Changes

Good teachers don't just impart knowledge: they give confidence and enthuse you with ideas and possibilities. The book starts with, er, ''Getting Started''. This is predominantly about you as a complete novice wondering about whether or not to use a Wiki and what the possibilities are. It's written in gloriously simple language which even a wrinkly like me can understand. In my spare time over Christmas I found myself playing about with our Wiki as I should have done three years ago. As I moved through ''Writing and Editing Articles'' my thoughts regularly began ''oh, gosh, we could...'' Some points weren't immediately relevant (translations, mathematical formulae...) but even those left me with the knowledge that the information would be there if we ever wanted to go down that road. In a couple of days I was a ''confident'' user of the Wiki and even did bits of of maintenance as I got into corners which had never before been swept. I already ''knew '' much of the information - now I ''understood'' it.

Progress slowed as I got further into the book. It wasn't just that what could be achieved was very much more complex, it was that I found many more dusty corners on the site which needed to be cleaned out. I donned my virtual Marigolds and cleared out redundant templates, double redirects and dead-end pages. There was an amazing sense of achievement. What also surprised me was the way that I stopped thinking in terms of ''our'' Wiki and began considering the wider possibilities as well as moving on from doing my best to produce good reviews but to also to thinking about best Wiki practice.