CZ:Userinfo System

User infoboxes are (proposed) boxes containing information about users, their plans, accomplishments, and so forth. Once fully developed, they'll allow you to see at a glance both your own "work roadmap" for CZ--where you've been, where you're going--and overall views of work by everyone on CZ, or in a particular workgroup, or on a particular initiative. All you have to do is fill in some blanks, and the data is distributed to different points around the wiki.

It's a way for us to get organized!

Example

See User:Larry Sanger/Userplan for an example of a user infobox.

The data for that page is stored in two places:

• Template:User/Larry Sanger for general info.
• Template:User/Larry Sanger/Philosophy for some info specific workgroup.

The data is structure by two templates: Template:Userplan-all and Template:Userplan-all-workgroup.

How the system is planned to work

Ideally, all active Citizens would start their own data pages, like Template:User/Larry Sanger. They then fill in a lot of information: their short- and long-term CZ plans, their recent and most important CZ achievements, top articles they're working on, and their roles in the system, as well as some notes. (We can add new data types later.) In addition, Citizens fill in similar sorts of information with regard to the workgroups in which they are most active, like Template:User/Larry Sanger/Philosophy. For instance, you might list out your goals for your work in the Biology Workgroup in the next week.

Once this data is filled in, we collect it and display it in various ways. First, of course, you can display all of your own data in one place, like User:Larry Sanger/Userplan does. But just as importantly, we can produce other kinds of tables, which we place on various workgroup pages (like CZ:Chemistry Workgroup), or initiative pages (like CZ:Recruitment). From a single place, you can see

• Who the active contributors are in a given workgroup/initiative.
• What they're working on; so, who to contact for help with a certain effort.
• Whether there is a workgroup/initiative need that is unmet.

This will, in turn, allow us to "get organized" in a way we haven't been. But it's all done bottom-up!

How to get started

Getting started with the user infobox system is moderately difficult: it should be pretty easy for technical people, but for most people, it might be challenging. If you take it step-by-step and ask for help (try the talk page) when you need it, it shouldn't be too painful.

(This should get easier with time. The following instructions are for people who want to do "alpha testing.")

Step 1. Get familiar with the system. Study the description above.

Step 2. Start a general information page using this little box:

Be sure to replace YOUR_USER_NAME with your user name. Leave the rest there. For example, Larry Sanger might write in the box: Template:User/Larry Sanger Then press the button.

Step 3. When you arrive at your user info page, you should see a bunch of code in the text box. You could fill in the blanks after the = signs at this point, but don't bother. For now, just press Save page without making any changes.

Step 4. Next, go to your user page, or a subpage of your user page--wherever you want to see your userbox. Wherever you want your user box to appear, paste this: {{Userplan-all|User Name|User_Name}} Replace "User Name" with your precise user name (exact capitalization, punctuation, and spelling are all required). Replace "User_Name" with the same name, except replace the spaces with _ (an underscore). (Sorry, this is required by some clumsy code...we'll fix it eventually.) For example, Larry would write: {{Userplan-all|Larry Sanger|Larry_Sanger}} In fact, if you go here, you'll see that that's all Larry had to put in, in order to generate that whole table.

When you're done writing that one line, press Save page. A big, empty infobox should pop up.

Step 5. Edit your info! On that page, you'll see a lot of fairly self-explanatory headers, and next to the headers, you should see little "edit" links. Go ahead and press them. You'll be presented with various code, interspersed with lines that look like this, for example:

| plans-wk-1 = 

If you look above that, for the text that follows <!--, you'll see: "Plans for this week (please update regularly)..." So, if you've got any general plans for the week on CZ, put 'em in across from the = signs. One per line, five lines per list.

Step 6. (Optional.) If you do a lot of work in a particular workgroup or initiative, then you can create another, more specialized user info box, with your plans and doings just for that workgroup or initiative.

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