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Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
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Manufacturer: Pogue Press
Author: John Broughton
Publisher: Pogue Press
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Our Price: $19.79
You Save: $ 10.20 ( 34% )
Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Pogue Press
Author: John Broughton
Publisher: Pogue Press
Average Customer Rating:
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Wikipedia: The Missing Manual Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.72
EAN: 9780596515164
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596515162
Label: Pogue Press
Manufacturer: Pogue Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 502
Publication Date: 2008-01-25
Publisher: Pogue Press
Studio: Pogue Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.72
EAN: 9780596515164
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596515162
Label: Pogue Press
Manufacturer: Pogue Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 502
Publication Date: 2008-01-25
Publisher: Pogue Press
Studio: Pogue Press
Editorial Review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
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 generates 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 6 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 Tips on using Wikipedia page histories and reversing inaccurate edits 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 Tools for fighting spam and vandalism Guidance on adding citations, links, and images to your articles You also learn about other Wikimedia services, such as Wikinews, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks. 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.
Customer Reviews of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: You won't miss this manual
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Train wreck
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Comprehensive
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Kindle Version Disappointing
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Valuable reference for beginning or expert editors
Review: This is a very clear and mostly-complete guide to creating and editing articles on Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It is not intended for people who look up things on Wikipedia, although there is a brief description of this process in an appendix.
It's surprisingly difficult to find things on Wikipedia. Even though all the how-to information is available free on their site, it's often difficult to find the thing you need, and everything is reference material--there's no tutorial for beginners. There are an amazing number of rules and practices to follow when editing Wikipedia (you don't just start typing), and this book does a good job of explaining and organizing them. This book is valuable because it is easy to find things in it and because it gives you a path to learning to edit Wikipedia. (Wikipedia uses the term "editor" for anyone who writes or modifies material.)
The most important thing I learned from this book is the importance of footnotes. An encyclopedia like the Encyclopedia Brittanica recruits experts to produce signed articles in their specialty. The selection process and the author's credentials give you some confidence in the material presented. Wikipedia lets anyone write or modify articles, and all articles are unsigned, so it must be approached more cautiously. Credibility depends on having all the statements referenced to reliable sources. I had not paid much attention to the footnoting in Wikipedia before, but after reading this book I notice how many articles are inadequately footnoted or have no footnotes at all. The Wikipedia leaders are very aware of this problem and continually urge editors to supply references. The high standard of sourcing every statement is met in many articles, especially those on very controversial subjects.
Any idiot can change an article on Wikipedia, and many idiots do. The most surprising thing I learned was how prevalent vandalism is. Estimates are that 10% of all edits are vandalism (p. 123). Most vandalism is obvious, for example, on March 20, 2008 the entire text of the article "Passive smoking" was changed to "ice cream icecream". Sometimes it is obvious when looked at, for example, a caption "San Diego Zoo" was changed to "San Hannah Montana". There are more subtle cases, such as adding bogus information or changing statistics. Each page has a complete history of changes, and there are human editors and robots who patrol the recent changes looking for vandalism. Most vandalism is detected and reverted within a few minutes or hours, so the average user will probably never see any.
The book has a few gaps in coverage. For example, there's half a page on p. 244 about the evils of having a single subsection, but there's no discussion of subsections in general and it doesn't even tell you the markup to create a subsection! After some rummaging around I discovered that the markup is described in Figure 1-4 on p. 8. This required "rummaging" because this page is not in the index under subsection.
For another example, capitalization of article titles is significant in Wikipedia, and there are several rules about how pages get looked up if there's not an exact match for the sought-for capitalization. Even worse, the rules are different when you type something in the search box and when you make a cross-reference from one article to another. The book does not explain any of this.
The index was disappointingly incomplete, especially since the Missing Manual indexes are normally excellent. One example: The technique of piped wikilinks (making the displayed text different from the linked article name) has many uses, and these are covered at several spots in the book where they naturally come up. But the index entry for "piped links" lists only p. 15. There's also an index entry for "vertical lines, wikilinks and", which is the same subject, but it does not cross-reference piped links and lists only p. 149. Another example: There are several entries under "wikilinks" and many entries under "links", although nearly all of the latter are wikilinks. The latter even has a subentry for "wikilinks", which has a different list of pages than the main "wikilinks" entry does.
Despite these weaknesses, the book is still extremely valuable to anyone who edits Wikipedia. It collects much useful information in an easy-to-use format.
Review Summary: You won't miss this manual
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Train wreck
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Comprehensive
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Kindle Version Disappointing
Review: 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.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Valuable reference for beginning or expert editors
Review: This is a very clear and mostly-complete guide to creating and editing articles on Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." It is not intended for people who look up things on Wikipedia, although there is a brief description of this process in an appendix.
It's surprisingly difficult to find things on Wikipedia. Even though all the how-to information is available free on their site, it's often difficult to find the thing you need, and everything is reference material--there's no tutorial for beginners. There are an amazing number of rules and practices to follow when editing Wikipedia (you don't just start typing), and this book does a good job of explaining and organizing them. This book is valuable because it is easy to find things in it and because it gives you a path to learning to edit Wikipedia. (Wikipedia uses the term "editor" for anyone who writes or modifies material.)
The most important thing I learned from this book is the importance of footnotes. An encyclopedia like the Encyclopedia Brittanica recruits experts to produce signed articles in their specialty. The selection process and the author's credentials give you some confidence in the material presented. Wikipedia lets anyone write or modify articles, and all articles are unsigned, so it must be approached more cautiously. Credibility depends on having all the statements referenced to reliable sources. I had not paid much attention to the footnoting in Wikipedia before, but after reading this book I notice how many articles are inadequately footnoted or have no footnotes at all. The Wikipedia leaders are very aware of this problem and continually urge editors to supply references. The high standard of sourcing every statement is met in many articles, especially those on very controversial subjects.
Any idiot can change an article on Wikipedia, and many idiots do. The most surprising thing I learned was how prevalent vandalism is. Estimates are that 10% of all edits are vandalism (p. 123). Most vandalism is obvious, for example, on March 20, 2008 the entire text of the article "Passive smoking" was changed to "ice cream icecream". Sometimes it is obvious when looked at, for example, a caption "San Diego Zoo" was changed to "San Hannah Montana". There are more subtle cases, such as adding bogus information or changing statistics. Each page has a complete history of changes, and there are human editors and robots who patrol the recent changes looking for vandalism. Most vandalism is detected and reverted within a few minutes or hours, so the average user will probably never see any.
The book has a few gaps in coverage. For example, there's half a page on p. 244 about the evils of having a single subsection, but there's no discussion of subsections in general and it doesn't even tell you the markup to create a subsection! After some rummaging around I discovered that the markup is described in Figure 1-4 on p. 8. This required "rummaging" because this page is not in the index under subsection.
For another example, capitalization of article titles is significant in Wikipedia, and there are several rules about how pages get looked up if there's not an exact match for the sought-for capitalization. Even worse, the rules are different when you type something in the search box and when you make a cross-reference from one article to another. The book does not explain any of this.
The index was disappointingly incomplete, especially since the Missing Manual indexes are normally excellent. One example: The technique of piped wikilinks (making the displayed text different from the linked article name) has many uses, and these are covered at several spots in the book where they naturally come up. But the index entry for "piped links" lists only p. 15. There's also an index entry for "vertical lines, wikilinks and", which is the same subject, but it does not cross-reference piped links and lists only p. 149. Another example: There are several entries under "wikilinks" and many entries under "links", although nearly all of the latter are wikilinks. The latter even has a subentry for "wikilinks", which has a different list of pages than the main "wikilinks" entry does.
Despite these weaknesses, the book is still extremely valuable to anyone who edits Wikipedia. It collects much useful information in an easy-to-use format.