Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Posted by tripwire45 on Mar 13, 2008 2:38 PM EDT
MCSEWorld.com; By James Pyles
Mail this story
Print this story

I didn't think of Wikipedia as having a manual, missing or otherwise, but it makes sense that it does. For much of the world, Wikipedia is a resource to help people access different types of information, but it's much more than that. As the back of Broughton's book puts it, "Wikipedia may be the biggest group writing project ever...". That being the case, the "group" will need to know how to work together to contribute related information in a common framework. Does this book tell you how to do this? Let's find out.

That makes a great deal of sense to me. The "dark side" of Internet information architecture is that not only can anyone do it (but not necessarily do it well), but there are virtually (no pun intended) no limits to how much information can be added to such online documentation. That means just tons and tons of data can be created that applies to how to perform various tasks, but finding the right information for the task you want to perform can become almost impossible. If I want to edit wikipedia content, I want to know just enough to achieve my goals and not have to wade through volumes of content that I couldn't care less about. That's where Broughton's book comes in.



Alas, no book is perfect. Broughton states that web browsers on both Windows and Macs will work just fine including Firefox and Opera and that the screen captures in the book were created on a Windows XP computer using a Firefox browser (I can attest that you can access Wikipedia using Firefox on Ubuntu just fine, as well...odd that he didn't mention the Safari web browser, though). I also wasn't quite sure which browser was being referenced in some of the instructions (Go to Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced doesn't seem to fit IE6 or Firefox on either Windows XP or Ubuntu. Go figure).

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Reviews; Groups: Community, Mozilla

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.