Collaborative editing

Media

A welcome message from Sandy Welcome message from Sandhya Gunness, Instructional designer at the Virtual Centre for Innovative Learning Technologies, University of Mauritius- WikiEducator fan.) Click on the audio link below to start the download of the audio file. Not recommended for dialup connections! (Note: If you're using a low bandwidth connection to the Internet skip the audio message and arrange for an off line version of the multimedia files).

Creating educational content on WikiEducator is quite different from what you may be used to. WikiEducator's contributors may come from many different countries and cultures and have different views, perspectives, and backgrounds, that sometimes vary widely. Treating others with respect is the key to collaborating effectively in building useful resources on WikiEducator. Remember that all resources on WikiEducator are viewable and potentially editable by anyone who creates an account. Expect your work to be edited by others and resolve any disputes or leave comments by using the discussion pages.

Key points

Our work is based on a consensus model. In practice members of WikiEducator agree to work as follows: Draft plans, outlines and suggestions are created on the wiki. Anyone is free to create a new wiki page in relation to any content. Use your discretion when editing, feel free to correct any typing mistakes or improve the layout of pages you see in the wiki. Minor edits, improvements and new additions are usually done without discussion. In the case of any substantive change you would like to make, first post a comment or message on the talk page or email the primary authors to share and discuss your ideas for any changes. Consensus discussions take place in the discussion pages (i.e., pages with titles that begin with "Talk:" which can be accessed via the discussion tab which you will find above the content area of each page). Once consensus is achieved, please make the necessary changes on the relevant wiki page. If you want to start working on your own without having others help you out, we advise creating these pages as sub-pages of your User page. Your User page area is a personal space and this tells other users that you would like to create this content on your own.

In this tutorial, we will discuss several ways to improve your collaborative editing skills. We will break down what is happening on the recent changes page, which shows the real time changes to WikiEducator pages. Once we are familiar with the recent changes page, we will show you how the diff (version comparison) and history pages can be used to speed up the collaborative editing process. Finally, in a collaborative editing environment mistakes will happen. A simple and quick method to correct mistakes is to revert the edit. To show you how easy it is, the final activity in this tutorial will be to revert some pseudo-vandalism.