Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

by John Broughton and John Broughton

Book Overview

Want to be part of the largest group-writing project in human history? Learn how to contribute to Wikipedia, the user-generated online reference for the 21st century. Considered more popular than eBay, Microsoft.com, and Amazon.com, Wikipedia servers respond to approximately 30,000 requests per second, or about 2.5 billion per day. It's become the first point of reference for people the world over who need a fact fast.

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596515162
• ISBN13: 9780596515164
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 501 Pages
• Weight: 4.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Wikipedia and the Wiki Concept

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 collabo

This is a great book because of its small size.

I already had the "big book" on wikipedia.org, "Wikipedia: The Missing Manual", but I've found that some people won't collaborate on wikis when you have such a large book. This new book "Wikipedia: Reader's Guide" is much smaller than I expected, but I'm very happy with it. Despite the title of this book that implies that it's for readers, the pamphlet has two main sections: 1) for readers and 2) section II for elementary editing. This book also covers some of the wikipedia sister projects such as wikiversity.org and wikibooks.org. So, now our people know about the free, online wiki encyclopedia, wikipedia.org, but we're going to also benefit from the free textbooks at: wikibooks.org and the free lesson plans and lessons from wikiversity.org About the MediaWiki Foundation: It just keeps getting better and better.

Valuable reference for beginning or expert editors

This is a very clear and mostly-complete guide to creating and editing articles on Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It is not intended for people who look up things on Wikipedia, although there is a brief description of this process in an appendix. It's surprisingly difficult to find things on Wikipedia. Even though all the how-to information is available free on their site, it's often difficult to find the thing you need, and everything is reference material--there's no tutorial for beginners. There are an amazing number of rules and practices to follow when editing Wikipedia (you don't just start typing), and this book does a good job of explaining and organizing them. This book is valuable because it is easy to find things in it and because it gives you a path to learning to edit Wikipedia. (Wikipedia uses the term "editor" for anyone who writes or modifies material.) The most important thing I learned from this book is the importance of footnotes. An encyclopedia like the Encyclopedia Brittanica recruits experts to produce signed articles in their specialty. The selection process and the author's credentials give you some confidence in the material presented. Wikipedia lets anyone write or modify articles, and all articles are unsigned, so it must be approached more cautiously. Credibility depends on having all the statements referenced to reliable sources. I had not paid much attention to the footnoting in Wikipedia before, but after reading this book I notice how many articles are inadequately footnoted or have no footnotes at all. The Wikipedia leaders are very aware of this problem and continually urge editors to supply references. The high standard of sourcing every statement is met in many articles, especially those on very controversial subjects. Any idiot can change an article on Wikipedia, and many idiots do. The most surprising thing I learned was how prevalent vandalism is. Estimates are that 10% of all edits are vandalism (p. 123). Most vandalism is obvious, for example, on March 20, 2008 the entire text of the article "Passive smoking" was changed to "ice cream icecream". Sometimes it is obvious when looked at, for example, a caption "San Diego Zoo" was changed to "San Hannah Montana". There are more subtle cases, such as adding bogus information or changing statistics. Each page has a complete history of changes, and there are human editors and robots who patrol the recent changes looking for vandalism. Most vandalism is detected and reverted within a few minutes or hours, so the average user will probably never see any. The book has a few gaps in coverage. For example, there's half a page on p. 244 about the evils of having a single subsection, but there's no discussion of subsections in general and it doesn't even tell you the markup to create a subsection! After some rummaging around I discovered that the markup is described in Figure 1-4 on p. 8. This required "rummaging" because this page is not

FOR ALL THOSE EDITORS THAT HAVE AN INQUIRING MIND THAT NEEDS TO KNOW!!

Are you an editor that has an inquiring mind that needs to know? If you are, then this book is for you. Author John Broughton, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that is about the English edition of Wikipedia. Broughton, begins by showing you the right way to edit, why you want to be a registered editor, how to become one, and everything you need to know about figuring out, tracking, and reversing changes to articles when appropriate. Then, the author discusses the rules of engagement, how normal conversations occur, the standard Wikipedia processes for disagreements over content, and dealing with incivility and personal attacks. Next, he introduces you to some parts of articles that aren't text or links: The table of contents, lists and tables, and images and other media. The author also shows you that an article isn't locked in stone--you can rename it, split it up, merge it with other articles, or even ask for it to be deleted. Finally, the author discusses every option that you have to customize Wikipedia to suit yourself, using choices you find when you click My Preferences. This most excellent book provides structured guidance for people who want to learn the core curriculum, the information you absolutely need to avoid running afoul of the rules.. But, more importantly, the book will show you the structured process for learning all about editing, including all of the tips and tools that can make editing easier.

Great resource for Wikipedia editors!

Wikipedia, the free access online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, is a remarkable achievement. Started only in 2001, it now comprises over 9 million articles is written in over 250 languages, and is the first choice for reference material for millions of Internet users. Despite criticisms by some for the variable quality of its material, the value of the contributions of tens of thousands of unpaid volunteers is enormous, not only in notable and verified content accessible to the vast majority of the world's population in their native languages, but in the opportunity for everyone to contribute to this repository of knowledge in his or her own way (subject to the review and editing of others just like themselves.) More importantly, in my view, is the model it represents in human collaboration efforts, this one in creating a repository of knowledge, but applicable more broadly to other efforts. Besides merely creating enormously useful things, the collaborative efforts result in a community of people and groups which has its own intrinsic values. Imagine thousands of volunteers committing their personal time and effort into a nonhierarchical, consensus-based collaboration having as its selfless main purpose the improvement of human society. Socialism at its best! It seems to me that the model may be useful in areas of politics, management and administration, education, and other social endeavors.. The Open-Source software movement, predating Wikipedia, operates in much the same way. Perhaps the earliest example of this collaborative model was the developmental years of the Internet. As a casual user of Wikipedia, I had no idea of the nature of the Wikipedia project (and its sister projects - Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikinews, and Wikiversity - and no doubt others yet to come) until I read "Wikipedia: the Missing Manual," by John Broughton. He is an experienced Wikipedia editor with over 15,000 edits to his credit and is the creator of the "Editor's Index to Wikipedia" which lists every reference page on Wikipedia as well as other off site pages with information useful for serious Wikipedia editors. "Wikipedia: the Missing Manual" is an extremely thorough guide to creating and editing Wikipedia articles. The book is intended to help train new writers and editors and to improve the skills and knowledge of existing participants. Broughton encourages people to join the Wikipedia community of researchers, fact checkers, and proofreaders. This community seems to be made up of committed, skilled, and serious people who take great pride in the project. There is little organizational hierarchy involved and a minimum of formal participatory rules, but a large set of informal mores and practices which help maintain production, efficiency, civility, and quality. There is always a need for more articles, although of the thousands created every day, nearly one half of them are deleted within 24