Revising How-To

These are short instructions on making revisions to different categories of topic in the course wikis. Please help make my course administration tasks easier by reading and respecting them.

Personal essays

When revising a wiki topic that is an essay of your own, please remember to make a new version, containing only your revised text. This makes the "History" of the page most useful in viewing revisions. I use programmer's tools for looking at and commenting on revisions, so this matters very much to my personal work efficiency.

Collectively authored pages

When revising collective authored pages, please edit the existing version, so that your edits co-exist with the rest of the existing page. You can delete anything that your revision requires be removed, of course, including commentary. Everything remains accesible in the page's history.

Conversations

When revising a page with chains of comments, please consider "refactoring" the discussion. That means summarizing the discussion in your own words in place of the existing "thread," explaining the points made by participants, giving credit by name to the commentators whose ideas were summarized. This form of editorial clarifications helps the conversation more than adding something at the bottom of a lengthening chain that may exhaust the patience of new readers.