Gospel Translations:How to help
From Gospel Translations
Thank you for taking the time to learn how you can help us! This website is the sum of many efforts, and God has used people from all walks of life to help. Chances are if you have the desire to contribute, you can.We've listed some of the current volunteer opportunities below, organized by skill sets.
No special skills required
Post English content to the wiki
One of the biggest challenges we face is loading articles and books onto the wiki. It doesn't require any special skills, just diligence and time. As of this writing, we are waiting to load:
- the book Why Small Groups?
- the book How Can I Change?
- the book Disciplines for Life
- many articles from the Desiring God website
- the booklet Missiology: Entering the Field of the Lord
- the booklet Polity: Leading and Serving in the Local Church
- the booklet Am I Called? Discerning the Summons to Ministry
- the booklet Sovereign Grace and the Glorious Mystery of Election
- the booklet 9 Marks of a Healthy Church
Post translated content to the wiki
Similar to the above, except that you'll be loading content you don't necessarily understand. However the copy-and-paste operation is the same as with English, so it is doable even if you don't understand the language. Things that have been translated, but aren't available on the website yet, include:
- the book How Can I Change? (Spanish)
- the book This Great Salvation (Spanish)
- the book A Display of God's Glory (Japanese)
- the book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church (Spanish)
- the book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church (Simplified and Traditional Chinese)
- the book The Deliberate Church (Spanish)
Programming
Maintenance Bots
Mediawiki (the software the runs this website) supports the use of automated bots for all sorts of tasks. They can be extremely useful for monitoring, updating, and general housekeeping around the entire website. Moreover, other developers have already written very helpful frameworks for bot programming in Python, Perl, PHP, .NET, Java, and Ruby (more from Wikipedia).
TransclusionBot
Copies data from this wiki (gospeltranslations.org) over to other members of the Gospel Translations wiki family (eventually es.gospeltranslations.org for Spanish content, de.gospeltranslations.org for German content, and so forth). This allows all of the translation development work to be done on this site, and our language-specific wikis can focus solely on presenting content to readers.
ProtectionBot
Will scan for articles that should be protected, and will lock them down if they aren't already.
TemplateFixBot
Will scan for articles that use certain important templates ({{MasterHeader}}, {{Stub}}, etc) and make sure that they have all the necessary variables assigned, and will list locations of templates that need to be corrected.
CategoryAddBot
Maintains category pages.
FormattingBot
Checks across the site for formatting problems (we will need to identify how to find them) and corrects them. This relieves the burden on our content uploaders, as they won't have to fix complex formatting problems for themselves (such as citations inside of call-out boxes).
Web Design
If you're interested in helping with web design, it'd be useful if you read the Mediawiki manual some to learn about using templates, categories, and formatting with wikitext.Improve high-profile pages
Several of our most prominent pages could use spiffier designs. If you have ideas on how to improve any of these, give it a try! (Just make sure you text your ideas on the "talk" page, not the live one.)
- Main Page (page for test designs)
- We want to start including information about the # of translators, translations, languages, etc
- Any suggestion that makes the page more inviting and easy-to-use is welcome
- We need a template that will randomly include an article from a category
- Translator enrollment page (page for test designs)
- Contact page (page for test designs)
- Currently used for translator sign-up, other volunteer sign-up, and anything else contact-related. More distinction would be useful between those categories, so people feel like they're sending a message that will be answered.
Graphic Design
Business cards
The staff at Open Source Mission/Gospel Translations need to have business cards printed to present at conferences and churches. Contact us to get logo files and text if you're interested in helping.
Brochure
An informational brochure for distribution at churches, conferences, and other meetings with potential partners. Logos and text will be provided if you contact us.
Newsletter template
We are going to launch a newsletter this Spring to keep all of our translators, partners, and other friends of the ministry up-to-date on our progress. This template would not need to be complex--it just needs to be readable, elegant, and use our logo.
