Creating a WikiHow Article
The wikiHow project is an assignment that takes students out of their comfort zones. This project has a mixture of basic Adobe Photoshop skills, basic coding, writing skills, and knowledge of how to use wikiHow. These skills that are put to use in this assignment almost make this seem like a media production crash course project. It is important for communications students to become familiar with wikiHow. This tutorial filled website is unique in the sense that anyone can edit and contribute to the website. Anyone who has general knowledge of coding and writing can be published on this website.
In the case of writing a step-by-step tutorial on selling clothes online, personal experience with this topic was shown to be the most helpful when working on this project. Having a heavy amount of experience with the topic being written improves the quality of the article. For this specific project, editing raw images on Adobe Photoshop was required. However, while using web ready images for each step is helpful and brings the article to life, screenshots of the app in question would have been the most useful. In a wikiHow that teaches readers how to do something on a phone or computer, screenshots would help viewers the most. For articles on topics such as recipes, an image taken by a camera is the most effective. The pictures for this project needed to be taken horizontally, which ended up proving to be the best way to have pictures shown on the article.
As for references, the wikiHow article titled “How to Sell Items on Craigslist”, was the most helpful article. In this article, screenshots with arrows edited onto them were used, which made the article easy to follow. This article is another example of why screenshots would work best for an internet related wikiHow. This Craigslist article was very technical and had no extra “fluff”, which made it a good inspiration. This is how an easy and effective step by step instructional should be. Making a wikiHow article thorough enough to be effective, yet not too long makes a 450 word count perfect.
The most difficult step of the project was the coding. The step where students were told to code was basic to anyone involved in media production. To anyone who is not familiar with coding, the task may seem daunting. Students simply had to take a code from a wikiHow of their choice and put their own steps into it. Once a blog is chosen and editing has begun, embedding new steps posed different challenges. Learning what characters to erase, add, or replace depending on what you are putting on your blog can become confusing. Coding is a skill that seems very detailed. One wrong stroke of the keyboard and the user may end up with an article they aren't happy with. Adding pictures into the article was very simple. All that the user needs to do to include a picture is to put their cursor at the end of the sentence, and then click the image icon. The “How to Sell Items on Craigslist” article was a fairly simple article to edit and put a different code into. The article was a good choice because of not only the simplicity, but the proximity to the topic of selling clothes online, specifically on an app.
Another step of the project that isn’t a requirement is becoming published on wikiHow. Once the article is finished, the next step is to publish it. This cannot be officially done until wikiHow editors look it over and decide if it is suitable for the website. This part can be difficult for some users, because even if an article is well written, it may not be what the editors are looking for.
An important aspect to add at either the beginning or the end of the wikiHow is a “What You’ll Need” section. This part is self explanatory. The wikiHow user simply needs to list everything the reader will need to complete the tutorial. Even if this part seems obvious, it’s important to write as if it isn't so obvious! The reader may have no idea where to start with the tutorial.
It’s also important to add a section at the end that shows links to wikiHows that may be related. This may be of use to the reader.
WikiHow aims to be a user friendly, feedback based website that is based on community. Readers can rate the blog at the end by clicking a smile or frown face to vote if it was useful. Users can even make reviews and ask further questions if needed.
Overall, the process of making a wikiHow article was a positive experience. There were difficult steps but they were all necessary for communication students.
Comments
Post a Comment