WikiLove: the small projects edition

[[user:Krinkle]], a Dutch hacker and small wiki monitor, has started a 2011 "Tour de Wiki" for developers to go through our smallest wikis and make sure everything is functioning properly post 1.17 deployment. As he says on Wikitech, the small projects that don't have a big in-house technical community often have a hard time of it...

More often than not, the smaller the wiki – the worse the local site wide resources are.

Blindly copied mess from one wiki to another, in some cases (the better ones) messed with until they work.

But we want our small projects to thrive! So if you are someone who understands things like  "if a css class for .wikitable is defined, go to an article with a wikitable and inspect it in Web Inspector or FireBug and see if the core rules match the wiki's," then I encourage you to join the Tour de Wiki. And kudos to Krinkle for starting it.

WikiLove: the gadget

On their day off, two wiki hackers recently made a neat little gadget for sharing the love: the WikiLove gadget. It lets you give out barnstars, kittens, brownies, cookies and more, with just a few clicks. No edit window, no messy wikicode.

The best feature is one that doesn't jump out as important at first: the option to automatically send an email to the recipient, letting them know about the WikiLove you've shared with them. Barnstars, in particular, are powerful symbols of appreciation in the Wikipedia community, and at first glance you might think that making it easier to give them out would cheapen them. But what I've found in using it over the last few weeks is just the opposite: the gift of a barnstar becomes more personal and powerful, because the automated email--more often than not--becomes the beginning of a conversation, the kind of thing that usually wouldn't happen in the public space of a talk page.

So go, spread the WikiLove!