There are more than 3,000,000 articles in Wikipedia in English alone at the time of this writing and each article has seen on an average 112 revisions. So, there have been over 300 million revisions to Wikipedia’s English articles. Then, there are millions of users who keep editing these articles regularly. You can very well imagine the enormity of the task of editing Wikipedia. Do you want to be an editor at Wikipedia? As you may know already, any person can start editing Wikipedia since it is written entirely by users. Want to know as to how to edit it?
Wikipedia has its own format and editing rules. Rules for creating a new article and for revising an existing article. Since it is a group effort, your revisions can be undone by other users. It has to be a collaborative effort. So, you must know how to communicate with other editors. And, so on. You must know the basics first as to how to revise pages on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has a large number of pages explaining its policies, technical matters, instructions, and agreed-on processes relating to these editing tasks. However, such instructions are too voluminous and a new user, who wants to contribute to Wikipedia, may be completely lost.
Luckily, there is a free book called Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, that is available as a part of Wikipedia itself. This book can give you all the information needed to edit pages of Wikipedia in a concise manner and at a central place. This book has been written by John Broughton who has been a registered editor at Wikipedia since August 2005, with more than 15,000 edits by the time he wrote this book that was first published in January, 2008, by O’Reilly Media / Pogue Press. However, since January, 2009, this book has been made available free online as a part of the Wikipedia itself. Moreover, like any other pages of Wikipedia, you can even edit the pages of this book if you’re confident that you’ve attained a level of expertise to be in a position to tell other users as to how to edit Wikipedia.
This book has 21 chapters and 3 Appendices, all spread over 5 Parts. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to this popular book that explains what this book is about:
“Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is designed to accommodate editors at every level of experience. If you’re just starting out, that’s fine: The early chapters will make your editing experience more productive as well as enjoyable. Nor do you have to be a computer whiz. The really great editors are good at one or more of several things, including research, editing and writing, organizing, and working with other editors; technical matters are simply one realm of specializing as a Wikipedia editor.
If you’ve already done quite a bit of editing of Wikipedia, and learned—by trial and error as well as reading documentation—what to do and not to do, even the earlier chapters are likely to offer you useful tips and tricks. In the later chapters, you’ll learn about things you’ve never run across before, simply because you’ve never had time to read through all the Wikipedia documentation. Check out the table of contents to spot unfamiliar aspects of Wikipedia, so you can turn immediately to the parts of the book most likely to help you work better and faster.”
So, in case you’re interest to volunteer for revising the Wikipedia pages, make it a point to first read this free online book.
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