User:Phoebe/outline

What would you include in the perfect Wikipedia book?

Section 0: Introduction

What is this book about?
1. What this book is not about: non-English Wikipedias (save sec 7), MediaWiki (save sec 6), other kinds of wikis (save apx C)
Who is this book for?
How to use this book
1. Sections, referencing, appendices, finding more information
2. Concept and approach: hands-on, participatory, teach you about the philosophy of the projects and how they work

Section 1: Welcome

This section will welcome readers to the topic, explaining in a nutshell the concept behind Wikipedia for those unfamiliar with it, and providing a background to the project. The history of two disparate things that have combined to produce Wikipedia will be briefly explored: open source and the free software movement, and the reference work, which has a storied and largely unappreciated history. This will bring us up to the creation of Wikipedia in 2001. The story behind the creation of the site will be briefly told, and then a history of the site's development since then will be reviewed. At the present day, the current statistics of usage will be reviewed, Wikipedia's place in current culture will be examined, and the official motivations for the project will be described. This will be a short but important and entertaining chapter -- it's impossible to understand just how revolutionary Wikipedia is without knowing what has come before it and how previous reference works and software projects have functioned.

What is Wikipedia?
1. Brief description of the project and its goals
2. Languages and internationalism: Wikipedia all around the world
3. An introduction to the Wikipedia Foundation and Wikimedia's sister projects
  1. include current statistics: users, articles, languages
Background:
1. Encyclopedias and reference works from the beginning to today: printing, worldwide, a few great examples (Chambers, Diderot, Britannica)
2. History of free software/open source projects:
  1. early hacker mentality, unix, gnu & stallman, linux & its spawn, great free software projects (mozilla, apache, etc)., current state of free software projects, the licensing wars
  2. free as in speech, free as in beer
A brief history of Wikipedia
1. Sanger and Wales
2. The Foundation
3. Exponential growth
4. Today: in the media, controversies, mainstreaming
What is a wiki?
1. Wiki history: Ward & the PPP, other companies, MediaWiki development
2. Wikis today -- development and use, Wikipedia continues to provide examples
Why Wikimedia?
1. motivations: of the project, of contributors
  1. "knowledge for all", current mission
2. why should you care?

Section 2: Using Wikipedia

This chapter will serve as the basis for understanding the sections that will come later. It will focus on the content and usage of Wikipedia from the point of view of a casual reader who wants to know what they're dealing with. This chapter will also help explain (in conjunction with chapter 4, on community) why you'll find some kinds of content but not others in Wikipedia, and what kinds of content Wikipedia is especially good for. This may serve not only as a reference for a reader, but also an editor that wants to understand inclusion guidelines (one of the number one points of confusion about Wikipedia). This chapter will also explain searching and browsing techniques to help you uncover some of the amazing content in Wikipedia, including lists and free music and images. It will also explain the use of categories and their helpfulness in browsing.

This chapter will then describe the main page of Wikipedia in detail, as a way of introducing the different types of content can be found and linked to from there -- current events, featured content, and community information. This will be followed by an introduction to the Wikipedia "screen" -- the MediaWiki article and editing interfaces.

Finally, the chapter will close with a description of how to evaluate Wikipedia articles -- an important task for teachers, readers and editors alike.

What's in Wikipedia?
1. Types of content and all about namespaces (part one)
  1. Types of articles (broad topic, specific topic, lists)
  2. Community and project pages
  3. Policy and help pages
  4. User pages
2. Article inclusion criteria: yes, they do exist
Navigating, searching and browsing: how to find content
1. Searching for topics: How to use embedded search, tricks for searching Wikipedia (Google etc)
  1. Naming conventions for articles, and when it's likely there's not an article on your topic
2. Browsing: when you don't know exactly what you're looking for
  1. Using "random article" and other fun, timewasting techniques
  2. Finding content by type -- various schemes and methods, or why the Dewey Decimal system didn't work on Wikipedia
    1. Portals
    2. Finding really good content: featured, rated and good content
3. Categories: what they are and how to use them
Anatomy of the front page
1. What can you find at Main Page?
  1. (inset: how does it happen?)
Anatomy of an article
1. An introduction to the MediaWiki sidebar
  1. What are all those buttons, anyway?
  2. WP:SPECIAL links and pages -- what can they do for you?
2. Article text
  1. Sections of the text: the perfect article
3. Article history
4. Article discussion page
  1. how to read an article history
How to evaluate articles
1. Introduction
2. Inset: quick checklist for evaluation
3. Parts of an article to consider, and what they mean
4. "I keep seeing these warning messages..."

Section 3: Contributing to Wikipedia

This will be the "how to edit" section: and yes, while much of this information is available online in syntax help guides and so on, those guides don't provide a handy index to the common and not-so-common problems facing editors. This will be divided into three sections; "basic editing", which will introduce MediaWiki syntax and provide best practice guidelines on things like creating an account and writing an edit summary; "what to edit", which will provide guidelines on how to help with projects such as collaborations and clean-up projects, as well as providing guidance on writing good articles, including information on sourcing and good writing; and "advanced editing," which will be a technical guide to the knotty problems facing the experienced editor -- how to write templates, manipulate images and css, and so on. This class of problems is often less well documented on Wikipedia (as fewer people know how to solve them) and so this will be a particularly valuable section of the book for current editors.

Basic editing: how to edit
1. Understanding the edit window
  1. Anatomy of an edit
2. Syntax
  1. where to find more information
3. Style guides
Basic editing: what to edit
1. Ways to contribute
2. How to make sure your changes will be kept
3. How to write the perfect article
4. Wikiprojects and collaborations
5. How to source an article
6. How to help clean up an article
Advanced editing
1. Images and media files
2. Tables and their ilk
3. Templates and infoboxes
4. Referencing and footnoting
5. HTML, CSS and TeX
6. Categories and topical navigation aids
7. Cleanup, patrolling new edits, AWB and more

Section 4: Wikipedia community

This section gets to the heart of why Wikipedia is the way it is. It will describe how Wikipedia participants interact and ways to find and communicate with other users. It will also describe policies, which will be another valuable section for current editors -- finding and understanding the plethera of policies on the site is one of the more difficult tasks facing experienced as well as inexperienced editors. Finally, this chapter will describe the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the legal entity behind Wikipedia, and how the Foundation and interlingual coordinating mechanisms (such as Meta) work.

The people
1. Using userpages
2. Using user talk pages, talk ettiquite
  1. finding wikipedians by interest
3. communication
  1. mailing lists & IRC
4. community portal/village pump
5. Wikiprojects and collaborations
Policies
1. What they are
2. Basic classes of policies
  1. Top 5 "pillars" of Wikipedia
  2. Other important policies
3. Policies over time; how policies are developed and discussed
Wikipedia history -- how processes came to be
1. Trouble (arbitration, et al)
2. Topicality (wiktionary, wikiquote, wikibooks et al)
3. Nostalgia (historical main page, &c.)
Foundation and Meta
1. What it does
2. How it works
3. Inter-lingual coordination
4. Chapters, committees and happenings

Section 5. Other projects and the future

This section will round out the book by placing Wikipedia in context, discussing other major Wikipedias in other languages, as well as the other sister projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation. These projects serve a different and complementary role to Wikipedia, and the other languages provide a background to Wikipedia as a global phenomenon. The future of Wikipedia section will briefly discuss current complimentary projects and forks and what the future may be for getting Wikipedia content. Finally, "using Wikipedia content" will also be a part of this section, describing how you can get a feed or dump of Wikipedia content (as is explicitly allowed under the GFDL).

Commons
Other sister projects
1. Wiktionary
2. Wikisource
3. Wikiquote
4. Wikibooks
5. Wikinews
6. Wikiversity
7. Wikispecies
Other languages
1. De, Fr, Pl, Ja
2. Eo, Ca
3. Minor languages and preservation of languages through Wikipedia
4. Commons and Meta as multilingual case studies
Using Wikipedia content
1. Licensing
2. Getting Wikipedia dumps
Other ways to get Wikipedia content
1. Other sites that use Wikipedia content: Mirrors and forks
2. Wikipedia in other mediums

Appendix: MediaWiki

This short section will deal with MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. It will describe how it works in a nutshell, and the development process; it will also describe dealing with MediaWiki -- downloading, installing and customizing it, as well as what hosting services are available. This chapter will be of use to the experienced editor, to the developer who wants a reference to MediaWiki (the current online documentation for which is sometimes pretty poor), and to anyone wanting to run their own wiki. Though most of this content belongs in a book about MediaWiki, that book hasn't been written yet; and an explanation of the software is very helpful for editors, particularly advanced editors.

Installing MediaWiki
1. Downloading and installing MediaWiki
2. Modifying MediaWiki -- common questions
3. The development process: reporting a bug, etc.
Customization and more
1. Customizing your skins etc.
2. Running scripts & robots
Hosting services
1. What's available
2. Difference between services

Other appendices

Some of these special sections may be appendices or included in the text, depending on formatting. These are blocks of text that address certain audiences: special sections for teachers, librarians and journalists, who have similar needs in being able to understand and evaluate an article quickly; appendices on the GFDL license, how to officially contact Wikipedia, and an alphabetical or topical index to policies, which will be helpful to current editors. The ending pieces -- the glossary, index, and references -- will help make this into a truly useful reference book.

General notes
1. For teachers -- how to handle use in assignments (tips on what to ask for and how to teach Wikipedia); ideas on when to accept Wikipedia as a source
2. For journalists --
  1. using Wikipedia as a source
  2. writing *about* Wikipedia
3. For librarians -- notes on using Wikipedia as a reference source and including in the collection
4. For everybody: how to evaluate an article (1-2 pp quick reference)
5. For everybody: structure of an edit window (diagram), page history, and what you can learn from each
Appendices
1. GNU license (or summary?)
2. How to contact Wikipedia
3. Policy reference
Glossary (including alpha index of acronyms with description; terms as highlighted in the text, and basic internet slang as used on WP)
References
1. Online links: finding out more
2. Citations from text
Index