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| This wiki, Appropedia itself, is the most important platform, of course. You don't need to use other platforms if you don't want. Just edit, and leave notes on talk pages{{w|Help:Using talk pages}} and people's user pages.{{w|Wikipedia:User pages}} | | This wiki, Appropedia itself, is the most important platform, of course. You don't need to use other platforms if you don't want. Just edit, and leave notes on talk pages{{w|Help:Using talk pages}} and people's user pages.{{w|Wikipedia:User pages}} |
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| Using Appropedia to manage your workflow, instead of external tools, provides the following advantages:
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| * You only have to learn one set of commands, one markup syntax, etc., to handle all your work: editing your content (the material you want to share with Appropedia's audience of general readers), plus your meta-content (the things you do to create your content and collaborate with other Appropedia editors). Because wikis are internally consistent (we re-use the same wikitext{{w|Wikitext}} markup{{w|Markup language}} to do many different tasks), putting all your work on one wiki platform makes it easier for you and others to comprehend what you are doing.
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| * By using Appropedia for as much of your work as you can, you learn to use wikis faster. This is analogous to the cultural immersion{{w|Language immersion}} one experiences on going to a foreign country. The fastest way to learn a new language is to put yourself in an environment that forces you to use that language for everything. If you have the option of stepping back to your familiar language, you have less incentive to learn the new one. Using Appropedia itself to manage all your work on Appropedia will teach you how to use wiki technology to get things done.
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| * Using Appropedia to write about your tasks gives you the full power of wikitext markup. You can add links,{{w|Help:Link}} display images,{{w|Wikipedia:Picture tutorial}} and use templates.{{w|Help:Template}} You gain the protection of Appropedia's revision control.{{w|Revision control}}<sup>,</sup>{{w|Help:Page history}} Few external tools provide the same flexibility and expressive power.
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| * Appropedia provides many ways for other users to monitor, search, re-use, and contribute to your work. Using external tools creates additional barriers for someone who wants to see what you did. Including you, when you come back to your work after a long absence and try to refresh your memory.
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| * You or someone else may want to re-factor your meta-content into article content someday.<ref name="brainstorm">For example, your notes may contain brainstorming ideas that later form the basis for a new article.</ref> That will be easier if your meta-content is already in wikitext format.
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| Because of the considerable power of Appropedia to let you manage your work on Appropedia, you should only resort to an external tool when some aspect of your work management cannot be done conveniently or at all on Appropedia itself. Studying Wikipedia's internal operation can be instructive - the Wikipedia community does most of its meta-content editing on Wikipedia itself, but also uses a mix of external tools to augment tasks such as bug tracking and feature requests.
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| Note that every time someone introduces a new tool to the Appropedia mix, Appropedia becomes more complex and harder to learn and document. This is particularly true of tools that are themselves complex and dissimilar to Appropedia, and overlap Appropedia's functionality with different commands. Thus you should consider carefully whether another external tool is really necessary. External tools that will see little use are almost certainly not worth the bother and learning burden. To justify adding another tool, one must identify a community of users who will use it regularly. That means actually finding such people, not merely imagining they will appear.
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| === Edit summaries === | | === Edit summaries === |
