Web2Go

Impress your friends with your advanced Web 2.0 skills. Learn how to edit in Wikipedia with Web2Go’s step-by-step guide.

I love learning new acronyms. A couple of weeks ago when I tagged along to the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s free GameJam ’08 event, I learned a new one – UGC. It stands for User Generated Content. If tWikipedia:Introduction”>here’s one feature that distinguishes Web 2.0 from the first generation of the World Wide Web it has to be UGC. One of the most well known examples of UGC on the Web today is Wikipedia.

Cast your mind back to the eighties (or before) when doing a school project meant going to the newsagent and buying one of those fold out school project posters on various riveting topics like ‘Spiders’, ‘Sharks and Stingrays’ or ‘Flags of the World’ or worse still, braving layers of dust so that you could check up the answers in the Encyclopaedia Britanica.

These days, not only can you avoid a dust storm by jumping on the Net and checking out your school project answers on Wikipedia, you, the user, can also contribute your own info to Wikipedia if you think something is missing or not quite right.

In this final post of Web2Go’s Help! Series I’ll tell you how to edit a Wikipedia page:

1. Before you dive in, take some time to read Wikipedia’s ‘How To Edit Guide’ and Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style”>Style Manual.2. Point your web browser in the direction of Wikipedia. 3. Create a user account by clicking on the ‘Create account/log in’ link in the top right-hand corner of the Wikipedia homepage.4. Once you’ve successfully created an account you’ll be automatically redirected to a ‘Login successful’ page. At the bottom of this page is a yellow link that says: ‘Go to the Introduction and learn the basics about Wikipedia’. (If you can’t find that link you can access the Wikipedia Introduction page from Wikipedia:Introduction”>here instead.)5. One of the options you’ve got on the Introduction page is to do a practice edit in the Wikipedia sandbox. As it says on the site, a sandbox is web-speak for ‘a place to make test edits’.6. Click the link to visit the sandbox and include your edit by typing some text into the editor. 7. To save your contribution, scroll down to the bottom of the editor and click the ‘Save page’ button.8. Ta da! You’ve made your first UGC contribution to the Wikipedia community!

If you want to edit actual Wikipedia pages – rather than just the sandbox page – in future follow these steps.

1. Point your web browser in the direction of Wikipedia. 2. Log in to Wikipedia with the details of the account you created above.3. In the ‘Search’ box (which sits in the middle of the navigation bar at the left-hand side of Wikipedia pages) type the name of the topic you want to make changes to e.g. ‘cerebral palsy’, and press the ‘Enter’ key on the keyboard.4. You will be redirected to the cerebral palsy entry. At the top of each Wikipedia page tWikipedia:Introduction”>here are a few rectangular tabs. Left-click on the tab called ‘Edit this page’.5. The Wikipedia page editor should appear and now you can start editing the entry.6. When you’ve finished editing, click the ‘Save page’ button.7. Remember to log out (from the top right-hand corner of the page) when you’ve finished.

Some Wikipedia pages are protected, which means that they can’t be edited by other users, but you’ll find that tWikipedia:Introduction”>here are many pages you’ll be able to edit if you choose to.

A word of caution. Even though Wikipedia entries are reviewed regularly by a team of volunteers and tWikipedia:Introduction”>here are strict guidelines for contributing, because Wikipedia is so easy to edit you can’t always be sure of its accuracy. Whether you’re researching a school project or just a topic that interests you, be sure to use a couple of different sources of information to check your facts and figures.

Have you already contributed something to Wikipedia or another Web 2.0 project? Let us know about it. Send me a message or leave a comment below.

Until next time – happy computing!