About wiki How The HowTo Manual That Anyone

“About wiki. How” “The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Edit” Presented By: Valerie Fuecker Engl 393/301 March 12, 2007

Introduction Ø What is wiki. How? Ø How does wiki. How work? Ø How can you help? Ø Guidelines of the wiki. How community

What is wiki. How? It is a collaborative writing project whose aim is to build the world’s largest how-to manual. Ø Its purpose is to provide useful and free instructions for people to use to solve problems of everyday life. Ø Currently there are 16, 737 articles on wiki. How, with new articles being created daily, and past articles being improved upon. Ø The ultimate goal of wiki. How is to provide “free, unbiased, accurate instructions on almost every topic imaginable. ” Ø

How does wiki. How work? Ø The site is a ‘wiki’ l Ø Process: l l l Ø A website that anyone can write and edit A visitor to wiki. How creates a new page about how to do something After the new page is submitted, any other visitor can then edit, improve, or change the page Whenever a change is made to a page, there is an area that displays ‘recent changes’ and also in the ‘page history’ Because users are trusted by the wiki. How admin to behave in a manner which helps others, vandalism, non appropriate material, and other miscellaneous material that does not pertain to a how-to manual is quickly removed

How can you help? Ø It starts with sharing your knowledge! l l Ø Editing an existing page l Ø Create a new page of something that you know how to do If you need ideas for topics, you can choose from a list of topic requests made by other users If you think that an existing how-to manual could be improved upon, press the ‘edit this page’ button The contributions made by wiki. How users help millions of people EVERY MONTH learn how to do something new l Just think… by writing an article about something you know how to do, you could be helping someone on the other side of the world learn something new!!

Guidelines of the wiki. How community Ø A civil group effort l l l Users must expect that their writing may be modified, criticized, or improved by others When changes are made to a how-to page, they should be viewed as an improvement and not as criticism on the author’s original abilities or the approach taken When editing someone else’s work, users must also be friendly, civil, and supportive Personal attacks should never be made REMEMBER! wiki. How is a GROUP effort… When users disagree, differences should be talked about civilly; those who cannot cooperate with this will be discouraged or prevented from participating in the community

Guidelines cont. Ø Helpful Instructions l “wiki. Hows should help people solve their everyday problems. We believe that profanity, sexually charged, sexually explicit, hate based, recreational drug focused, joke topics, societal instructions, and vanity pages are inappropriate for wiki. How. Topics that pose very high odds of injury or death or are universally illegal will be deleted. wiki. Hows that are written using Reverse Logic, Satire or Sarcasm will be also be deleted. ”

Guidelines cont. Ø Limit egregious self-advertising l l l wiki. How was not created for people to promote products Users should refrain from articles created just to promote a specific business without providing useful insights Users are welcome to post external links, but the wiki. How community reserves the right to delete the links or entire articles that are over stepping the boundaries of self-advertising

The End Ø Any questions?