWiki:Roadmap (Plans for the future)
- OrthodoxWiki:Meta Reflections (Discussions about the kind of project we're engaged in here)
- OrthodoxWiki:Administrators (Sysop to-do's & general notes for admins)
- OrthodoxWiki:Categories (Organization of articles and categories)
- OrthodoxWiki:News (Updates about what's happening on OrthodoxWiki)
- OrthodoxWiki:Reference desk (Questions and answers about research subjects)
- Category talk:Featured Articles (Nominate or contest a featured article)
Notice boards
- OrthodoxWiki:Suggestions (Suggestion Box for new articles and projects)
- OrthodoxWiki:Help wanted (A place to solicit help for specific articles and projects)
- OrthodoxWiki:Buzz (reverse links and "what they are saying" )
- Starting Points - for importing Wikipedia articles
Community Policies & Guidelines
- Style Manual
- OrthodoxWiki:FAQs
- OrthodoxWiki:Templates
- Spam Battleplan
- OrthodoxWiki:Mediation
- Help:Contents
- Help:Citing OrthodoxWiki
- Help:InterWiki links - How to use interwiki links, with notes on our customizations; and Special:Interwiki - a list of all interwiki links
Please note: Users are not allowed to have more than one account. This is not just to forestall funny business, but also to prevent confusion.
Copyright and Permissions
Please see OrthodoxWiki:Copyrights and Help:Image licenses. Also, please pay particular attention to the following:
- Help:Image_licenses#OCA.org - an important note on using images from OCA.org
- Help:Image_licenses#Holy_Transfiguration_Monastery - using icons from Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Brookline, MA USA)
For more general information, please see wikipedia:Category:Wikipedia_copyright.
Who's Who
- OrthodoxWiki:Patron saint (St. John of Damascus, pray for us!)
- Category:Sysops and Special:Listadmins
- Special:Listusers
Newsfeeds for recent pages
RSS and Atom. For new pages: RSS and Atom. Many other Special pages also have newsfeeds available (e.g. "popular pages", "users", "wanted pages", etc.). They're a great way to keep up with what's happening on this site.
Category feeds are also now available. Please see Help:Newsfeeds for more information.
OrthodoxWiki Images and Link buttons
Please see OrthodoxWiki:Link buttons.
