• WikiEtiquette

SWD Wiki Etiquette

From: "Jon Phipps" <jphipps@madcreek.com>

In addition to Tom's points about the page history, I'd like to suggest a few protocols for editing wiki documents:

1. Rather than emailing changes to the list as a general practice, I'm inclined to think that this should only be done when the person making the change thinks the change warrants further discussion on the list. Non-controversial changes (previously discussed?) or changes that might be of interest only to the editors (spelling, formatting, minor corrections) can be handled by the wiki's automatic change notification mechanism. If the editors see that a change was made that isn't as trivial as the changer thought, it's easy enough for them to forward the change to the rest of the list.

2. Anyone interested in being notified of changes to a page should subscribe to it -- the "subscribe" link is at the top and bottom of the page next to the edit link. You'll receive an email showing the changes each time the page is changed. If you're interested in seeing "trivial" changes, you may select that option in your wiki UserPreferences page. The pages you're subscribed to are listed in your UserPreferences page toward the bottom and you can edit that list directly using Regex parameters to be notified of a range of pages.

3. To receive general notifications of changes to any page in the wiki, you can subscribe to the RecentChanges page or grab the rss feed: http://www.w3.org/2006/07/SWD/wiki/RecentChanges?action=rss_rc&ddiffs=1&unique=1

4. When you edit a document, it's a good idea to add a this-edit-specific comment for the enlightenment of people viewing the change in the page history. The comment box is just under the editing textarea and above the preview window. Each comment entered is specifically related to the change that you're making rather than the page as a whole.

5. If you'd like to leave comments for the editors related to a specific edit or section of text, you can leave a one-line comment directly in the text by inserting a "##comment" page processing directive like this:

Then add a comment in the page-level edit comment that you inserted inline comments Comments inserted in this way won't appear in the displayed page and can only be viewed by people with edit privileges.

6. You can enter public comments by using the footnote macro: ¹ The contents of the footnote will appear at the bottom of the page.

7. Please preview your edit before you save it. This will help minimize the number of changes in the change history.

8. It would be nice if page editors could feel free to undo your changes without feeling obligated to explain why. Whether an editor actually does this or not is up to the individual, but it would be good if nobody really expected an explanation and it would be really nice if no offense was taken when none was given.

There's an excellent editing reference here: http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/SyntaxReference