How can I help: If I am a trainee, assistant or student

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As a student or trainee there are a number of important ways that you can help the Psychology Wiki grow. Remember too that every time you alter a page and save it, as long as you are logged in with your account name, you will get full credit for your contributions. To see this and to print off details of your efforts click on the the 'User contribution' link on the left hand side of your own User page which is accessed by clicking on your user name at the top of this page.

Producing original material. It can be a souless task for many of us, producing academic material just for assessment, and then discarding it in our files. Much good work is often just abandoned once it is marked.

If you have put a lot of effort into a piece and you feel that you have covered an area fully, with all the main references documented, why not think about using it as a basis of a Psychology Wiki article, or the updating of an existing article?

If you are not sure about contributing why not discuss it with your supervisor or teacher.

It is particularly helpful if those of you on professional training courses could contribute the literature review portion of your thesis. You may be concerned about not wanting to provide full details of your work because you want to try and publish the results in a journal. However most journals will now give permission for you to provide a preprint or a postprintof your material for use on the web, so in most cases publishing a version of your work here will not prejudiced. The rule is to check it out at submission and once you are happy put the material up here.

Encouraging lecturers to contribute their material If you have had a good lecture from someone and they have given out useful handouts etc., encourage them to archive their materials on the site. You are the generation which will reap the benefits of these developments and it is worth getting as much quaility material onto the site as possible. Remember too that some of your teachers will not have caught up with this new web development and may welcome encouragement from you to make use of it.

Working on the wiki to improve the quality of the articles

At this stage of our development there are numerous tasks to be done. Each of the articles needs going over and cleaning up for our purposes. Each of the red links needs evaluating. If it is not really relevent then it needs the square brakets removed from it (in edit mode) or if it is relevent then the material it links to needs to be imported from Wikipedia etc.

Most of the material has been produced for the general reader and our job is to work towards upgrading it to academic quality. So some of the existing text can be edited out and the rest shaped to support all relevant research references. etc.

Articles also need editing from a purely English langauge point of view, improving spelling, grammer, punctuation etc. Remember that American and Commonwealth spellings differ and as long as they are consistent within an article need not be corrected.