An Introduction to the Clerk Wiki

[McDanielCA]

An Introduction to the Clerk Wiki was originally posted on the main page of LDSTech. It was written by Robert Lindsay.
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How does the Church train 50,000 clerks in 40 or more languages? That’s a challenge that is getting easier to solve, thanks to the recently launched LDS Tech Clerk wiki.

The Clerk wiki offers new training and support resources for ward and stake clerks, including membership clerks, finance clerks, stake technology specialists, stake auditors, and other record keepers, helping them to better understand how to magnify their callings. The Clerk wiki offers more than 250 searchable pages of content. There’s even information to help bishops and stake presidents understand their record-keeping responsibilities.

The wiki is built in MediaWiki, the same application that powers Wikipedia. For now, the LDS Tech Projects wiki is sharing space with the Clerk wiki, but at some point the Clerk wiki will get its own home.

The first 120 pages of content on the Clerk wiki were donated by Kent S. Larsen of New York, New York, who had been funding and maintaining his own wiki for LDS clerks. Brother Larsen’s contribution allowed the new site to “go live” nearly overnight. All of the content from the Clerk and Technology Support site (clerk.lds.org) has also been migrated to the Clerk wiki, including troubleshooting tips, the archive of official letters and policies, and the glossary of key terms. Recent additions include detailed instructions for users of the Meetinghouse Internet and Meetinghouse Webcast technologies.

The Clerk wiki is updated frequently and is growing quickly (doubling in size in its first few months) as contributors from around the world add and refine pages. Registered users can edit existing pages and even add new ones. Users can opt to receive automatic e-mail notifications when content changes on the wiki.

In a recent pilot test, volunteers from around the world translated some wiki pages into Spanish and Portuguese. We hope to leverage this community translation effort to allow the wiki to be translated quickly into many more languages, at little (or no) cost to the Church.

The wiki continues to expand and improve. In October 2009, the wiki had more than 1000 subscribers, but we know that there are more than 50,000 clerks in the Church, so we have only seen the tip of the iceberg and hope to see many more subscribers in the future. Come share what you know with other clerks around the world.

Robert Lindsay is a manager of instructional design for the Church.