Contributing to a wiki

Your course may contain a wiki. The wiki works like a course encyclopedia and glossary. It can include entries – written by you and your classmates – on a particular topic of study during the course. It makes collaborative working far easier because one person doesn’t have to be responsible for collating comments from a whole group, and several versions of the same document aren’t circulating between group members at the same time. If you are using the wiki for group work only the members of your group and the tutor will be able to view it.

A Wiki can be identified by the  icon. You can also access a wiki from the menu drawer via Activities > Wikis.

There are a number of functions that you can use when working with a Wiki which can be accessed using the drop down menu:

    • View: allows you to view any documents your group has created and to navigate between them.
    • Edit: allows you to edit or add to your group’s documents, click on Edit and then use the text editor to make any changes you require. The text editor works in the same way as for the forum tool.
    • Comments: allows you to make a comment about a page without editing the page itself.
    • History: allows your tutor and your group to track the changes that have been made to your documents and see how they have changed over time. This makes it much easier to see retrospectively how the discussions have progressed.
    • Map: gives you access to information on the site through different views, accessible through the Map menu. These include seeing all your contributions, all the pages which link to the page you have just been viewing, a page index and more.
    • Files: If you have uploaded any images to the wiki they will be listed here.

The best way to familiarise yourself with a wiki is to have a go! Click on the relevant tab and follow the on screen instructions to create a page, view it, and then edit it.