Early Retirement Extreme Forums

This is so exciting!
OK, so does FOOD include gardening? Cooking? Recipes? Shopping? Hunting?

Children? Alternative housing(rv, boat)? College/education?
Not sure if these require their own category.

As far as I understand, things can easily be moved around later.
Or are we making regrettable editorial decisions already? I'm thinking about how I initially chose my blog "categories" only later to realize that they were suitable at which point it would/will take 40+ hours to go through all my posts and change them.

It's usually fairly easy to reorganize things. It does take *some* effort so it's worth putting a bit of thought into layout ahead of time.
In general, though, IMO it's best to just throw content in there, and not worry too much about organization until there's enough stuff to organize.

@Jacob,

This one's for you.
Why should one create a new account for the wiki? Can't we use the same account info we use for the forums over there?

@Surio - Because different programs aren't necessarily compatible.
bbpress and wordpress actually are, but it's a pain to integrate them --- also some people prefer NOT to use the same account everywhere.
Incidentally, creating wiki accounts isn't all that crucial. It's only if you want credit/glory for your work. For example, I have two accounts there.

@bigato

Will do, thanks for the invitation.
To expand on my previous statement --- for a given wiki topic, only a few people can add valuable content, but almost anyone can edit and organize existing content. So as a rule I think it's best to "bias to action" and encourage any and all new writing, even if it's haphazard and needs to be cleaned up later.

@Jacob,

> bbpress and wordpress actually are, but it's

> a pain to integrate them

I'll go with that.
> Incidentally, creating wiki accounts isn't all that crucial

It is, if you wished to edit something (or discuss in the talk page). Ohh... Having bashed heads with rams in wikipedia for a while, I am not looking forward to the "talk" page....

@Jacob - I made a few edits, but I noticed that the links to help (expecially editing help available when editing a page) are empty. I added an external link to the standard MediaWiki help, but I'm not sure it is the same version of MediaWiki. Did those pages originally exist and then you deleted them? Or was there an option to install standard help pages?

@rjack - I haven't deleted anything (I don't know how )

@bigato

Thanks, though after I typed all that in I felt like I had only scratched the surface.

Is there any special wiki markup to make a table?

Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table

So what happens if you don't agree with some comments or methods that someone put up on the wiki? What if you think information is slightly inaccurate?

@jennypenny - You create a formal review committee and then...just kidding.
You edit it or delete it! The content evolves over time.

I second bigato's points about talking about it in the page's "talk section" first. It gets tedious (based on Wikipedia experience) but it is the only available correct way of moving forward in these matters...
If we can't resolve it all, we can always go to Jacob, like this comic strip... and Jacob can pull a Caesar on us, just like that strip too

I just read the PP-part yesterday, great job! One of the most easily understood texts on the subject I've read!

I wish I could see who entered some of the items on the list of things to do when you're retired. What a great list.
What to do first? Read a trashy novel? Learn to surf? Save the world?

I believe there are some mediawiki plugins that help show how a page evolves over time. So you could see it as a flash/html5 animation as each editor comes in and makes a change. I know this is something you can do with wikipedia.
As it is, there's the 'history' tab, but it's mostly a blunt tool to check a particular revision and general change history, rather than a specific line.

As for editing policy: I contributed to Wikipedia for a while and here are my thoughts:
While not touching what someone else has written (at all) sounds nice, it doesn't work all that well in practice. The page can very quickly grow clumsy and uncoordinated. I think the best policy is that rewrites, shuffling of content, error correction, and style standardization are all ok provided (A) you leave the page better than you found it, and (B) no substantive content was lost.
By 'leave the page better than you found it', I mean, if you're a fluent english speaker, feel free to correct grammar. If you're not a fluent english speaker, feel free to add sentences and make a paragraph flow better but be more cautious fixing grammar. Each person probably has particular areas where they know they're strong and can contribute.
If you feel the scope or tone of an article is wrong, then write something in the 'discussion' page. If an article is making statements that a large majority of other editors would find contentious, then reframe them so they're a neutral point of view.
For instance if I saw someone had written "George Bush was a terrible President," I could reformulate that as "Some people have suggested that George Bush was a terrible President. For instance <source> said <something>."
Neutral point of view is one of the cardinal rules of wikipedia, but I think it can be overdone and leave pages feeling sterile. For an ERE wiki, I'd say in most cases it's safe to make a value judgement. For instance, it's not neutral to say "Beans are a wonderful, cheap, flexible food source" but I don't really think it needs to be rephrased here (it would be forcibly rephrased on wikipedia). On the other hand, people have a variety of opinions in, say, investing in gold and it would make sense to be more neutral when discussing that.