Archive:Project Home/Launch Requirements

This page outlines the requirements for a public launch of the project. The target launch date has not been announced, but will fall in the early part of 2007.

Technical

Hardware

The technical team needs to specify hardware requirements for the Citizendium Project's first 6 months in operation, which needs to bought.

Software

1. Investigate and test PostGRE SQL 8.2 (possibly install)
2. Consider MediaWiki 1.9.x migration (after first bug fix release?)
3. Design Wikipedia Update system
4. Automate personnel tasks
5. Fix major layout and SQL bugs, as well as the category and special page bugs.
   1. Set $wgUseTidy to true for layout issues
   2. rebuildlinks.php for category bugs (should have come with install, else check sourceforge)
6. Automatically hide or remove interwikis
7. Design approval system (at least a temporary version)
8. Images.
   1. Scaling of Images
   2. Uploading
   3. Import acceptable WP images

Administrative

1. Handle functions related to Tides Center affiliation
2. Reconnect with various foundations, etc., after we're in with Tides.
3. Decrease email response time
4. Create "Total Idiot's Guides" for Citizendium and MediaWiki functions. We need some method of helping people who have no prior MW (and possibly little computer) experience do things like use wikitext and deal with templates/images.

Content

1. Retool Main Page for readers, and put author or editor stuff somewhere else. See Talk:Main Page.
2. Logo Design Contest - as discussed on CZ-L
3. Workgroups should all have homepages.
4. Create Citizendium userspace, and begin migrating Citizendium_Pilot pages over to it
5. Policy Outline should be appropriately elaborated.
   1. Feasibility
   2. Family Friendliness
   3. Article standards
   4. high-priority items, including: approval process; dispute resolution; naming conventions and formatting; how to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles; the "Article Standards" detail pages; policy on content-based bans; policy on topic informants; policy on shared articles; policy on starting subgroups
   5. Policies similar to Wikipedia's that we intend to mirror.
   6. Images - what licenses, formats, etc.
6. Remove Wikipedia templates we won't use.
7. Start tossing any pages we don't want.
8. The Citizendium_Pilot:Author, Citizendium_Pilot:Constable and Citizendium_Pilot:Editor pages need to be high-quality.
9. Approved Articles: at least 10, with half of them coming from articles that were not featured articles or good articles on Wikipedia.

Staffing

1. Consider adding more constables (up to a total of 10)
2. Dramatically increase personnel administrators to prepare for higher signup rate post-launch; or else code a new and automated method of getting people on board.
3. Increase size of volunteer tech support team from 3 to about 5-6 (also consider hiring a contractor if we have the money to insure the launch date)
4. Mailing List outreach