Cerebral Palsy Alliance

Posts Tagged ‘wikis’

Help! I can’t edit stuff in Wikipedia.

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!

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Telling your story, your way

Having CP, or having it in your family, can be lonely sometimes. There are days when you think nobody else could possibly know what you’re going through. Sharing your story is one of the best ways to connect with others and make those bleaker days a bit more bearable.

Thanks to Web 2.0 and digital storytelling more and more people affected by CP are getting out there and making their voices heard.

You guessed it. Digital storytelling enables you to share your story, your way, using computers and Web 2.0 technologies. All you need is a video camera or some photos, a mic headset to record your narration, some music and a free program like Microsoft’s Photostory 3 or Apple’s iPhoto or iMovie to pull it all together.

Until recently, digital storytelling was mostly used in education as a fun way to teach kids about using computers. Increasingly, like blogs and wikis, digital stories are being used by ordinary folk like you and me to share our daily grind with the world.

No matter how boring you think your daily grind might be, you can stake your house on it that there’s someone out there in cyberspace who’s just waiting to be inspired, comforted or engaged by your CP story. (And if you still need proof, check out the 100 million or so videos uploaded to YouTube each day.)

If you want more info on digital storytelling before you decide to join the fray check out Stories For Change which includes information about United Cerebral Palsy Michigan’s Life In Focus digital storytelling project.

UCP Michigan also has its own YouTube channel where you can watch various Life In Focus videos created by people with CP.

Telling Lives is a great digital storytelling related site and blog from the UK and US site EDUCAUSE also has an interesting podcast called

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A matter of trust: finding accurate information online

Finding accurate and up-to-date medical information on the Internet can be a minefield at the best of times and if a child you know has just been diagnosed with CP, it can be even harder.

As I’ve said in previous posts, the advent of wikis and blogs has turned everyone into an expert. These days you don’t have to wait for your friendly GP or specialist to explain the ins and outs of CP and how it might impact your life. Instead you can jump on the Net and almost instantly Google up a storm.

With roughly 29.7 billion pages of info available on the World Wide Web (as of February 2007), it’s easy to see why this can be a daunting task. What makes the prospect of sifting through hundreds of web pages even less appealing is the possibility that the information you find is inaccurate, exaggerated or just plain old.

Thankfully, there are a few places on the web that offer soundly researched and reviewed medical information such as the Health on the Net Foundation, PubMed, the WRAPIN project and HealthInsite.

Of course for quality information about cerebral palsy you can visit the ‘About CP’ section of The Spastic Centre’s site or you can check out an international site such as the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Education Foundation.

Wherever you choose to start your search, here are a few pointers to help you sort the good websites from the bad and ugly ones.

Does the website show:

details of the organisation information about the organisation’s not-for-profit status the organisation’s aims and purpose the names and professional qualifications of anybody contributing to the website details of an advisory panel or review group?

Websites should also clearly state if they are based on personal experiences or sponsored by commercial organisations. Sites funded by companies may heavily promote certain treatments or products and sites like these often just exist to get you to buy something.

Because disabilities like CP can affect different people in vastly different ways, information based on personal experiences rather than research and scientific evidence can give an unrealistic picture of how CP will affect you and your family.

You also need to check out if a website’s articles include the author’s name, job title and any professional qualifications and, most importantly, the date.

Above all, if the claims made in any web-based articles sound too extreme or sensational to be true, then they most probably are. It’s a good idea to double-check any articles you come across with a doctor, specialist or service provider like The Spastic Centre.

The Web can put you in touch with mountains of advice, information and new ideas. These guidelines will help you sift through the electronic rubble to unearth the bonafide gems.

Share your favourite websites with us!

Thanks to all those Web2Go readers who have sent us their comments. We look forward to receiving more of your feedback and ideas for future posts.

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No rest for the wiki

Web 2.0 is all about collaborating and sharing information with others. Wikis are a great way to do this. “So what’s a wiki and how do I find one?”, you cry.

Read on as Web2Go reveals a few wiki secrets…

If you thought wikis had something to do with sport, think again. If you thought (like a few of my friends did) that people who had started a wiki actually also owned a wand and turned people into frogs in their spare time, you’d be wrong.

A wiki is a collection of webpages that can be easily edited by members and viewed by anyone with an Internet connection and a web browser.

The word ‘wiki’ is Hawaiian for ‘fast’ and an article from one of the world’s largest wikis, Wikipedia, also suggests that wiki has more recently come to stand for ‘What I Know Is’.

Unlike a website or a blog which is usually the work of one person, the success of a wiki relies on getting content from many places and faces. For this reason, wikis are a particularly effective tool for building member-driven online communities.

For example, if you wanted to start your own wiki about parenting kids with CP or about what it’s like to live with CP you could jump onto Wikispaces, sign up for a free wiki and invite others to join. It only takes about 10 minutes to create your online presence and share it with the world, so as the Hawaiians would say, it’s ‘wiki’!

After setting up your wiki you might write an article or post a link or comment about assistive technology and someone else might come along and add more information or clarification about what you’ve just written.

As your wiki’s fame starts to spread, members might post articles about other hot topics such as transport, government funding or accessible pubs ; ). Soon you’ll have a cache of contributions, offering differing perspectives on your chosen topic, all gathered in the one spot.

The English version of Wikipedia boasts over 2, 431, 000 user-created, peer-reviewed articles and there are hundreds of thousands more Wikipedia contributions available in other languages.

Both the biggest drawback and the biggest benefit of wikis is that the items posted to them can be created by anybody and everybody, rather than just experts.

While this offers Netheads everywhere lots of opportunities to ‘liberate’ information it can also cause havoc if wiki content is poorly researched, fabricated or even sabotaged. (For an interesting take on the perils of unreliable wikis and disability information visit the BBC’s Ouch website message board.)

If you’d like to sample some disability-related wikis, here are a few places to start. (Please share your finds and suggestions by leaving a comment below.) And if reading this post and wiki list compels you to start your own bigger and better wiki, remember to tell us all about it!

DisapediaGlobal Assistive Technology EncyclopediaWiki Accessibility Interest Group

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