Want to be part of the largest group-writing project in human history? Learn how to contribute to Wikipedia, the user-generated online reference for the 21st century. Considered more popular than eBay, Microsoft.com, and Amazon.com, Wikipedia servers respond to approximately 30,000 requests per second, or about 2.5 billion per day. It's become the first point of reference for people the world over who need a fact fast. If you want to jump on board and add to the content, Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is your first-class ticket. Wikipedia has more than 9 million entries in 250 languages, over 2 million articles in the English language alone. Each one is written and edited by an ever-changing cast of volunteer editors. You can be one of them. With the tips in this book, you'll quickly learn how to get more out of -- and put more into -- this valuable online resource. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual gives you practical advice on creating articles and collaborating with fellow editors, improving existing articles, and working with the Wikipedia community to review new articles, mediate disputes, and maintain the site. Up to the challenge? This one-of-a-kind book includes:

• Basic editing techniques, including the right and wrong ways to edit

• Pinpoint advice about which types of articles do and do not belong on Wikipedia

• Ways to learn from other editors and communicate with them via the site's talk pages

• Tricks for using templates and timesaving automated editing tools

• Recommended procedures for fighting spam and vandalism

• Guidance on adding citations, links, and images to your articles

Wikipedia depends on people just like you to help the site grow and maintain the highest quality. With Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, you get all the tools you need to be part of the crew.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 12 Ratings

You won't miss this manual - 2008-09-14
Reviewer Rating:
This is not the manual to guide you if you want to contribute good articles to Wikipedia. It is lacking good information on logos and trademarks, and its directions on how to use footnotes, citations, and various templates are maddeningly doublespeak. Wikipedia-specific pathologies such as disruptive editing are left untouched. Remember your fourth grade teacher who taught you never to define a word by using the word? Broughton may have been absent that day. I don't think this is a useful guide and it certainly isn't the muscular reference I had hoped for.

Train wreck - 2008-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
This book was a total train wreck. It arrived with a bad binding, the pages were falling out. Then I realized... they were just trying to escape.

Kindle Version Disappointing - 2008-07-24
Reviewer Rating:
I downloaded to my Kindle the sample for this book. I was very disappointed.

Let me state that: 1. I love my Kindle and 2. I liked the book and plan to buy its printed version. But, the Kindle version is useless. This is not because of its contents but because of its images. The book, being a computer "how to", has a lot of pictures mostly screen captures. These pictures are an essential part of the book and are referred to by the text. Unfortunately they are illegible. This make the whole book useless.

Comprehensive - 2008-07-25
Reviewer Rating:
Having used Wikipedia for a long time as a reference tool, I liked it for being able to quickly look up topics. I had no idea until reading this book what a huge amount of time and people's work to ensure it works smoothly. I also was unclear about the process involved in contributing an article to Wikipedia and the rules an article should conform to. This book answered a lot of questions I had about how Wikipedia operates.

For example, contributing an article can be easy if you have reliable sources to back up your information or it can be more difficult if not. The book's first part talks about creating (and editing) articles, along with setting up an account.There are also chapters about documenting your sources and what to do if your article gets "vandalized" or "spammed." Unfortunately with any large online endeavor, these threats are always present. Another problem online of course is dealing with personal attacks, one of the topics covered in Part II. I like the author's philosophy about this. They say when you read comments you feel are an attack, best to walk away for a few hours and then come back and comment. I've been in that situation many times myself in a variety of forums and I totally agree. This also holds true in resolving content disputes.

The book also covers formatting and illustrating articles and gives some handy tips about doing so. For example, insuring your article is not too wordy or that the Table of Contents for the article is not too long. If either of them are too long, you may consider splitting the article into two separate ones. And finally, there are chapters about properly categorizing articles, deleting articles if necessary and also customizing Wikipedia.

All in all, this is a great book to learn about the many facets of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia and the Wiki Concept - 2009-03-06
Reviewer Rating:
Years ago when I first had the occasion to use Wikipedia, I remember thinking that this was an amateur effort to provide the masses with a free online encyclopedia they could use instead of a Britannica or a World Book encyclopedia. I did not return to the use of Wikipedia for years after that.
Only in the last year of so did I get back to Wikipedia. I was referred to Wikipedia as a great source of information regarding some subject by someone whose opinion I valued on the subject. Thus I went back to check out Wikipedia and I must say I was surprised and very favorably impressed. It was not the same entity that I had encountered many years ago.
Wikipedia, I have found out, is a project built upon the collaboration of many editors that endeavor to build a consensus around what information should go into each article in the encyclopedia. An authority has been established to enforce agreed-upon processes and rules to manage this gargantuan project that has put together over 2.7 million articles in the English version of the encyclopedia. It appears Wikipedia has become an excellent if not an exceptional encyclopedia to consult when researching an article or a subject.
When I first started reading this book, I presumed that the purpose of the book was to facilitate the search process of the reader in finding information in the encyclopedia. No, its main purpose it to provide the reader a structured process and the procedures to re-write the Wikipedia encyclopedia, that is, to train the reader to become one of the many educated and proficient editors that produced and maintain this collaborative effort! If you are not really interested in being such an editor but plan to be more of a user and a reader, Appendix B is for you.
I decided to register and become an "editor" to ensure I would experience some of the details involved in this Wikipedia effort. Part I of the book is the most important, in my estimation, because it defines and describes the actual work to be done by editors. I happened to read Appendix A on my initial browse of the book and I gained a lot of information from the descriptions of all the links provided in every Wikipedia article. There are links useful to editors and links useful to readers. The information regarding the links gave me a preliminary inkling of how the collaboration process is implemented in this effort.
I completed one minor edit when I ran across a typo in one part of the help section. It went pretty smoothly.
The book covers in detail the editing procedures in Part I. There is even a wiki markup language in the editing process, not unlike HTML markup in creating web pages. Collaborating with other editors is covered in another part of the book. The actual process of article creation and formatting, like creating lists and tables and adding images, is described in another part. Part IV deals with features for building a better and stronger encyclopedia.
A wiki is defined as a collaborative web site which can be directly edited by anyone. Wikipedia is just one of several related wikis. There is wiktionary, wikiquote, wikisource and other sister projects of Wikipedia. The concept of wiki building has evidently spread to other areas of knowledge information sharing produced by consensus collaboration.
If you think you would like the work of being an "editor" of the Wikipedia encyclopedia and think you would enjoy the social and cultural environment of collaborating with other "editors" of the same ilk, this is the book I would recommend for you.

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