Forum:Meeting with Lifeartist & Mostly Zen

Lifeartist - Joe Kiff and Tom Michael - Mostly Zen met on Friday 28th July to discuss the Psychology Wiki.

We live quite close to each other, by random chance, in Birmingham and Dudley, West Midlands, in the UK. If other contributors would like to meet in person (and live close by) then perhaps this can be arranged. In the meantime, use either IRC (chatrooms) or MSN messenger (see our user pages for details).

Preparing for Harvard

 * Mission statement - see latest redraft Joes redrafting of manifesto and Joes redrafting of manifesto-again** I really like the latest version, its 98% spot on - Zen
 * Questions for Gil and the team
 * What are the plans for expanding and upgrading the hardware.
 * What are the plans for duplicating the site on servers in another country
 * Whats been the Search Engine advice been?
 * Whats the business plan. Whats the strategic vision?Whats happening with branding? Marketing?
 * How does the advertising work? Can we get more control? Difference between wikia advertising and google advertising? Does Wikia want to handle it in the longrun? What's best for us?
 * Can they set up pages that keep us uptodate with whats going on?
 * Talk to them about becoming academic publisher. This is our unique selling proposition to the profession and the grey suites. We offer a way of making the knowledge base free


 * Really don't know what to ask, short of, how much help are they prepared to give us?! They've been great so far. - Zen


 * Publicity material.
 * Letters to journal editors - You might be best to work on these. Id include an Intro, Our Vision, & what they can do (e.g. they could update all their details, try to attract new subscribers, use google ads as this is a new medium through which they might get more business?  Point out what they can GAIN basically.  They can come visit the site and judge it for themselves.


 * Letters to heads of societies - As above but with a different slant - Again you are best to handle this.
 * press release - Wait till after the Wall St Journal article, so we have an external reference.

Technical questions

 * Search engine ranking - I can ask Wikia technical people about this.
 * I think this is a key issue. In my book people can't find us till our 'Clinical psychology' is on the first page of google.
 * Upgrading search facility - Building LOTS of redirect pages is the simplest way I know to make the search better. I would like to get clear how the search facility works. My way only searches page names. Can it, like WP search the pages themselves?
 * Whats the actual limit to the size of a wiki from a technical point of view.
 * Exploring the potential of the software
 * Categories to build our Index for us -I feel I dont quite grasp this in the way you do so would be good to get clear
 * Using New IRC channel for live communication. You'll need to educate me on this. Joe
 * Using Forums for general discussion about whole project, and discussion pages for individual things
 * Using BOTS to do much of the cleaning/template structuring - I need updating as to what is available

Internet based Publicity campaign
I can better contribute here


 * Blogs - I will personally email them all. Personal is better than spam. These people are basically journalists, so rather than try to sell the Wiki to them, I will just link them, explaining why i thought they'd be interested and that if they think its good, please link to US and talk about us on their blog.
 * Forums - As Above
 * Psy Web Pages - As Above

Local work with Uni courses/student Socs/advertising/getting curriculum up - I'll do this for Newman as a test run

Structuring the wiki

 * Basic structure is getting there. The cats need sorting (as much as I can before i sleep tonight).
 * How do you do this so I can help?
 * How to improve the look of the pages?
 * How to improve link pages? Working links into text? Chapter headings?
 * Some of our conventions are not clear
 * Page titles Capital letter on first word only unless proper name.
 * Use of page templates for bibliography etc
 * Use of navigation templates

Recruiting new editors
From wikipedia and online to start with I'd imagine. We need to think longer term though. I'd imagine we may have about 25 solid contributors by the end of the first year, with about 200 occasional contributors. After we have this, we have more of a basis to branch out and improve the project.
 * Inviting prominent names to edit particula areas. Baddeley and memory. He is public about being interested in making the science public and is influential at the hard science end.
 * Contact particular societies and organisations. Eg MBTI, NLP, Tavistock Clinic people etc asking them to put up the evidence available for their theories and techniques.
 * Following Jaywins tactic of approaching people whop have written interesting papers. I would like to see his emails.

I'm away for a fortnight.

I'd like to spend a while going through the structure of the site with you, to make sure we are both synchronised as much as possible. Mostly Zen  (talk ) 22:12, 26 July 2006 (UTC)