John Broughton recently sat down to answer some questions for us about his new book, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. While I’m sure most people find navigating Wikipedia to be quite a simple task, editing it can be rather confusing.
John discovered this as he began working deeper in the online encyclopedia:
In November 2006 I started working on an index for editors of Wikipedia - a single page that had links to all relevant policies, guidelines, how-to pages, reference pages, tools, and other things that an editor might conceivably want to read. The more I worked on the index, the more I discovered of the complexity of editing Wikipedia. As the index developed, I realized that I had the basis for the book. I also realized, given how incredibly complex Wikipedia is, why there hadn’t yet been a book about editing Wikipedia?
His book comes out at an exceptionally pivotal time in Wikipedia’s short history.
Wikipedia is immensely popular as a source of information. But it needs many more active editors than it has now, because it is so incomplete. It also needs many more editors who are experts in a particular subject matter. This book helps such potential editors avoid a lot of the mistakes that newcomers make, and shows them how to deal with various situations as they are encountered.
John, along with many other Wikipedia users, anticipates that the online encyclopedia will continue to grow over the years. John speculates about the future of Wikipedia:
I think as more and more people grow up computer-immersed, Wikipedia will become even more important, and the idea of editing it will be intimidating to an ever-increasing percentage of people. Someday perhaps chatting about recent Wikipedia editing experiences may be almost as common as talking about the weather or the traffic or sports.
And finally, John shares an interesting fact about Wikipedia:
I still find it astonishing that Wikipedia and the Commons and a bunch of sister projects (Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikiversity, and Wikibooks.), in all the languages across the globe, are all being run by a non-profit foundation that has only a handful of employees and a budget of only a couple of million dollars per year. And that even includes developing and distributing - for free - the wiki software that all these projects run on. It shows what the Internet makes possible, given a good idea, inspired leadership, and the opportunity for everyone to contribute their time and knowledge.
Check out more information about Wikipedia: The Missing Manual on the Missing Manuals homepage, and peruse John’s Tips & Tricks for Wikipedia.
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The only thing that people need to know about editing Wickedpedia is that editing it is a waste of time. Wickedpedia is a lost cause. Many schools and teachers prohibit students from using Wickedpedia as a source, and one school district went so far as to block Wickedpedia on all of the school district's computers, with the result that the students can't even use Wickedpedia to find other sources.
A lot of people have the mistaken idea that the main -- or even the sole -- cause of bias and error in Wickedpedia is the open editing, but a bigger cause is censorship of good edits by the Wickedpedian control freak administrators. It is this censorship by the administrators that prevents Wickedpedia from being self-correcting. For example, once I tried to add the book "Of Pandas and People," a book that a federal judge banned from public school classrooms, to the Wickedpedia list of "banned books." The Wickedpedian control freaks refused to accept the entry. As a compromise, I proposed listing the book along with a note that the listing was disputed and links to external websites where the dispute was discussed or debated. No soap. The Wickedpedians finally completely rewrote the whole banned books article just to avoid listing the book.
So you can take your lousy Wickedpedia manual and shove it.
Larry Fafarman's complaint was that Wikipedia would not place a book on their list of banned books for the sole reason that it was not banned. He then insisted that they note the "controversy" and then provide a link to his worthless blog.