How Wikipedia Works is a 2008 book by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates. It is a how-to

How-to

A how-to or a how to is an informal, often short, description of how to accomplish some specific task. A how-to is usually meant to help non-experts, may leave out details that are only important to experts, and may also be greatly simplified from an overall discussion of the topic...

 reference for using and contributing to the Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

 encyclopedia, targeted at "students, professors, and everyday experts and fans". It offers specific sections for teachers, reusers, and researchers.

How Wikipedia Works (And How You Can Be a Part of It) is published by No Starch Press

No Starch Press

No Starch Press is a publishing company specializing in computer books for the technically savvy, or "geek entertainment" as they term it. They have published such titles as Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, Silence on the Wire, Steal This Computer Book 4.0, Steal This File Sharing Book, Write...

, part of their series of technical how-to books. The Register

The Register

The Register is a British technology news and opinion website. It was founded by John Lettice, Mike Magee and Ross Alderson in 1994 as a newsletter called "Chip Connection", initially as an email service...

 called it "a great one-stop source for information on the world’s go-to source for information." The book was published under the GNU Free Documentation License

GNU Free Documentation License

The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and...

. It was designed as a reference work more than a how-to guide, with detailed bibliographies for each section.

External links

• How Wikipedia Works (pdf) at Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
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• Reviews of the book at No Starch Press
• There was text available for download at the official website howwikipediaworks.com, but now it is a dead link as of 2010.
• How Wikipedia Works, a full, free copy of the book available through Google Books.