Project Mentor

Project Mentor

Please Note: Project Mentor has closed down. If you are a new user who has arrived here by accident, please visit Project Welcome.

Project Mentor was an Urban Dead Wiki member group dedicated to making people new to wikis feel more at home on the Wiki by giving them one-on-one tutoring. It was created on August 27th, 2006 after realizing that Project Welcome was simply not good enough at ongoing aid to new users and more "refined" help was needed.

What We Do

We perform several activities as part of the Project:

• Identify the newbie in need - First and foremost, we search for a newbie in need. New users in need are often identifiable by accidents and errors: Someone putting his or her user page in the mainspace or not signing messages are dead giveaways. Although other users may have already greeted them, we drop off a friendly "Hello!" and tell them about our great program.

• If you arn't currently mentoring any users, you can alternatively add Template:PMentor (use {{Template:PMentor}}.

• Teach newbies - This is the most important step in our program. We take pride in teaching newbies with an advanced Mentoring system explained below. This helps make even the most newby newb a competent, productive wikizen.
• Make the Wiki friendly! - We strive to make the Wiki a more user-friendly environment. Experts agree that being a welcoming individual is critical to successful teaching and learning.

How to Get Involved

Project Mentor is an open project, and welcomes any user that wishes to get involved themselves. As long as you're committed to helping those in need, and teaching often times frustrating newbies, we'd love to have you.

To officially join, you should place your name below on the Member register. And it is strongly recommended that to become a Wiki Mentor, you have at least balanced skills in all areas of the Wiki. One bad area is acceptable, but only if you report what you're bad at. If someone you are mentoring asks a question in an area you are less than fully comfortable with, you can refer them to another Project member who is more skilled in that area.

We also have a userbox that can be used to identify users as members of Project Mentor. You can use it simply by putting {{mentor|user being mentored|him or her}} on your user page, which would appear as

	This User is a Mentor
	This user is mentoring Example User, to show him or her how we work on this wiki.

Further, there's a fledgling convention of putting a link to Project Mentor within your signature. You can do this by doing the following:

1. Go to the Preferences page, accessible from the set of links at the top of the page (or alternately, by pointing to Special:Preferences).
2. Make sure you check the box labeled Raw signatures (without automatic link).
3. In the field "Your nickname (for signatures)", put the following (replacing Your name with your user name):

   [[User:YourName|Your Name]] ^{[[Project Mentor|M!]]}

4. Press Save Preferences.

This will make your signature look exactly like it normally does, except it will now have ^M! appended to the end of your name, linking to this page.

Member Register

The easiest way to place your name on the register is to use 3 tildes (i.e., ~~~) in the appropriate column. Try to keep the list in alphabetical order and remove inactive members, defined as no edits for 3 or more months. The current member register is as follows:

Project Mentor Members
Available Mentors Bob Moncrief Chief Seagull DanceDanceRevolution	Currently Mentoring none	Currently Being Mentored none

For New Users

If you are a new user interested in joining Project Mentor, simply send a message to anyone listed as "Available Mentors" above on their talk page. If you do not want to pick out a mentor, but be assigned one, you can also leave a message on Talk:Project Mentor. Be sure to explain who you are and what you're interested in so the mentoring team can best help you out!