WikiRun:Community Portal

From WikiRun

WikiRun is a collaborative effort, and your contributions are welcomed. This page is a place to share thoughts about the project and how we can work more effectively together. We have now reached 2,241 articles, but look forward to having many more. (See Landmarks for more measures of our progress.)

Collaborative Project of the Week

By unanimous vote of the active editors, this week's collaboration is adding to our coverage of Great Britain, its athletes, provinces, and events.

Olympic coverage

We are continuing to wrap up our Olympic coverage. A separate article has been created for each event with links to them on Portal:Olympics As the events progress, please post the results and your own narative. The most important element is to contribute narrative to these pages to give the reader some idea of what was important or dramatic. We have also created a template for each event called "Footer Olympic Champions <event name>", for example "Footer Olympic Champions 3000 and 5000 m Women." When the gold medal is awarded in the event, please update each template for 2008. Also consider writing a biographical article about the gold medalist.

We have also created separate articles for each nation sending runners to the Olympics. They are collected in Category:Nation. Feel free to add a narative to any nation article if something notable happens to its team in Beijing.

The IOC has assigned a unique three letter code to each nation, and reports results using that code. We are uploading flag images of the nations based on that code. For example, the file "flagUSA.png" is the United State flag. When entering results, consider using our new templates:

{{flagIOC|code}}

which displays the flag and the name of the country with a wikilink to that nation's article. For example: {{flagIOC|USA}} produces United States. Because this template uses positional parameters, you don't need to type the parameter names and equal signs.

{{flagIOCathlete|name|code}}

which displays the flag, athelete(s) name(s), and the code wikilinked to that nation's article. For example, {{flagIOCathlete|[[Ryan Hall]]|USA}} produces Ryan Hall (USA). We have uploaded three medal graphics:

Gold: [[Image:med 1.png]]
Silver: [[Image:med 2.png]]
Bronze: [[Image:med 3.png]]

If you have a public domain image from the Olympics, please upload it (noting its source) and include it in your story.

We have created a series of historic article stubs with the name "<year> Summer Olympics", and invite you to add content to them. Because there are no running events in the Winter Olympics, we did not create stubs for them.

Future Articles

In general, articles can be divided into the following broad categories:

Biographies of runners
Notable historic events, races and running achievements
key concepts and terms
Records of achievement
Entities - notable races, organizations, vendors
College programs for track & field and cross country

Please suggest article topics under each heading. In addition, you can visit Special:Wantedpages to see the list of pages which do not yet exist, eventhough editors have created links to them on other pages.

Biographies of runners

We are currently creating biographies based on the USA Track & Field athlete biographies, and have loaded all athletes from the ultramarathon and cross country lists. Please consider adding the runners from the track and field list. Please consider using the Template:Infobox runner to list the key details of each runner on their article page. The format is:

{{Infobox runner
|name       =
|image      =
|imagesize  =
|caption    =
|event      =
|height     ={{height|ft=5|in=9}}  you can use the height template to display both metric and English height
|weight     =
|nationality=
|pr         =10K 32:00
|birth_date ={{birth date and age|1990|2|24}} you can use this template to display the birth date and age given the yyyy|m|dd as parameters (only for living runners)
|birth_place=
|death_date =
|death_place=
|current_residence=
|high_school=
|college    =
|coach      =
|agent      =
|club       =
}}

Please suggest additional parameters for this infobox. The infobox now automatically adds categories to each article based on the contents of the event parameter:

If event is "pole vault" then it adds Category:Pole vaulter,

If event is "shot put" then it adds Category:Shot putter,

If event is "discus" then it adds Category:Discus thrower,

If event is "javelin" then it adds Category:Javelin thrower,

If event is "decathlon" then it adds Category:Decathlete,

If event is "hurdles" then it adds Category:Hurdler,

If event is "steeplechase" then it adds Category:Steeplechase competitor,

If event is "marathon" then it adds Category:Marathon runner,

How about writing an article for each of the 31 track stars inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame?

Notable historic events, races and running achievements

I have posted a list of the 10 largest half marathons and the 20 largest marathons in the U.S. We should have a separate article covering each of these races. Here is the parameters for the Infobox:

{{infobox race
|name          = race name
|image         = racelogo.gif
|imagesize     = size in pixels (default 200)
|location      = town
|website       = url
|founded       = year founded
|race_director = name
}}

key concepts and terms

Examples are Jones counter and road race. These are placed in [[Category:Definition]].

Records of achievement

College records should be included in the article about that college's program. Conference records should be included in the article about the conference. Course records should be included in the article about a specific race.

Entities - notable races, organizations, vendors

Articles on each nation can outline the structure and history of competitive running in the country. The format of the infobox is:

{{infobox nation
|name      =United States
|image     = flagUSA.png
|noc       =US Olympic Committee
|nocwebsite=www.usoc.org
|ngb       =USATF
|website   =www.usatf.org
|gold      =973
|silver    =772
|bronze    =660
}}

College programs

Articles on each college can feature its varsity programs, college record performances, and famous athletes. In addition, each article should contain this Infobox:

{{infobox college
| name      = college name
| image     = team logo file
| imagesize = size in pixels (default 200)
| location  = city & state
| conf      = conference name
| div       = NCAA Div I, II or III or NAIA
| nick      = team nickname
| head      = head coach name, if combined program
| coachm    = men's coach name
| asstm     = men's assistant coach name(s)
| coachw    = women's coach name
| asstw     = women's assistant coach name(s)
| throws = throws coach name
| sprint = sprints coach name
| jumps = jumps coach name
| champ     = past championships and years
| venue     = name of field house and/or track
}}

The infobox automatically adds [[Category:College program]]

Phase I added articles for the nation's top college programs, and Phase II (completed on 2009-01-06) established articles and footer templates for each NCAA Divison I Conference. Phase III (completed on 2010-02-01) created at least a stub article for each Division I program. We are now working on Phase IV which will address Division II progams.

Training

Articles on training techniques and philosophies, including "how to..." articles. These will be collected in our Portal:Training.

Getting to know you

I suggest that each editor post his/her PR and running interests on his/her user page. If your user name is Fred, your user page is called User:Fred To create a user page, type User:Fred (or whatever) into the Search box and click on the "Go" button. You can decorate your user page with user boxes.

Illustrations

As you can see from visiting any good website, graphics make a site appealing. There are several things we can do to "dress up" the site:

include a course map or elevation chart on articles about major races.
- I added a Google Map extension so we can have course maps.
include photographs on biographical articles
include standardized infoboxes on various types of articles

The basic decision is whether to upload graphics to the wikirun.com server or to upload them to the Wikimedia.org Commons and then link to those. You can discuss this on the discussion page of this Community Portal page. We will post instructions here when we decide on how we will handle uploaded graphics files.

Ways to publicize wikirun.com

Perhaps we could set up a "links" page and offer to swap links with other running sites? Please share your ideas on publicizing the site and in recruiting more editors.

Portals

The site is currently in its infancy, but as it grows rapidly, we want to add portals to assist users. We have started our Olympic, Road running, and Training portals.

Possible future portals could be:

Track Events Portal
Field Events Portal
Racewalking Portal

Landmarks

Our 2,200th article was added on January 25, 2010, about Willie Gault‎. On January 30, 2010, we reached our 350,000th page view. On January 28, 2010, we reached our 3,500th page in the data base, and have 3,542 currently. On February 14, 2010, we added our 600th biography of a United States runner, John Collier. On January 14, 2010, we reached our 9,000th page edit, and have 9,248 currently. On March 9, 2010, we had our 14,000th hit on the Main Page. On December 10, 2009, we reached our 3,000th hit on the Community portal page, and on November 19, 2009 we reached our 2,000th hit on the Category:College program page. On September 27, 2009 we reached our 1,000 hit on the Current Events page. On November 22, 2009, we reached our 1,000 hit on the Training Portal. On December 12, 2009, we reached our 1,000th hit on Cornell University. On September 26, 2009, we added our 400th college profile, University of Massachusetts Boston. On December 23, 2009, we had our 4,000th hit on Category:United States runner. On August 12, 2009, we added our 200th biography of a running coach, Christian Cantwell. Finally, on April 6, 2009, Title IX became the first substantive article to reach over 500 page views.

Navigation