Appendix: Screen Shots

In this appendix I include five screenshots of the essential Wikipedia experience. Many of these functions (discussion, edit this page, history, watch, etc.) are accessed as a tab at the top of an article.

The watchlist is a special page, like a collection of Wikipedia bookmarks, that permits a user to keep track of the edits to the articles he or she is concerned with. From the watchlist one can easily view the history, which shows the sequence of edits to a given article. For any two edits within the history of an article, the diff shows what contributors changed, added, or subtracted from the article. In the edit this page example one can see the Wiki syntax used to actually write the content for a page. The discussion or talk page permits contributors to discuss their edits to the article.

However, screenshots are a poor substitute for the interactivity of the Wikipedia. One does not need an account or any special abilities to see most of this functionality for one's self.

1.1My Watchlist

Each users' watchlist contains a list of edits to a page that she is watching. One can easily click on and see what the edit was, the history of that article, the article, who made the edit, and the article's discussion ( Talk ) page.

watchlist

1.2History

The history of edits to a page includes the ability compare the differences between any two revisions, the most current revision, or its predecessor ("last"); and shows whether the edit is considered minor ("m"), and a brief comment on the edit.

history

1.3Differences

The diff page displays the results of Me677's edit: an addition to line 69 to document when the English Wikipedia passed the 800,000 article mark.

differences

1.4Edit

Within a form field on the web page, one can actually edit and author the article text using the Wiki syntax.

graphics4

1.5Talk or Discussion

On this page contributors are encouraged to talk about their concerns, questions, or proposals for editing the actual article.

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