Informal learning activities/Wndrng
The various entity lists (groves) of name trees give the user a choice of starting points for a recreational and/or educational wander. The groves are divided alphabetically within a name tree forest, and the headings of any grove display provide easy access to the other groves within a forest, and also to related forests.
The topics discussd here are: (a) using the browser, (b) the kinds of links, and (c) the kinds of items in the starting points lists.
Wandering
[edit | edit source]A starting point is usually a Wikipedia page, occasionally a Wiktionary page.
A Wiktionary starting point will usually lead to a Wikipedia page, though occasionally the hint of such an entity in the name tree list will be itself a related link to a Wikipedia page. Because Wiktionary starting points are infrequent, they will not be discussed in detail here.
Using the Browser
[edit | edit source]To enjoy wandering, the first requirement is to be, or to become, familiar with the browser used to do the wandering. The following description is intended to help the unfamiliar become a little more familiar. However, the description must be rather general because there is variation across browsers.
Clicking
[edit | edit source]The basic wandering action is to click on a link; Presumably you, the reader, know enough about that to have got here; But there might be some puzzlement about what to click on.
A link is text highlighted by colour. A dead link is coloured red, one that doesn't react to being clicked on. A live link is coloured blue. If the blue is purpled this is because the browser has recorded that you have clicked on that particular link before, not necessarily recently and not necessarily from the same Web page.
Of course, just because text is coloured red or blue doesn't mean that it is necessarily a link. The way to find out is to click on it, or (better) to move the cursor over the putative link and after a moment the browser will produce a little box with the URL in it if it is truly a link. Try it on the preceding URL (the underlined one) and look for the box with "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL" in it. And this is almost certainly a dead link.
Reversing
[edit | edit source]Once you have clicked on a link but want to reverse the effect, that is, return to the Web page you came from, then, if there is a large left-pointing arrow at the top of your current browser window, clicking on it should get you back. Otherwise you should be able to back using the keyboard. For example, on the browser used for putting this documentation together, you hold down an Alt key and tap the so-called left arrow key. This is likely to be a key marked with a ∇ symbol turned 90° clockwise.
The combination of clicking and reversing makes the wandering like clambering around a tree, going forward and backward along limbs and branches. You might like to click here to have a preliminary wander, just for practice.
Contributing
[edit | edit source]As you are wandering, you might have issues with the content of a Wikipedia page. It's probably best to just pass over it until you are comfortable with wandering.
If it's just a cosmetic change, e.g. of spelling or grammar, then that's very easy to do. There should be an [edit] alongside the relevant heading that you can click on to open up the text for changing.
If you want to make more serious contributions to Wikipedia then you should find out more about it, starting here.
Kinds of links
[edit | edit source]Starting from any Wikipedia page, three kinds of wandering steps can usually be taken: Wikipedia links, other Wikimedia links, and external links. Of course it is up to the wanderer to decide which links to use, but the wandering will be more relaxed if mostly Wikipedia links are used. They are also usually the most in number and interest.
If there is any doubt about what kind any link is, bringing the cursor of the browser onto the link will display the URL. For example, here is a Wikipedia link: Saturday; a Wiktionary link: brigandage; and an external link: Rafael Sabatini.
Sometimes links will point to Web items that no longer exist (or never did exist). These are called dead links, and may be of any of the three kinds. Here is a dead Wikipedia link: knil daed.
Wikipedia links
[edit | edit source]Wikimedia pages, including the one you are looking at, are displayed with a column of Wikimedia links to the left of the Wikimedia page. These can be very useful and interesting but they are typically irrelevant to a wander (except, maybe, What links here), and will be ignored in the following descriptions.
A typical Wikipedia page is highly varied in content, in particular in its links.
Most links in the main text of a Wikipedia page are about some aspect of the topic of that page and lead to further information about an object, a person, an event, or a place (for example) mentioned in the text. This small example shows many such links in a small Wikipedia page.
Some main text links, shown as a superscripted integer enclosed in brackets (this[1] example is not a link however), are usually of little interest to wanderers as they only link to an item in a reference list that is put somewhere towards the end of the current Wikipedia page. The above example has four such links at the time this explanation was being written.
At the beginning of a Wikipedia page there is sometimes a very useful link or two leading to Wikipedia pages that give other uses of the title word of the current page. The example has such a link, and these are called hatnotes. This sample page has several hatnotes.
There are often several lists of links towards the end of a Wikipedia page following the descriptive body of the page. Sometimes these lists are formatted in a tabular fashion and are portals to Wikipedia pages, for example to pages of the same category. These will be described within the particular name tree descriptions.
One of these trailing lists of links, though, is simple, and is usually just of Wikipedia links. These lists have the heading See also. The example has one, as has also the sample.
Other links
[edit | edit source]There are two kinds of links that are not to Wikipedia. They are links to other Wikimedia pages, and links to other parts of the Web. While these may appear in the main body of a Wikipedia page, they are generally gathered at the end, as appendices.
The links to other Wikimedia pages are displayed in different ways, most notably as a fancy box. There are two such shown in this specimen.
Kinds of items
[edit | edit source]The following are examples of different kinds of items: zester (peeler) yate (gum) • Paul Xuereb 19 (politician) • Wappinger USA (town) (don't bother to click on any of these at this stage).
The items in the starting point lists all provide a main word that a wander can start from, and a hint that is provided to foreshadow the nature of the entity that is the trunk of the wander tree, and to trigger the user's memory if the trunk has been visited before. More information on a starting entity can often be got by moving the cursor over the main word of its list item to bring up the URL of that entity.
The starting point lists are grouped by kind, and the details of each kind are described elsewhere. Within each group the items are sequenced alphabetically, and the sequence is subdivided into several lists or groves so that the user isn't overwhelmed by too many items being available at the same time.
In the display of each grove there are links in the heading to all the other groves of the main group. Again, more details are given in the descriptions for each group.