DP Wiki
From DPCanadaWiki
The DPC Wiki is a part of the Distributed Proofreaders Canada website. This page you are reading right now, and its brothers, sisters, children, cousins, parents, and other relations are wiki articles, intended to capture the knowledge and insights of the volunteers' years of experience. The biggest part of the DPC community is the DPC Forums, where discussion, community affairs, and teamwork is undertaken.
What makes a wiki website so powerfully useful in a community like ours is that here every DPCer can easily apply their proofreading, formatting, post-processing, and authoring skills to make every page better for everybody else. This is a website we make, we fix, and we perfect together.
If you're entirely new to Distributed Proofreaders Canada, you should refer to the Getting started article.
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New to the Wiki?
We are too!
Be aware that this is a completely new wiki. Many articles are still being filled in and edited for the first time!
It's like buying a summer time-share cottage. Most of the furniture moving over from our permanent house hasn't arrived yet. Even when it gets here you just know it will need some work: touching up, shoving around, maybe a little glue or a fresh coat of paint. We'll probably need to obtain a bunch of new furniture, too.
But we're also sharing this new cottage. All our co-owners can redecorate and move things here as well. Luckily, it's a house that grows to suit: we can add a wing whenever we want.
This new house may take a bit of getting used to at first....
Our shared cottage
Everything in our wiki can be edited, by any DP community member. No one of us "owns" any material that's here. In this simultaneous time-share, everything is yours while you're there, but it's everybody else's as well. The rest of the community can redecorate at any time to suit themselves.
This works, of course, because nobody acts purely to suit themselves. When we move things, and edit, and even delete material is always improving something we all own. The wiki is our shared knowledge. When we change it, we're collaborating.
Knowing that you're new, the maintenance crew has left a brief introduction to your new abode: Getting started in DPC Wiki. But you can edit that too!
At any time you can watch who's been doing what in the neighborhood: editing pages, moving and deleting articles, carrying on Wiki discussions. Every change here is logged automatically in the Recent Changes page. It's a great page to bookmark in your web browser, and a lot of times it can be useful to just sit and watch what people are working on.
If you want to explore what's here, but can't decide where to start, try the "Random page" link on the navigation bar (at left for most browsers).
This is your website, too. You have a wiki home page of your very own! There and everywhere else, you have the right to fiddle and move things around. Have a look at the editing tutorial for more information.
You can edit anytime you want. If you feel more comfortable trying your hand in a "safe" place before changing something somebody else has done, you can practice in the Sandbox.
As a DPCer, you know all about edit diffs, right? Some folks think this is the best part: We never have to worry about making mistakes here. Every version of every wiki page is preserved. Your new time-share can always be rolled back in time to an earlier version: edited, reupholstered, put back the way you liked it. You don't have to worry about that hideous plaid wallpaper -- even if you put it up yourself.
The core value here is this: We all own everything. Every one of us gets a crowbar, hammer, and paint brush as soon as they move in. Anybody can edit any article, at any time. We can fix what looks wrong, add what we think is missing, tidy up, move things around, proofread and reformat to our heart's content.
Every DPC Wiki article has an accompanying Talk page. We can chat and discuss and leave each other notes there. And as with every other wiki page, if somebody leaves a mess lying around, you can clean up after them. You can even leave them a note of complaint in return. :)
Every DPC Wiki account, including yours, comes with a built-in Watchlist. Just like in the DPC Forums, you can add and remove articles (including Talk pages) to and from your watchlist. Whenever anybody edits one of those pages, you'll be notified.
What about the DPC Forums?
The DPC Wiki is not intended as a replacement for the forums, or the FAQs, but a complementary tool.
