Technical Communication Wiki : Chapter 2
This page last changed on Apr 15, 2009 by kjp15.
Public Wikis: Sharing Knowledge over the Internet
What is a public wiki?
A public wiki refers to a wiki that everyone can edit, that is, it is open to the general public on the Internet with or without a free login. Anyone is welcome to add information to the wiki, but contributors are asked to stay within the subject area, policies, and standards of the particular wiki. Content that does not relate to the subject or is not of good quality can and will be deleted by other users. Also, if a contributor makes a mistake or a typo, other users will eventually correct the error. Open collaboration by anyone means that multiple articles can be written very fast simultaneously. And, while there may be some vandalism or edit wars, quality of the articles will generally improve over time after many editors have contributed.
The biggest public wiki in the world, with over 75,000 contributors, is Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" [1]. Wikipedia has over 2.8 million articles in the English version, which includes over 16 million wiki pages, and is one of the top ten most popular websites in the United States [2]. There are versions of Wikipedia in ten different languages, and articles in more than 260 languages. Wikipedia is operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation [3] which pays a small group of employees and depends mainly on donations. There are also over 1,500 volunteer administrators with special powers to keep an eye on editors and make sure they conform to Wikipedia's guidelines and policies.
Contributions made to most public wikis remain the property of their creators and are formally licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The GFDL license ensures the content is freely distributable and reproducible. For example, articles on Wikipedia can be copied, modified, and re-distributed provided that the copy is made available for free and acknowledges the authors (usually by providing a link back to the article). This principle is sometimes called copyleft and is similar to the way free software is licensed and distributed [4]. However, care should be taken when copying articles from Wikipedia because some users have uploaded copyrighted material, against Wikipedia's policies, and copying that material can violate the copyright of its owner. Eventually, the copyright material will be detected and removed by Wikipedia editors.
Examples of public wikis
While Wikipedia is the most well-known public wiki, it is certainly not the only one. The following describes several large public wikis that anyone can contribute to.
Wikitravel is a free, collaborative, world-wide travel guide that contains over 21,000 destination guides and articles. Inspired by the success of Wikipedia, Wikitravel was started in 2003 and designed to give travelers more up-to-date and complete information than can be found in a book. Anyone can sign up and become a Wikitraveller, edit and contribute to articles, or ask questions in the Travellers' pub.
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 1 WikiHow is a collaborative wiki project with the goal of building the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. The free wiki contains over 52,000 articles on an eclectic range of subjects including, "How to survive a long fall," "How to plant a tree," and "How to deal with a difficult daughter-in-law." Articles are organized in categories such as Arts & Entertainment, Family Life, Health, Relationships, Food & Entertaining, and Computers & Electronics which are broken down into subcategories, such as Books, Costumes, Movies, and Music, which are further broken down into more specific categories ,such as Bands and DJs, Musical Instruments, Music Listening and Appreciation, and Songs and Song Writing.
Wikia Entertainment Network contains thousands of entertainment-related wikis that anyone can edit, including wikis dedicated to movies, TV, books, and comics. The biggest entertainment wikis have over 5,000 pages and include:
• Wookieepedia: over 65,000 pages about Star Wars. • Marvel Comics: over 49,000 articles on Marvel comics and characters, including a Strength Scale which is an attempt to rank all of the Marvel characters in order of raw physical strength, with references to support their conclusions. Many of the pages seem to be locked to prevent editing. • Memory Alpha: over 29,000 pages, this is the definitive, accurate encyclopedia for everything related to Star Trek. • Muppet Wiki: over 18,000 pages about Jim Henson and the Muppets. Requires the user to login to edit pages. • Klingon Dictionary: over 7,000 articles on the fictional language spoken by the Klingons on Star Trek. • Lostpedia: over 5,000 articles about the popular TV show Lost, complete with spoiler warnings.
Wikia also hosts Wikia Gaming which has hundreds of wiki fansites for Xbox, PS3, Wii, PC, and handheld gamers, and a variety of other wikis such as the Recipes Wiki (with 48,000 recipes including 190 dog food recipes) and the Psychology Wiki (with over 25,000 articles in 17 subjects related to psychology).
There are also "hybrid" websites that contain some regular webpages with fixed content and some wiki pages where readers can share their knowledge and experience. An example is Dave's Garden which is a website for beginning and experienced gardeners around the world. There are featured articles on fixed webpages, hundreds of forums on home and gardening topics where readers can share advice and knowledge, thousands of gardening blogs and the opportunity for users to create their own blog, and several wikis where gardeners can share their expertise and information about plants, bugs, birds, and insects.
Another form of public wikis are industry-oriented wikis, such as KeyContent.org and the Carolina Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Both are non-profit organizations that have wikis for discussions and articles related to technical communication.
The mission of KeyContent is to provide a place for users to instantly publish articles and express their views about the technical communication profession. Currently, there are over 180 articles with the oldest dating back to 2004 on subjects such as social networking, wiki-fying documents, humor about XML, and news of the profession. Since KeyContent has free and open registration for industry professionals, a basic guide for editing the KeyContent wiki is given later in this chapter.
The STC has updated their website to use a wiki-based content management system which allows members, after logging in, to edit and update some of the pages including sharing their resumes. Access to the STC wiki is limited to dues-paying members of the organization and many of the pages are locked, allowing users only to monitor a page and to view the history of the page (click on the history tab), but not edit the page.
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 2 Software used by public wikis
Wikipedia, Wikitravel, wikiHow, and Wikia all use the free, open-source MediaWiki software, so they share a similar appearance. MediaWiki was originally written for use on Wikipedia but is now used by many other wikis. Editing and creating pages is accomplished in a similar way for all of these sites. At the top of each page, there are tabs that say Article, Edit or Edit this page, Discuss or Discussion, and History. The tabs on Wikia may look different, but the same tabs are present. If a page is locked for editing, such as the main pages of the sites, the Edit tab will not appear. For a locked page on Wikia, Edit this page will be replaced with View source which shows the wiki markup but does not let you change it. There are many reasons to lock a page from editing including protecting the main information about a wiki or to settle controversies and prevent constant bickering over the content.
Many of the public wikis give you the option of editing pages anonymously or creating an account. To register an account is free and your user ID will show up on the history page when you make edits. If you don't login, either "anonymous" or your IP address will show up. On wikiHow, the contributors to an article are listed at the bottom of the page. If readers click on a name, they are sent to the author's About Me page which gives details about the author and lists the articles they have written or to which they have contributed.
Each of the sites allows editing and formatting using the wiki markup language and a Rich Text or WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface, usually at the same time. For example, users can click a button to make text bold or they can type in the markup language (''') to make text bold. On wikiHow, the user has the option of using Guided Editing, which has sections such as Introduction, Steps, Video, Tips, Warnings, Related wikiHow articles, and Sources and Citations that the user can fill out using the wiki markup language. Then, there is a button called Advanced Editing at the top of the page, where the user can use a Rich Text interface for formatting, but the sections do not appear. While the Rich text toolbar for each site is slightly different, they all are similar to the toolbar on Wikipedia which is shown in Figure 2-2 in the following section.
KeyContent.org and STC Carolina use TikiWiki software for their wikis. TikiWiki is more than just wiki software; it is a content management system that includes many other tools as well, such as blogs, calendars, and forums. TikiWiki can be customized with different "skins" or themes, including different colors and layouts. For example, Keycontent designed their own theme using a turquoise green color, icons instead of tabs at the top of the page, and a tag cloud at the top right. More details on KeyContent are included in a later section. On the STC website, if the user has the authority to change a page, there will be edit and monitor page tabs at the top of the page. If a user has logged in, but does not have the authority to edit a page, there will be no edit tab, only monitor page and history tabs. If a user is not logged in or is not a member, the page looks like a regular webpage with no tabs at all.
Editing pages in Wikipedia (MediaWiki software)
Many public wikis say that the number one rule of wiki editing is to be bold. Jump right in and make changes. You can't mess up a wiki because someone else can come behind you and fix the mistakes you make, and there is always the History tab where previous versions of the page are saved. Editing a page can range from fixing a typo or spelling error to adding a link or a whole paragraph or page of text.
The following describes how to edit a page in Wikipedia, using their MediaWiki software. A similar procedure would be used for other wikis that use MediaWiki. (You can tell a site uses MediaWiki by looking at the bottom of the page. There is usually an icon that says "Powered by MediaWiki.")
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 3 Create an account
Go to http://www.wikipedia.org. The home page is shown in Figure 2-1. Click on English for the English version of Wikipedia. In the upper righthand corner of the screen, click on Log in / create account. Enter your Username and Password or click Create one to create an account. It's free to register an account and then your username will show up on the history page when you make edits. If you don't want to create an account, simply navigate to a page in Wikipedia you want to edit. Your IP address will be recorded publicly on the history page.
Figure 2-1. The Wikipedia home page showing the Wikipedia versions around the world.
There are several benefits to creating an account and logging in. When you login for the first time, you can follow the links to learn the basics of Wikipedia. When you are logged in, a fifth tab called Watch appears at the top of the page. If you click on the Watch tab, you will add the page to your watchlist, which will list any edits made to the page. You can then click on my watchlist in the upper righthand corner of the page to check for updates to your watched pages. To remove a page from your watchlist, click on the Unwatch tab at the top of the page. There are other links in the upper righthand corner of the page that you get when you log in, namely:
• my talk, where other users can post messages for you; • my preferences, where you can change your password and your email address, you can select a multitude of options for your files, your watchlist, and your searches, and you can enable a number of gadgets, which you are warned to use responsibly or risk being blocked; and • my contributions, where you can see a list of all the edits you have made.
Another benefit of creating an account is that you can create your own user subpage, where you can start writing your articles without them being scrutinized, and you can create your own user sandbox to practice editing.
Practice editing
After logging in, or choosing not to, you can practice editing pages in the Wikipedia:Sandbox. If you do
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 4 not see a link for the sandbox, enter "Wikipedia:Sandbox" in the search box on the left side of the page and click Go. (Note that you must include the colon.) You can also navigate directly to a page you want to edit. In either case, click on the edit this page tab at the top of the page. The page transforms into an editable webpage and you can see the wiki markup throughout the text. The toolbar shown in Figure 2-2 appears.
Figure 2-2. The Rich Text editing toolbar in Wikipedia. The numbers below the icons were added for reference--they do not appear on Wikipedia.
The icons on the toolbar in Figure 2-2 stand for the following commands:
1. Bold text (you can also use Ctrl-b as a shortcut) 2. Italic text (you can also use Ctrl-i as a shortcut) 3. Internal link--when you highlight a word or phrase and click Internal link, Wikipedia will automatically find a related Wikipedia page and create a link to it. The text turns blue, indicating it is a link. This works really well for places, like cities and states. If Wikipedia cannot find a related page, the text will turn red, indicating that the page does not yet exist. 4. External link (remember http:// prefix)--generates the text: [http://www.example.com link title]. Insert the web address, leave a space, then type the title of the link (link text will turn blue). 5. Level 2 headline 6. Embedded file--embeds a picture that you upload to Wikipedia 7. File link 8. Mathematical formula 9. Ignore wiki formatting--this option can be used if you want the actual wiki commands to be displayed in your text or if you want asterisks or brackets in your text. 10. Your signature with timestamp--adds your user ID or your IP address if you're not logged in, the time, and the date. 11. Horizontal line (use sparingly) 12. Redirect--sends the user to another page with a similar topic. Used for synonyms or variations of the same subject to avoid duplicate pages. 13. Strike--text with a line through it 14. Line break 15. Superscript 16. Subscript 17. Small--text in a smaller font 18. Insert hidden comment--text only shows on the edit page, not on the actual page 19. Insert a picture gallery--default is a table with spaces for two images each with a caption, as shown in Figure 2-3 20. Insert block of quoted text 21. Insert a table--default is three rows and three columns 22. Insert a reference--generates the text: Insert footnote text here. Insert your reference or footnote between the tags. They will automatically be numbered, but they will not automatically be listed at the bottom of the page. You must go to the end of your article, make a heading called "References", and type
{{reflist}}.
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 5 Caution Other users can be changing the Sandbox at the same time you are, which could result in editing conflicts. Wikipedia will show a warning and let you compare the changes you made to those the other user made. Of course, for the Sandbox, it doesn't matter much, but for an actual page, you would have to merge your changes into the existing text.
Figure 2-3 shows the Wikipedia:Sandbox where the user has practiced some basic formatting. The wiki markup shown was automatically generated when the user clicked an icon on the menu bar. Once you have added some text or made some changes, click on the Show preview button below the Sandbox. You can see what your text will look like before you save it. If you like it, click on the Save page button. Your text will become the new webpage--until someone else changes it.
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 6 Figure 2-3. The Wikipedia:Sandbox with some practice formatting. Top image shows the editing view; bottom image shows the resulting page.
Find articles to edit
Once you have practiced in the Sandbox, be bold and find other pages to edit or add to. It's a good idea to start wikiing by editing articles first. Once you feel comfortable with that, you can add new pages and develop new articles.
A good place to start is by finding some red text, that is, a link to a page that does not yet exist. To create a new page, click on the red hyperlink. A new blank page will open up with the red hyperlink as the title. Before writing a new page, search Wikipedia to see if there is a related page where you can redirect the user to avoid duplication, for example if the link is "hunger" you can redirect the user to the "malnutrition" page. To insert a redirect, go to the new blank page and click on the redirect icon (#R or icon number 12 in Figure 2-2). The text "#REDIRECT [[Target page name]]" will appear. Type the name of the related page, e.g. "malnutrition," where "Target page name" appears. Another good place to start is to flesh out a Wikipedia stub. A stub is a very short article, sometimes only a few sentences long, that needs expansion. A stub contains useful information but is too short to be of encyclopedic quality [5]. You can either randomly run across a stub while you are researching a topic of interest, or you can search the Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting page to find a list of thousands of stubs organized into categories.
Create a new article
If you don't find a page on the topic you are interested in, you can create a new page. Before starting an article on Wikipedia, read their official policies and guidelines, summarized as five pillars [6]. The five
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 7 pillars of Wikipedia are:
1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so all articles must be factual, verifiable, and referenced. Wikipedia is not a dictionary, a soapbox, an advertising platform, a forum for personal ideas or experiences, or a place to present original research (because it cannot be verified). 2. Wikipedia must have a neutral point of view. Newer articles tend to be more biased, but after multiple edits, articles become more neutral over time. Articles can represent multiple points of view, with each one having equal weight and verification. 3. Wikipedia is free content that can be edited by anyone. The GNU Free Documentation License ensures that the content remains free even if copied or redistributed. Articles are not owned by any individual and can be freely and mercilessly edited by others. 4. Wikipedia has a code of conduct including, be civil, avoid personal attacks and edit wars, and respecting other Wikipedians even when you may not agree with them. Practice the three-revert rule: do not return a page to an earlier version (revert the page) in whole or in part more than three times in 24 hours, except if you revert your own actions or obvious vandalism or copyright infringement. 5. Wikipedia does not have firm rules, so be bold in editing articles and don't worry about making mistakes.
To create a new article, follow these steps:
• Search Wikipedia first to make sure the article does not already exist, possibly under a different title. • Login. You must have a user id to create a new article. • Develop a stubstantial amount of content for the article off-line or in your user sandbox. New articles with minimal content may be speedily deleted. • Gather reliable, published references to show sources for your information. • Be sure your article is notable and does not contain copyrighted text or images. • Create a new page using one of the following methods: ° Highlight a word or phrase, create an internal link (text turns red), save the page, click on the red link, then click Start the... article. ° Search for the new title, and when the search finds nothing, click on Create this page. ° Type a new URL in the browser address bar using underscores instead of spaces between words in the title. For example, type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Continuing_Education to start a page about the Duke Continuing Education program. Then, click Start the Duke Continuing Education article link. • Type or copy in your content including references and weblinks. • Consider adding the message shown in Figure 2-5 to the top of your article so it will not be deleted while you work on it.
Template messages and tags
Wikipedia has many template messages that you may see at the top of an article or within an article. These messages are designed to give helpful information to users or to warn about sub-standard content. Several are shown in Figure 2-4, but there are many more (see [7]). Editors can flag pages with a message by adding the appropriate tag directly to the wiki syntax. This is an advanced topic for beginning editors, so practice in the Wikipedia Sandbox before adding a message to an actual article.
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 8 Figure 2-4. Examples of some of the warnings and messages that appear on Wikipedia articles.
To tag an article with the messages shown in Figure 2-4, go to the top of the page (or wherever you want the message to appear) and type, respectively:
{{coi\|date=type in current month and year}} {{primarysources\|date=type in current month and year}} {{cleanup-section}} {{globalize\|date=type in current month and year}} {{Original research\|date=type in current month and year}}
Note that adding the date is optional, and for some template messages the date is not included. Another message that may be useful for new articles is shown in Figure 2-5. To generate the message, use the tag
{{underconstruction}} or {{construction}}.
Figure 2-5. A useful message to add to a new article you're working on.
Other terms to know
There are several other terms that are useful to know in Wikipedia, such as:
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 9 • Disambiguation page: a page that lists articles associated with the same title, for example, type "stub" into the search box on Wikipedia and you will get a page directing you to a more specific page, such as pay stub, stub network, and stub (circuit). • Edit conflict: warning that appears if another user makes an edit to a page while you are in the process of editing it. Your edit will not take effect, but you are prompted to merge your edit with the previous one. • History page: tab at the top of each wiki page that lists all the previous versions of the page and the user name (or IP address) of the one who changed them. • Wikification or wikify: to format using the wiki markup, as opposed to plain text or HTML, and to add internal links to incorporate the article fully into Wikipedia. • Wikilink: a link to another Wikipedia page, as opposed to an external link to an outside website.
For a complete set of terms commonly used in Wikipedia, see the Wikipedia:Glossary. To learn more about Wikipedia, go through the Wikipedia:Tutorial.
Editing a page in KeyContent (TikiWiki software)
Editing a wiki page in KeyContent.org is a little different than in Wikipedia because they use TikiWiki software and not MediaWiki. TikiWiki CMS/Groupware (also called Tiki) includes more than just wiki software. It is a content management system (CMS) that includes many tools, such as discussion forums, blogs, news articles, a calendar, and RSS feeds, that can keep track of content [8]. Tiki is a free, open source software that was developed by an international community with over 200 people contributing to write the code.
KeyContent operates under the Creative Commons copyright. All articles are owned by their copyright holder(s) and published under the Creative Commons license [9]. Under this license, users are free to copy and modify the content provided that they give the original author(s) credit, that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that the Creative Commons license is applied to the modified work as well.
The home page of KeyContent.org is shown below in Figure 2-6.
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 10 Figure 2-6. The home page of KeyContent.org.
Create an account
To edit or add articles to KeyContent, you must register to get a username and password. Benefits of registering include being able to post comments, edit articles, and get your own personal wiki page. There are several links to the registration page. One is on the green menu on the left side of the page called Sign up (free) to see more.
Once you are registered, login by entering your username and password in the boxes at the upper left of the page. After logging in, you can create your personal wiki page, by clicking My KeyContent (directly under your name in the upper left of the page), then selecting Preferences from the dropdown menu. On the User Preferences page, under the first section called Personal Information, it will list the name of your personal wiki page, for example "UserPageKristie.Phillips," followed by the blue weblink Create. When you click Create, the wiki page is transformed to an editable page and you can add your content in the same way you edit an article, described in the following section. Be sure to click Save at the bottom of the page or you will lose your changes and your page will not be created. Once your wiki page is created, it will show up under your My Contributions page (click on My KeyContent in the upper left corner of the page, then select My Contributions from the dropdown menu). Your personal wiki page is a great place to practice using the wiki syntax or to start an article, building up content until you are ready to share it live.
Practice editing
To practice editing, either go to your personal wiki page or click on Articles at the top right of the page and select Sample Article (Sandbox) from the dropdown menu.
Instead of having tabs at the top of the page as in Wikipedia, Tiki software has a small line of icons at the
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 11 top right of the page. The icons that appear change according to the content type on the page. The History icon (see Figure 2-8) seems to only show up when you have contributed to a page and then lists all the previous edits to the article. So, for most articles, you cannot see the history of the edits, however, contributors to the article are listed at the bottom of the page in a gray box, along with the last person who edited the page and when the page was last updated.
To edit a page, either click on the Edit This Page weblink at the top center of the page, or click on the Edit icon (paper and pencil), as shown in Figure 2-7. If you are using your personal wiki page, you will see three additional icons, as shown in Figure 2-8.
Figure 2-7. Icons shown at the top right of the screen on the Sample Key Article page in KeyContent. From left to right, the icons stand for: Edit, Print, PDF, Email this page, and Monitor this page.
Figure 2-8. Icons shown on your personal wiki page. From left to right, the icons stand for: History, Comments, Attachments, Edit, Print, PDF, Email this page, and Stop monitoring this page.
After clicking Edit this page, the webpage transforms to into fields that you can edit. You can use wiki syntax to edit the article directly or you can click on the Quicktags link to use the Quicktags toolbar, shown in Figure 2-9. Clicking on an Quicktag icon generates the wiki syntax for you, however, you cannot see how the page will actually look until you preview or save the article. You can also click on the small, gray box Wiki Help at the bottom of the page to get more information about the wiki syntax.
Figure 2-9. The Quicktags toolbar from KeyContent.org (TikiWiki software). Numbers under the icons were added for reference--they do not appear on KeyContent.
The icons on the Quicktags toolbar in Figure 2-9 stand for the following commands:
1. title bar: makes highlighted text bold and puts it in a green shaded box 2. text, underline 3. text, monospace: typically used for writing code 4. text, line break 5. text, italic 6. text, bold
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 12 7. text, align right 8. text, align right (yes, it's a duplicate!) 9. text, align center 10. table, normal: simple table with light green shading; three rows and two columns are the default 11. table, fancy: table with three rows and two columns where the header row (top row) is shaded dark green, the first row is shaded light green, and the second row is white 12. submit to social network: this generates the text "share this page:" followed by a menu bar with icons for 20 social networking websites; clicking on any of these icons will send you away from the KeyContent site 13. style, color: makes the highlighted text red, however, you can rewrite the HTML color code to insert the color you want 14. no formatting: removes the wiki formatting so you can use brackets or asterisks, or show wiki commands in your text 15. list, numbered 16. list, bulleted 17. link, wiki page 18. link, external 19. image 20. hr: gives a horizontal line across the page 21. heading3: smallest heading, black text 22. heading2: medium heading, dark green text 23. heading1: largest heading, dark green text 24. color (another duplicate icon!): makes the highlighted text red 25. box: puts the highlighted text in a box 26. special characters: includes foreign letters, Greek letters, and the Registered and Trademark symbols
Find an article to edit
Once you have practiced editing, search for an actual article that you want to edit. At the top right of the page, click on Articles and, from the dropdown menu, select either Newest Articles, List All Articles, or Browse Categories. There are 11 categories with the most articles being found in the Practices, Tools, Basics, Business, and Industry categories. The Published Articles category contains finished articles that have been submitted to KeyContent and approved by the editorial board. These articles cannot be edited, and the individual authors hold the copyright. Information about the author is at the bottom of the page.
Create a new article
If you cannot find the article you are interested in, you can create a new article. KeyContent accepts several kinds of articles, including reviews of electronic and print resources, software applications, and new technologies or products. Most reviews should be a minimum of 800 words. Check KeyContent's submission guidelines for more information and a style and format guideline [10].
To create a new article, first login, then click on Articles at the top right of the page, and from the dropdown menu, select Start New Article. Enter the name of your article (you can change it later), and click Create Article. Choose the category from the dropdown menu that best fits your article. You can choose to apply a template to your article that contains some basic formatting such as headings, bulleted lists, and a navigational box showing an outline of the headings. Any parts of the template that you don't need can be deleted. Edit the article title if needed and write or copy and paste your article in the
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 13 Edit box. You can include notes to yourself or ideas you don't want to forget in the My Footnotes box. This box is not part of the article and is not visible to others.
Enter several keywords, or tags, in the Folksonomy Tags box. Some are suggested for you if you can't think of any. Folksonomy is a term meaning to collaboratively create and manage tags to categorize content, also known as collaborative tagging or social tagging [11]. Generally, keywords are chosen freely instead of choosing from a controlled list of traditional subject headings. KeyContent uses a tag cloud, or a weighted list in a visual design [12], to show the tags in their folksonomy. See the right side of the KeyContent home page in Figure 2-6. The tag cloud is called "Key Tags" and includes the top 50 tags used on the site. In a tag cloud, tags are listed alphabetically, and the importance or popularity of a tag is shown by font size or color (more popular tags are bigger).
You can also check the Spellcheck box to spell check your article when you click on Preview. Be sure to click the Save button to save your changes.
References
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About [2] http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/top-10-most-popular-websites-in-the-states-596744.html [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_five_pillars_of_Wikipedia [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tags [8] http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php [9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons [10] http://www.keycontent.org/tiki-index.php?page=submission+guidelines [11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy [12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_cloud
List of Links
The following websites were linked to this chapter: http://www.wikipedia.org http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page http://entertainment.wikia.com http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Portal:Main http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Muppet_Wiki http://mughom.wikia.com/wiki/tlhIngan_Hol_mu%27ghom:ghItlh%27a%27 http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Recipes_Wiki http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page http://davesgarden.com http://www.keycontent.org/tiki-index.php?page=Home http://www.stc-carolina.org http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
Document generated by Confluence on Apr 15, 2009 16:57 Page 14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/Stub_types http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_five_pillars_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_tags http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Glossary#Wiki_markup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial http://keycontent.org/tiki-index.php?page=Home http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons http://www.keycontent.org/tiki-index.php?page=submission+guidelines
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