Wikipedia Editing Essentials

To contribute to Wikipedia there are a few things 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 -- you can tell, they got the book 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. The result is here.

You can download this as a MindManager (.mmap) file or as a .pdf 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, detailed version.

Here is the full MindManager .mmap file. (To open the mmap file if you don't have MindManager, see the note below.) Depending on your browser settings, this may download as a zip file. If it does, download it anyway, and then change the .zip to .mmap. The pdf file is here. Nodes (boxes) on the PDF and the mmap file with a Wikipedia 'W' icon against them are live links to the relevant Wikipedia editing reference.

Feel free to use the mmap or pdf files for your own work, but you may not publish it other than by including the above thumbnail image, with a link to this page.

Thank you.

A note: Mindjet, the publishers of MindManager, provide a free viewer for mmap files. You can get it here. In fact it's the full version of Mind Manager which gives you 30 days to try it out, and when the trial period is over it blocks the editing functions and becomes a read-only viewer for as long as you want to keep it.