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 should be pretty easy.

(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. Grab the general information template. Click here, select all the text inside the edit box, and copy it.

Step 3. Copy it into Template:User/YOUR_USER_NAME, and save it.