Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Wikipedia's Wiki on Writing Wikis
While looking for tips on writing wikis, to assist me on our current project, I made a quite fascinating discovery: Wikipedia, the mother of all wiki databases, has a wiki article on writing wiki articles! You can only imagine my glee at happening upon something so meta and applicable to what we are doing in class! I hoped that it would be filled with entertaining and interesting information . . . ehhh, kinda. The article is incredibly informative and descriptive regarding Wikipedia's expectations and suggestions for articles submitted into its database, giving almost an excessive amount of detailed information. For example, explaining that a subheading should go under a heading. But there are some useful writing techniques the can be taken from the article and applied to our wikis. For instance, the "Provide Context for the Reader" heading (which you can conveniently navigate to through a well organized table of contents!) makes suggestions for writing clearly so that anyone who might read the article can understand what it's trying to say. For anyone who might want to sift through this extensive resource the link is below. Go forth, and wiki informed!
Wikipedia:Writing better articles - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Hey Emily!
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I saw the post title, I knew this was going to be good. :) I sort of skimmed through the page just now, and I have to say, it's pretty well written. I'll probably be using it tonight for my wikispaces page thing... Thanks for posting the link!
Ahaha, Emily this is great. The fact that we need a wiki page to figure out how to...write a wiki page. But it's actually super helpful. I liked the section that said "super long wikis should be avoided"... you mean like this one? Despite its length, it actually had some nice tidbits of information. I actually didn't even think to look up how to make a wiki! Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this! I wonder who decided what to put in it... since there's not a wiki about writing a wiki about writing a wiki. XD I thought it was interesting how they said you need more intro/lead paragraphs if you have a longer article, since this wasn't something I had thought about before.
ReplyDeleteEmily! This is fantastic! It's nice to have a source like Wikipedia to explain the best ways to write a wiki, because they are so successful with all their wikis. Personally I enjoyed the section titled "principle of least astonishment" which explained that you shouldn't shock your reader with information.
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