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| Book: | Wikipedia: The Missing Manual | |
| Subject: | Wikipedia and Collaboration | |
| Date: | 2009-03-09 10:53:43 | |
| From: | Jose M. Baeza | |
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Rating:
Years ago when I first had the occasion to use Wikipedia, I remember thinking that this was an amateur effort to provide the masses with a free online encyclopedia they could use instead of a Britannica or a World Book encyclopedia. I did not return to the use of Wikipedia for years after that. Only in the last year of so did I get back to Wikipedia. I was referred to Wikipedia as a great source of information regarding some subject by someone whose opinion I valued on the subject. Thus I went back to check out Wikipedia and I must say I was surprised and very favorably impressed. It was not the same entity that I had encountered many years ago. Wikipedia, I have found out, is a project built upon the collaboration of many editors that endeavor to build a consensus around what information should go into each article in the encyclopedia. An authority has been established to enforce agreed-upon processes and rules to manage this gargantuan project that has put together over 2.7 million articles in the English version of the encyclopedia. It appears Wikipedia has become an excellent if not an exceptional encyclopedia to consult when researching an article or a subject. When I first started reading this book, I presumed that the purpose of the book was to facilitate the search process of the reader in finding information in the encyclopedia. No, its main purpose it to provide the reader a structured process and the procedures to re-write the Wikipedia encyclopedia, that is, to train the reader to become one of the many educated and proficient editors that produced and maintain this collaborative effort! If you are not really interested in being such an editor but plan to be more of a user and a reader, Appendix B is for you. I decided to register and become an “editor” to ensure I would experience some of the details involved in this Wikipedia effort. Part I of the book is the most important, in my estimation, because it defines and describes the actual work to be done by editors. I happened to read Appendix A on my initial browse of the book and I gained a lot of information from the descriptions of all the links provided in every Wikipedia article. There are links useful to editors and links useful to readers. The information regarding the links gave me a preliminary inkling of how the collaboration process is implemented in this effort. I completed one minor edit when I ran across a typo in one part of the help section. It went pretty smoothly. The book covers in detail the editing procedures in Part I. There is even a wiki markup language in the editing process, not unlike HTML markup in creating web pages. Collaborating with other editors is covered in another part of the book. The actual process of article creation and formatting, like creating lists and tables and adding images, is described in another part. Part IV deals with features for building a better and stronger encyclopedia. A wiki is defined as a collaborative web site which can be directly edited by anyone. Wikipedia is just one of several related wikis. There is wiktionary, wikiquote, wikisource and other sister projects of Wikipedia. The concept of wiki building has evidently spread to other areas of knowledge information sharing produced by consensus collaboration. If you think you would like the work of being an “editor” of the Wikipedia encyclopedia and think you would enjoy the social and cultural environment of collaborating with other “editors” of the same ilk, this is the book I would recommend for you. |
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