Help:Tools for collaboration

Colwiki is a platform for collaborative development of online Open Educational Resources. All Colwiki page (except protected pages) promte collaboration as they are generally editable by any one with a Colwiki account. There are some other tools also that help us to build effective collaboration.

Talk/Discussion Page

In logged in state beside your user name at the top of the Colwiki page you will see a link my talk; it is the Colwiki page for others to communicate with you. This page provides facility to add new messages as well as to reply to an existing message. When you access other people's talk pages, it will be displayed as discussion page. Similarly all the content pages on Colwiki also have an associated discussion page.

A talk page is actually very similar to any other wiki page. Talk pages can be accessed by clicking the “discussion” tab at the top of the page. Simply edit the page as normal to add your comment

Our work is based on a consensus model. In practice members of Colwiki agree to work as follows:

• Draft plans, outlines and suggestions are created on the wiki. Anyone is free to create a new wiki page in relation to any content appropriate to Colwiki.
• Discussions take place in the discussion pages.
• Once consensus is achieved, necessary changes are made on the relevant wiki page.
• However, minor edits, improvements etc are usually done without discussion.

Signing your comments is a best practice

Adding your signature below your comments will increase the reliability of your comments and hence the possibility of collaboration. Here signature means adding your user name and time below your comments. Inserting four tildes ~~~~ below your comment is the standard way to display a full signature. When you put four tildes and save the page, the system will display your user name with time and date.

See a sample signature below:

Anil 12:06, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Recent changes Page

The Recent changes link that you will see under the navigation menu in the left side of the Colwiki pages help you to monitor the changes that are happening in Colwiki on a real-time basis.

The Recent changes page tells you who has done changes on which page at what time. This will help you to identify the pages that are being frequently edited and know who are online at a given time. This is also a good venue to identify new members of the community. In these ways Recent changes page sets venue for building collaboration.

Page History

All pages on Colwiki have an associated page history, which lists all changes made to the page in reverse-chronological order. You can access this information by clicking on the history tab that is located at the top of every page. It help you to track all the changes made to a page from the time of its creation.

Comparing selected versions of a page

The histroy page also gives you a facility to compare selected versions of a page.

For every version or change that has been made to the page there are potentially two radio buttons: the left column is for selecting the older version, the right column for selecting the newer one. Pressing Compare selected versions gives the difference between the two versions.

Please see the picture below: