#17 Contributing to a wiki

I thought this would be more difficult than it was. I tried doing it without reading all the tips and watching all the videos. The PBwiki tour site wasn’t working so I didn’t even look at that either. I just had a look at the actual Favourite Blogs page and hit ‘edit’. It then asked me if I wanted to steal the page from another user who was currently editing it. I felt a bit mean, but I did steal it. The other user had apparently been in the edit mode for 27 minutes so I assumed that they weren’t doing anything but had just left it open. I tried to do my editing quickly because I didn’t want anyone stealing it from me!

I added my blog. Instead of adding [brackets] and typing out the url I just added the link the same way I do when typing in blogger. I just wrote the name of my blog, highlighted it, clicked on the create link button at the top and then cut and pasted the link into the box, and selected URL instead of new wiki page or whatever the other option was.

I then went to play with changing some other entries. I added my favourite book at the moment. When I got to the bottom of the page I realized how messy wikis can get and it didn’t really look like something I’d like to read through. It would be nice if it was a bit more organized, and also would be good if you could tell who write what. But I guess for a wiki like this with so many people contributing to a page it’s bound to get messy. After I got to the bottom of the page and started adding my entry I thought to myself “Why not put it at the top?” so I did. I went back to the top and made my entry the first one that would be seen. I just wrote a short entry about how I like Diana Gabaldon’s books. I was actually quite proud of myself that I figured out how to do this, and it was fun to put my own little bit in.

I also added in a link to my favourite music (The Salteens) and saw that other people had added pictures so I tried that too. I’m not sure if anyone will read it but it was a good way to find out that contributing to a wiki is not that difficult. It will be interesting to see how long my entry stays at the top of the page.