Wiki – My First Contribution

A Troll from the game “Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion”

Okay, yesterday, I talked about Wiki – “The Know-It-Alls“.  I discussed how great it was that they are huge, free, and open-sourced – edited by volunteers.

Today, I took the next big step and enrolled as a wiki member and made my first update to a page.

Membership was easy.  I tried to edit the page outright and it asked me to join.

In the beginning, I was merely looking up the word “trolling” to see exactly what an Internet troller was.  From there, I saw the references to the creature and there was a section entitled games.  I noticed that my favorite game “Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” was not listed.  So, that was my first official change to the page.  Listed below is all the pertinent info.  It was really cool!

Troll -> Troll (Internet)   Notice the words “see Troll (disambiguation)”  This is where I went next.

The section I changed was under the sub-heading of “Games”.  It looked as follows:

Games

• Troll (Dungeons & Dragons), a monster in the Dungeons & Dragons setting
• Troll (Warhammer), a monster in the Warhammer Fantasy setting
• Trolls, a 1992 PC game by Capstone Software
• Trollbloods, a faction in the Hordes game setting
• Troll, a playable race in the game World of Warcraft 

I decided to add my line at the end.  I just copy/paste the first line of “Troll…”, altered it to fit Oblivion, and had to fix the link so it went to the right place.  Here we are now:

Games

• Troll (Dungeons & Dragons), a monster in the Dungeons & Dragons setting
• Troll (Warhammer), a monster in the Warhammer Fantasy setting
• Trolls, a 1992 PC game by Capstone Software
• Trollbloods, a faction in the Hordes game setting
• Troll, a playable race in the game World of Warcraft
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a monster in the Oblivion setting

See my line at the end?  I can say I was scared to death to hit “save”.  I didn’t think I would be, but I was.  Guess I was afraid that the cyber police would come or that I would shut down the site, but they have it fixed pretty good for that stuff.

It wasn’t anything special or big, but the process made me realize that I am now part of the thousands who, not only look at wiki every day, but I am now one of those who tries to help make it better.  Take a full look at the page I made a change to:

Wiki:  Trolls (disambiguation)

The interesting thing is, as usual, I decided that wasn’t enough.  I saw a broken link in the Literature section for the Shannara link.  I looked that up in wiki, copied the link, and applied it to the page.  After several tries, I managed to get the link to work.  It still needed some cosmetic fixes, but I am having trouble with that.  Worse, I copied the wrong version (I guess) and lost all the changes I made for Oblivion!  I redid that and, now, it looks right (except for the cosmetic change).

I will update once more:  I decided that the cosmetic changes were my concern (after all, I started this), so I began working on this again.  After a high learning-curve session or two, I finally figured out the simplicity of this situation (thanks, in part, to working on WP) and managed to make the page look excellent and all links going where they should (at least, the two I worked on).  What began as a simple exercise and smiling task turned into a several hour project that will be, fortunately, easier in the future.

Welcome to the world of computer web page editing.

Namaste,

Scott