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Wikipedia Editing Essentials

If you contribute to Wikipedia, or you'd like to give it a try, there are a few things you will need to know. Wikipedia has a bewildering array of policies, templates, guidelines and practices. Basic editing is easy, but even here a guiding hand can be useful at first.

I recently read How Wikipedia Works, by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews and Ben Yates, all long-established Wikipedians. They must be, the book is endorsed by Jimbo Wales himself. It was a fascinating read, but we don't all have time to work through a 500 page book, so I pulled out what I consider to be the real essentials, in a mind map as I usually do, and you can find the result here.

Now it just so happens that the latest version of MindManager, version 8, has a new trick up its sleeve: It can make either an active PDF file or a Flash file, both of which will allow you to use the mind map just as if you had MindManager installed, except it's read-only.

You can download this as a MindManager .mmap file, a .pdf file or run it in your browser as a flash file.  The book covers many areas that I have not discussed here, as does the mindmap, though naturally in less detail.

Click the image to view a larger version.

You can download the MindManager .mmap file from this link. Depending on your browser settings, this may download as a zip file. If it does, please change the .zip to .mmap.

Here is the active PDF of the Essential Wikipedia Editing Guide. An up-to-date version of Acrobat is needed to view this properly. Click + to open a branch, then click link icons to go to the corresponding Wikipedia page. If you just see a blank page, your PC may be set up to view PDF files with another reader (like Foxit). Please either download the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe, or try the Flash version below.

If the PDF (or Flash version below) doesn't work for you, please see here for more information.

Here is the Flash version of the Essential Wikipedia Editing Guide. (You'll find it hard to see a difference.)

Feel free to use the mmap, PDF or Flash files for your own work, but please do not publish them except by the above thumbnail image, with a link to this page.   Thank you.