GospelTranslations:How to help

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Thank you for taking the time to learn how you can help us! This website is the sum of many efforts, and God has used people from all walks of life to help. Chances are if you have the desire to contribute, you can.

We've listed some of the current volunteer opportunities below, organized by skill sets:

  • General help (no special skills needed)
  • Programming
  • Web design
  • Graphic design

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to conact us using the contact page. The project descriptions below are not comprehensive and we're eager to help you get started.


General Help

Volunteer Now!

Post English content to the wiki

One of the biggest challenges we face is loading articles and books onto the wiki. It doesn't require any special skills, just diligence and time. As of this writing, we are waiting to load:

  • the book Why Small Groups?
  • the book How Can I Change?
  • the book Disciplines for Life
  • many articles from the Desiring God website
  • the booklet Missiology: Entering the Field of the Lord
  • the booklet Polity: Leading and Serving in the Local Church
  • the booklet Am I Called? Discerning the Summons to Ministry
  • the booklet Sovereign Grace and the Glorious Mystery of Election
  • the booklet 9 Marks of a Healthy Church

Post translated content to the wiki

Similar to the above, except that you'll be loading content you don't necessarily understand. However the copy-and-paste operation is the same as with English, so it is doable even if you don't understand the language. Things that have been translated, but aren't available on the website yet, include:

  • the book How Can I Change? (Spanish)
  • the book This Great Salvation (Spanish)
  • the book A Display of God's Glory (Japanese)
  • the book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church (Spanish)
  • the book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church (Simplified and Traditional Chinese)
  • the book The Deliberate Church (Spanish)


Programming

Volunteer Now!

Maintenance Bots

Mediawiki (the software the runs this website) supports the use of automated bots for all sorts of tasks. They can be extremely useful for monitoring, updating, and general housekeeping around the entire website. Moreover, other developers have already written very helpful frameworks for bot programming in Python, Perl, PHP, .NET, Java, and Ruby (more from Wikipedia).

TransclusionBot

Copies data from this wiki (gospeltranslations.org) over to other members of the Gospel Translations wiki family (eventually es.gospeltranslations.org for Spanish content, de.gospeltranslations.org for German content, and so forth). This allows all of the translation development work to be done on this site, and our language-specific wikis can focus solely on presenting content to readers.

ProtectionBot

Will scan for articles that should be protected, and will lock them down if they aren't already.

TemplateFixBot

Will scan for articles that use certain important templates ({{MasterHeader}}, {{Stub}}, etc) and make sure that they have all the necessary variables assigned, and will list locations of templates that need to be corrected.

CategoryAddBot

Maintains category pages.

FormattingBot

Checks across the site for formatting problems (we will need to identify how to find them) and corrects them. This relieves the burden on our content uploaders, as they won't have to fix complex formatting problems for themselves (such as citations inside of call-out boxes).


Web Design

Volunteer Now!

If you're interested in helping with web design, it'd be useful if you read the Mediawiki manual some to learn about using :mediawikiwiki:Help:Templates, :mediawikiwiki:Help:Categories, and :mediawikiwiki:Help:Formatting.

Improve high-profile pages

Several of our most prominent pages could use spiffier designs. If you have ideas on how to improve any of these, give it a try! (Just make sure you text your ideas on the "talk" page, not the live one.)

  • Main Page (page for test designs)
    • We want to start including information about the # of translators, translations, languages, etc
    • Any suggestion that makes the page more inviting and easy-to-use is welcome
    • We need a template that will randomly include an article from a category
  • Translator enrollment page (page for test designs)
  • Contact page (page for test designs)
    • Currently used for translator sign-up, other volunteer sign-up, and anything else contact-related. More distinction would be useful between those categories, so people feel like they're sending a message that will be answered.


Graphic Design

Volunteer Now!

Please note: submitting an idea for these projects does not guarantee that it will be used. We appreciate all attempts, but practically cannot use them all.

(No help needed at this time)

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