After reading my remarks yesterday about geoscience wikis, perhaps you're itching to share some of what you know. Below are ten quick ways to get started. And if you're going to SEG next week, you're in luck: you'll find a quick way to get started.

Ten things you can do

First, if you really just want to dive in, here are ten easy things you can do in almost any wiki. Let's use SEG Wiki as an example — but this applies equally well to SubSurfWiki, PetroWiki, or Wikipedia.

Read it — find a page or category that interests you, and start exploring the content
Edit it — nothing tricky, but if you find a typo or other small error, hit Edit and fix it (you can do this without logging in on Wikipedia, but most other wikis require you to make an account first. This isn't usually a deliberate effort to put you off — allowing anonymous editing results in an amazing amount robot spam. Yes, robot spam.)
Share it — like most of the web, wikis need to be shared to survive. When you find something useful, share it.
Add a profile — if you're an SEG member, you already have an account on SEG Wiki. Why not add some info about yourself? Go log in to SEG.org then click this link. Here's mine.
Add a sandbox — Edit your user page, add this: [[/Sandbox/]], then save your page. You'll see a red link. Click on it. Try some editing — you can do anything you like here. Again, here's mine — click Edit and copy my code.
Fix equations — most of the equations in the SEG Encyclopedic Dictionary are poorly formatted. If you know LaTeX, you can help fix them. Here's one that's been fixed. Here's a bad one (if it looks OK, someone beat you to it :)
Add references — Just like technical papers, wikis need citations and references if they are to be useful and trusted. Most articles in SEG Wiki have citations, but the references are on another page. Here's one I've fixed.
Add a figure — Again, the figures are mostly divorced from their articles. The Q article shows one way to integrate them. Some articles have lots of figures.
Improve a definition — Many of the Dictionary definitions are out of date or unhelpfully terse. Long articles probably belong in the 'main' namespace (that is, not the Dictionary part) — so for example I split Spectral decomposition into a main article, apart from the short dictionary definition.
Add an article — This may seem like a big step, but don't be shy. Be bold! We can worry later if the new article needs to be split or combined or renamed or reformatted. The point is to start.

Wiki markup takes a little getting used to, but you can get a very long way with a little know-how. This wiki markup cheatsheet will give you a head start.

One place you can start

SEG Annual Meeting At the SEG Annual Meeting next week, I'll be hanging about the Press Room from 11 am till 1 pm every day, with John Stockwell, Karl Schleicher and some other wiki enthusiasts. We'd be happy to answer any questions or help you get started.