WikiStudent Blog

I finally picked up my new Wikipedia book (How Wikipedia works and how you can be a part of it) and got an idea for WikiStudent before even getting to page 1! Here’s quoting from the cheatsheet found in the introduction, page xxiv

<!– hidden comment in wikitext –>

Produces hidden comments in wikitext, only visible to other editors.

Now this is a standard HTML comment tag that I’ve known about forever, but when reading the phrase “only visible to other editors” I realised I could take advantage of this to display editing instructions only to people editing the wiki, making it easier for editors (who might be unsure of what to write) and better-looking for visitors (who don’t need to see instructions).

The old WikiStudent wiki had instructions in red font below each heading, so if you went to a page that nobody had filled in yet, it looked rather ugly.

You might think it would be better to put editing instructions in a separate part of the site. Yes, I am going to have an editing help guide, but when people see something that needs editing, do you think they are going to start looking for this guide? No, they’re going to want to click ‘edit’ and start typing away, so it’s a good idea to have localised instructions.

To give you an example, take the very first heading of all module pages, which is “Introduction”. When you click ‘edit’ next to this section you’ll see something like this:

=== Introduction ===

<!– Write a beginner’s introduction below, in paragraph format. Say what you learn in this module, what it is like in general, and give the prerequisites. –>

The instructions between <!– and –> are only visible to the person editing the section. Perfect!

Only 24 people ever edited the WikiStudent wiki. Can you believe it? I can. All you need is a few good students with writing skills and you can create a lot of useful content. Now as I said in the previous post, if you’re not going to contribute to the site you don’t need an account.

I think that’s fair. Not everyone is the kind of person who wants to add their 2c. We are all different. Some people prefer to navigate by browsing, others prefer to navigate by searching. Some of us naturally take to participating in discussion forums, blogs and wikis, while others prefer to just read.

Wikis are for a certain type of people, and it’s these people I’m targeting. People who take naturally to wikis are often very anal, perfectionist, and we get irritated with little things like spelling mistakes which we want to put right straight away. If you are this kind of person too, then you will be a welcome member on WikiStudent!

I am considering having people apply for membership, instead of creating their own logins. (This will also prevent spam bots from creating fictitious accounts and posting viagra ads all over the wiki!) There could maybe be an application  form that you fill in, where you can indicate where you want to edit, and which modules, etc. This is just an idea. I know it might chase away some good editors, and it will be more work to create logins manually, so will have to think it through some more…

All I can say is if I can find 50 dedicated Unisa students who can write well and whose modules cover the 135 WikiStudent modules, then I will be very very happy