One of the first things that people new to wikis do to get used to the practice is to review existing pages and fix typos, remove dead links, correct inaccuracies, rephrase awkward sentences, etc.
1. Find a Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) article about a topic you are knowledgeable about (e.g. your favorite hobby), review it carefully, and then edit and improve it. Review the revision history of that page and others to see how previous editors have added small improvements.
Wikis make linking easy, which is a key reason why their pages are often densely interconnected. You don't even have to ensure that the pages you are linking to have actually been created.
1. Start a new page in Wikipedia. (You will need to register). At this point, Wikipedia covers a lot of ground, so try to think of something/someone/someplace pretty obscure you are knowledgeable about, or explore the Requested Articles page to find one. Read the Wikipedia guidelines about what articles are not likely to be acceptable: http://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information
Refactoring means taking the content already within one page or a set of pages and rewriting, reorganizing and cross-linking it to improve its navigability, readability or accessibility.
Because of the free process by which wikis grow, redundant or overlapping pages can accumulate and merging them would be beneficial. Refactoring is usually required to get a well-formed result.
1. Choose a pair of pages in Wikipedia that need to be merged. The Proposed Mergers and Articles to be merged pages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_mergers and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_to_be_merged) list a number of them.
2. Perform the merge, following the instructions here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Merging_and_moving_pages#Performing_the_merger). (Step 5 is the refactoring part)
(Assuming students have some kind of assignment to write in teams, and a class wiki to work in)
Discussions between wiki users most often contain interesting arguments and information; refactoring these into a compact text is a valuable contribution for future readers.
1. Start a page for your team assignment in the class wiki. Make sure everyone on the team knows where it is.
2. Put a first draft up. It doesn't matter, and is actually better, if it's incomplete.
3. Let team members comment and discuss the draft in the comments field at the bottom of the page.
4. Refactor comments into the draft text (you can opt to leave the original discussion on the page)
For the next assignment, eliminate the discussion - have people directly edit the text. Which method do they find to work better? Why?
2. As you write your new entry, turn any relevant names, etc. into links to other Wikipedia pages by enclosing them in [square brackets].
3. Revisit the page a few days later. Check the revision history. Did anyone else contribute to your new page?
2. Revisit the page a few days later. Were your modifications all preserved? If not, see if you can figure out why.
Page Last Updated: Oct 27 2:48pm by Howard Rheingold