Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/Early/IPO

New members
Sure you can join! Right now there is little structure or leadership; simply read the sections below, sign your name in the section, and check out the  section.

Orientation
As stated above, much of the purpose of this project is to assist new users of scripts, bots and other software tools for finding, sorting, manipulating and maintaining Wikipedia content. If this topic is completely new to you, here's a good introduction to Bots. Much of what we do here is creating one-off or general purpose tools for editing tasks. Regular expressions are extremely useful for this purpose as is strong knowledge of a high-level programming language. However, you do not need these qualifications if you wish to help; in fact your presence here is a welcome and we will work to teach you as much as we can.

A common problem among talented computer users is frustration when dealing with less knowledgeable users; it is important to combat this tendency: remain patient, communicate clearly and effectively, and be extremely to overly friendly. To assist in this task we will develop procedures, templates, and other methods of making the task of interfacing to other wikipedians as painless as possible. Also remember that there are very specific things that computers are good at, especially as it relates to dealing with abstract things such as text. It is unlikely that other contributers will have a firm grasp on these intricacies and may well ask for the impossible. The proper course is to properly research the problem and if you don't think you can solve it then bring it up for general discussion. Perhaps another member can bring some insight into the problem and if it is particularly difficult to solve, but also useful, it will probably generate lots of support.

Creating a new case
Once a contributor has listed a new case under a case should be created and placed in  as soon as possible (but only if that case is actively receiving help). To create the case simply create a sub-page on this project. The format of the name is the date in DNS zone format (20050701 is Jul 01, 2005. The first four digits are the year, the fourth and fifth digits are the month, and the last two digits are the day.) followed by the username of the contributor who initiated the request. Example: Computer help desk/20050702 Dmcdevit. There is currently no template; one will be created as experience is increased.

Once the case has been created please place it on your watch list and leave a message on the contributor's talk page with a reference to the new location for the case and instructions asking that all communication be performed in the case. Also please list the case under if you are going to begin helping immediately or under  so someone else knows it is available.

If you create source code as a solution to the case you are working on, please publish it by creating a separate page, placing the source code there, and including it in your case as a template. Then protect the page that has the source code from edits and watch the page; this is done so the code is less likely to be modified to be malicious. If you are not able to protect the page yourself then please leave a request on this projects talk page to have the page protected.

Participants

 * 1) I hope this idea takes off and it works out well. It will be nice to have one spot where people who need technical help as it relates to Wikipedia and people who can actually provide that help come together. Status as of Oct 4, 2005: School and work are keeping me busy; I don't have the spare time to get anything done for the help desk at the moment. Triddle 17:36, 4 October 2005 (UTC)
 * 2) Me too. I'm mostly just a normal user I'm not a coder but I play one on TV.  I'll help as much as I can. Quinobi 21:47, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
 * 3) Me too! r3m0t talk 21:44, July 24, 2005 (UTC)
 * 4) And me, I'm a C# programmer. Martin 20:51, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
 * 5) I wish to improve my understanding of the various procedures. I am relying on Help Desk, henceforth.
 * I am 110 percent STUDENT and &#45;10 percent INSTRUCTOR. Superslum 13:59, 2 April 2006 (UTC)


 * 1) I want to increase my knowledge about general computing and impart wisdom of PHP onto other people @kshay 07:39, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Todo

 * 1) Generate some attention for the project. The best way so far seems to be by organizing cleanup projects and crediting the help desk with the task of managing them. With the new XML dump format supported by Parse::MediaWikiDump new cleanup projects should be coming soon.