"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
--Jimmy Wales
With more than 2,000,000 individual articles on everything from Aa! (a Japanese pop group) to Zzyzx, California, written by an army of volunteer contributors, Wikipedia is the #8 site on the World Wide Web. Created (and corrected) by anyone with access to a computer, this impressive assemblage of knowledge is growing at an astonishing rate of more than 30,000,000 words a month. Now for the first time, a Wikipedia insider tells the story of how it all happened--from the first glimmer of an idea to the global phenomenon it's become.
Andrew Lih has been an administrator (a trusted user who is granted access to technical features) at Wikipedia for more than four years, as well as a regular host of the weekly Wikipedia podcast. In The Wikipedia Revolution, he details the site's inception in 2001, its evolution, and its remarkable growth, while also explaining its larger cultural repercussions. Wikipedia is not just a website; it's a global community of contributors who have banded together out of a shared passion for making knowledge free.
Featuring a Foreword by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and an Afterword that is itself a Wikipedia creation.
About this product: Wikipedia may be the biggest group writing project ever, but the one thing you won't find in the comprehensive online encyclopedia is easy-to-follow guidance on how to contribute. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual helps you avoid beginners' blunders and gets you sounding like a pro from your first edit.
Conversation with John Broughton Author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
What made you write the book? 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. Why is your book especially important now? 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. What is the single most important thing readers of your book will be able to do after buying your book? Readers will be able to find specific things in Wikipedia that they’re particularly interested in editing, and other editors with the same interests. How important is the subject matter of your book? What do you think is on the horizon for your readers? 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. In researching the book, did you come across any surprising facts, figures, or statistics that the world might be interested in? Before I did the book, I had no idea that Wikimedia Commons – the central "stock photo" site for all language versions of Wikipedia – had more than 2 million images available for encyclopedia articles. I sometimes find the sheer volume of transactions at Wikipedia to be astonishing. 100 million article views per day. More than a quarter of a million edits per day. Several thousand new articles added every day. More than a thousand articles deleted every day. More than 7,000 new registered user accounts every day. And that’s just for the English language Wikipedia - the other 250+ non-English language versions combined are more than three times the size of the English Wikipedia. Then there’s this odd statistic: The vast majority of the more than 6 million registered user accounts have never actually done an edit. Perhaps that says something about how easy it is to register versus how easy it is to edit? Finally, 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 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.
Amazon Exclusive: VIP Tips and Tricks:
1. You can dive right in and start editing without setting up a Wikipedia account (that is, getting a user name). However, there are advantages to having a user name - increased privacy, the ability to create new articles, and a personal user page, to name a few. 2. Sometimes editing an entire article at once is necessary - for example, if you're moving sections around, or moving text from one section to another. But those are usually exceptions; in general, it's better instead of clicking the "edit this page" tab, to click an "edit" link for a section that you want to edit. If you plan to edit two or three sections of an article, you can efficiently do these as separate edits of individual sections. Doing so helps you (previewing your edit is much easier), helps other editors (they can see exactly what sections you edited), and minimizes edit conflicts between you and other editors. 3. If you encounter vandalism and don't know how to do reverts, it's better to leave the vandalism in place and check back in ten minutes or so. (Refresh your browser, to make sure you're seeing the latest version of the page.) If the problematic text is still there, then go ahead and delete it, but make sure that your edit summary mentions something like "removing vandalism." The reason for waiting a bit is to see if another, more experienced editor can reverse the vandalizing edit, putting back into the article any text that was overwritten by the vandalism. 4. If you inadvertently add something to a page that you later decide shouldn't be there - a home address, a complaint about your employer, or other private information - you need to do more than just edit the page again and delete that information. Anyone visiting Wikipedia can still read the previous version of the page, a version where that information still exists, simply by going to the page history and opening that prior version. To make something completely inaccessible to other editors and readers, you have to ask an administrator to help. Type "WP:SELDEL" into the search box on the left for details. Even then, the problematic version of the page is still in the database, but only administrators can read it. 5. It's easy to add some information to a Wikipedia article - but if you want that information to stick around, to be there in a day or a month or year, it's critical that you cite the source of that information. The best way is a footnote; you can find out how to create one by typing "WP:CITE" into the search box on the left of your screen. But if that seems to complicated, then there are two easier options. If it’s from an online source, just add the URL, within squared brackets, at the end of the text you've added to an article, like this: [http://webpageaddress]. If it’s from an offline source like a book, go to the article talk page, start a new section (use the "+" tab), and type in the text plus information about the source (title, author, date of publication, page number, etc.) and add a comment that you'd appreciate another editor adding the information to the article. 6. Besides failing to cite a source, inexperienced editors often make two other big mistakes. One, they cut-and-paste large chunks of text into articles, which is a copyright violation, Two, they use information from what Wikipedia calls a "non-reliable" source: a discussion board, the blog of someone who isn't an acknowledged expert on the topic of the Wikipedia article, or a self-published book. (For more information about what Wikipedia considers reliable sources, type "WP:RS" into the search box on the left.) 7. Since January 2008, Wikipedia has had a new resource for intermediate and advanced editors (and yet one more place novice editors can use as a jumping-off place to find information) - the Editor's Index to Wikipedia. You can get to this via the shortcut "WP:EIW" (in the search box to the left, of course). 8. You as a reader may not find answers to some of your questions in Wikipedia articles because they're not really questions for an encyclopedia. For example, "What's a good camera to buy for someone who wants to be a professional photographer?" You can take those questions to the Reference desk (type the shortcut "WP:RD" in the search box on the left). This Wikipedia department is similar to a librarian service. (It's also a place where you can volunteer your question-answering expertise, if you're so inclined). 9. When you type a date, avoid using a format like "05-01-2007." In some countries that date would be May 1, 2007, in others it would be January 5, 2007. Remember that you’re editing the English Wikipedia, not the American Wikipedia. When Brits or Aussies or even Canadians write or interpret written information differently than Americans, then you should carefully design the information in an article so that no one -wherever in the world they happen to be from - is confused. 10. The Wikimedia Commons is the "stock photo" site for Wikipedias in all languages; it's where you should upload an image if you have one that you want to add to a Wikipedia article (or think someone else might find useful). But it's also a place where you can find millions of photos and other images, often quite unique and stunning, for your own personal use, at absolutely no cost. All you need to do is follow the licensing terms - for example, attributing a photo to the person who took it, if you share a photo with someone else.
About this product: We—the users turned creators and distributors of content—are TIME’s Person of theYear 2006, and AdAge’s Advertising Agency of the Year 2007. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what’s really going on? In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. This book shows that what’s emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy.
Building on an analysis of key sites including Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, and Second Life, it explores the intellectual, technological, and social implications of produsage, as well as the legal and economic models employed by produsage projects. In doing so, the book highlights the implications of produsage for our culture, democracy, and society.
About this product: Take any article on Wikipedia. Who wrote it? Where did it come from? Now take a closer look at those unconvincing, badly written sentences in the middle. Why did someone add them? How long will it be before someone else deletes them? And how many people will have read them before they are removed? Five years ago such questions didn't matter; Wikipedia was one source among many, and no one took it very seriously. Two years ago they hardly mattered, because the newspapers said Wikipedia couldn't be trusted, and there was always a more 'reliable' source to check later. But suddenly, these questions really do matter. With all its nonsense, its illiteracy and its unreliability, Wikipedia is currently the eighth most visited site on the web. Whatever they say, most people rely on it most of the time. Those other sources won't be around much longer, and Wikipedia will be the best there is. But is it good enough to rule the world of knowledge? And how big will it be ten years from now?
"A good book! It's a nice overview of wiki editing and administration, with pointers to handy extensions and further online documentation." -Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer, Wikimedia Foundation "This book is filled with practical knowledge based on experience. It's not just spouting some party line." -Rob Church, a developer of MediaWiki MediaWiki is the world's most popular wiki platform, the software that runs Wikipedia and thousands of other websites. Though it appears simple to use at first glance, MediaWiki has extraordinarily powerful and deep capabilities for managing and organizing knowledge. In corporate environments, MediaWiki can transform the way teams write and collaborate. This comprehensive book covers MediaWiki's rich (and sometimes subtle) features, helping you become a wiki expert in no time. You'll learn how to: Find your way around by effective searching and browsing Create and edit articles, categories, and user preferences Use advanced features for authors, such as templates, dynamic lists, logical parser functions, and RSS, to organize and maintain large numbers of articles Install and run your own wiki, and configure its look and behavior Develop custom wiki features, called extensions, with the PHP programming language and MySQL database
This book also provides special guidance for creating successful corporate wikis. For beginners who want to create or work on collaborative, community-driven websites with this platform, MediaWiki is the essential one-stop guide. "I was a MediaWiki newbie before reading this book. Now, many aspects of the platform that were murky before are crystal clear." -JP Vossen, author of O'Reilly's Bash Cookbook
Myxomatosis. The Order of Canada. Noble gas. Catherine de' Medici. The History of Superman? Whether you're doing serious research on the Web or just settling an argument, it's easy to get caught up in Wikipedia's two million articles. And that's not such a bad thing. But how'd all the information get there in the first place? And how can you tell if it's reliable?
Or say you want to become a part of Wikipedia and make your own contributions. Where do you begin?
In "How Wikipedia Works," you'll learn the skills required to use and contribute to the world's largest reference work-like what constitutes good writing and research and how to work with images and templates.
With insight, anecdotes, and tips from three Wikipedia veterans, you'll learn how to: Find information and evaluate the quality and reliability of articles Contribute to existing articles by copyediting, writing new material, and fact-checking Add new articles that conform to Wikipedia's guidelines and best practices-so that your hard work won't be deleted Communicate with other Wikipedians through Talk pages, discussion forums, direct messaging, and more Understand Wikipedia's policies and procedures and how they're created and enforced Resolve content disputes and deal with vandals and other malicious editors
Wikipedia is made up of people just like you: students, professors, and everyday experts and fans. With about 10,000 articles added to Wikipedia each week, there are plenty of opportunities to join this global community. "How Wikipedia Works" explains how you can make the Web's go-to source for information even better. Instead of wondering where to begin, the question will be "How far will you go?"
Sams Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes gives you straightforward, practical answers when you need fast results. By working through the 10-minute lessons, you’ll learn everything you need to know to take advantage of the Wikipedia encyclopedia–and all of Wikipedia’s incredible resources.
Tips point out shortcuts and solutions
Cautions help you avoid common pitfalls
Notes provide additional information
Plain English explains new terms and definitions
10 minutes is all you need to learn how to…
Navigate the Wikipedia site and discover its latest capabilities
Use Wikipedia for fast, efficient research
Verify Wikipedia information and check references
Edit, correct, improve, and discuss existing Wikipedia articles
Write new Wikipedia articles, and add images and media to them
Find word definitions in Wiktionary and quotations in Wikiquote
Download Wikimedia Commons photos you can freely reuse
About this product: During its brief existence Wikipedia has proved astonishingly successful. Its 2.8 million articles (in English alone) are available freely to all with access to the internet. The on-line encyclopaedia can be seen as the 21st century's version of earlier historical attempts to gather the world's knowledge into one place. This unique book first offers a description of some of these earlier attempts. The author discusses five historical groups or communities of practice, all of which had similar ambitions to Wikipedia to make an impact on the society of their time through the dissemination of information. The second part is an analysis of Wikipedia itself, and the third part contains suggestions about how to approach it, how to contribute to it and what one might gain from it. Writing in an accessible style the author takes a socio-historical approach and argues that by looking at communities of practice in the past we can come to understand the radical, even political, nature of Wikipedia. The book will have a broad appeal to anyone interested in the development of this unique project, including information management professionals but also historians, sociologists, educators and students.
You don't have to understand how to edit Wikipedia in order to find the information you need and join the conversation. This booklet gives you just what you need to know in friendly, concise form so you can research any subject without getting lost in Wikipedia's labyrinth. With it, you'll be able to unlock the mysteries of the many links on every Wikipedia page and the sometimes cryptic buzzwords you see on Talk pages. And, while this booklet focuses on Wikipedia readers, it also includes a tutorial for first-time editors and explains Wikipedia's editing tools. You'll find valuable advice on how to alert editors to flaws in articles and how to contribute to Talk pages without getting caught up in pointless disputes. The author of Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual has edited more than 15,000 Wikipedia articles, and has written a comprehensive index to Wikipedia for editors to use in their daily work. His knowledge of Wikipedia is limitless and his passion is contagious. With this guide, you'll catch on quickly.
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