PracticalAdvice

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Practical advice for all

Make each contribution worth reading (in wiki jargon "add value").

Practical advice for guests

Use your real name, ask questions, write about yourself and your experiences, create doors for others to communicate and cooperate with you.
Don't try to impress people, talk in an open way, show that you are listening, be yourself, impress people.
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Practical advice for members

Write at least a bit every (other) day, show that you exist as part of the community.
Take responsibility: produce value, welcome guests, give warm reactions, answer questions, give praise.
Develop your goals within the community and synchronize them with the community goals
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Practical advice for hosts

Look at the whole. If content is needed, write content. If people are needed, invite them. If there is surplus chaos, start refactoring. In conflicts, stay calm and build bridges. In boring times, provide provoking thought. Work towards a lively community.
Build external (interwiki) relationsships. Use a part of your time to participate in other communities. Put anchors into the external ground, so that people know your community and find it when they need it.
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Practical advice your dad should have taught you

Don't let the hair grow out of your ears or nose.
Rotate your tires. Don't let them get bald.
Rotate stock -- food in your kitchen, clothes you wear, and shoes (never wear the same clothing two days in a row).
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Though it may be too early for a ColdBlanket... Is this page going to mesh into the rest of Meatball when it grows? It seems like it should (in theory) include a large number of pages on the Wiki, since they are supposed to be practical advice. There is no reason to put one bit of advice here and not another. So it either becomes a place to throw away advice in a big heap, or degenerates into a page about practical advice, which is no better. -- ChrisPurcell

Hi Tim! We crossed paths several times on Wikipedia in its earlier days; good to see you again! Like Chris, I'm not sure how this page is going to fit with the rest of MeatballWiki. It's nothing against partical advice, but the purpose of the page is vague. So far we have some advice on personal grooming, car care and stock rotation, none of which have much to do with our MeatballMission. -- StephenGilbert

Hi, Stephen. Good to see you, too. I started this page after an IRC conversation inside my employer's firewall. We run MediaWiki inside our firewall, so I threw up a page there called "Practical advice." Someone mentioned how lame http://www.dadsadvice.com/ was ("it could be so much better"), then we all started tossing our own advice onto the IRC channel. I copied it all to our mediawiki. Then, in keeping with our mediawiki's guideline (which I wrote :) that we refactor to the Internet any content that isn't proprietary, I thought of starting a page at WikiPedia. However, it didn't seem to belong there. So MeatBall was my next choice. Granted, I have never been significantly active here, but this seemed to me like an idea barn raiser. I hadn't seen MeatballMission, so I read it today. (A lot has changed since I've surfed around this wiki.)

To answer your concerns, Chris, I envisioned this page to be a collection of one-liners. One side-effect of thinking of practical advice being given by a dad is that it's going to be brief, unlike a mother's advice, which we all know can easily turn into an encyclopedia volume for any given subject. I did read a little more at MeatballWiki today and now see why I was off-topic. I tried to clean up this page to highlight the on-topic additions. Leaving the "dad's advice" section as "playful wisdom," but won't fight it if even that is deemed unworthy by TheCollective to remain. -- TimChambers

Tim, I have a personal wiki set up (I haven't linked it from anywhere, so it's "invisible" at the moment). I'm planning to let friends start small wiki-projects there if they like. So, if you'd like to declare yourself my friend, and you wanted to do a full "Dad's advice"-type of page, you'd be welcome to some space on my wiki. If it ever takes off, you could always move it to its own dedicated wiki. Let me know if you're interested, -- StephenGilbert

PracticalAdvice

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