FAQs
From Reuters Financial Glossary
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About
What is a Wiki?
A wiki is a web site containing content which can be viewed and edited by anyone at any time. A wiki is different from other web sites because more than one person can change the content on it. Anyone can create a new page, and improve and change existing pages.
Ward Cunningham invented the wiki concept and wrote the original wiki software. Wikis are growing in popularity, but are still most commonly used to collaboratively create content. The most famous example is the Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/), an open source encyclopedia founded in 2001 that now boasts over 1,300,000 articles in over 100 languages, and more than 13,000 active users.
This particular wiki focuses on content around the financial markets.
What is the Reuters Financial Glossary?
The Reuters Financial Glossary is a online, open resource for information about the financial markets. It is a collaborative project based upon a written glossary previously written and edited by Reuters Editorial; this web site is an experiment in collaborative editing around previously existing content.
The glossary content comes from a previously published book, but exists in a different form on this web site -- as a wiki that anyone can change, edit, and add to. We encourage visitors to the site to contribute to the glossary, so that the content stays fresh and gets read, and hopefully improves in quality over time as more people tend to the site. The Glossary is intended as a valuable tool for the public and we hope to build a critical mass so that it will really "take off."
The glossary itself covers foreign exchange, treasury, money and capital markets, mortgage-based assets, equities, commodities, sovereign and corporate debt, technical analysis, and macro-economic terms.
Why a wiki?
We hope that community members will improve upon existing pages, and create new content as necessary. The "wiki" nature of the web site allows community members to collaborate around the Financial Glossary content, as well as transforming it into a living, breathing document.
The goal is to create an always-changing, up-to-date, useful, helpful, and community-created web site. This site is an experiment, and we hope you enjoy it.
Contributing
Why would I want to contribute to the Glossary?
There are many reasoning for contributing to the Glossary -- some people do it for fun, or to communicate with other members, or to join a community of like-minded individual, as an intellectual challenge, or to share knowledge with other people.
Because this site is an experiment, we don't claim to have all of the answers in advance, but we hope to build a thriving community of active Financial Glossary users and contributors.
How can I help?
Easy! Create an account, confirm your email address, and login. Once you are logged in, you may edit any page by clicking on the "edit" link at the top of the page.
I'm logged in, what should I do now?
Here are some (but not all) of the things you can do:
- Edit any page in the Financial Glossary by clicking "edit this page" on the top of the page you're interested in.
- Discuss the content of any given page by clicking "discussion." The purpose is to help improve the page via discussion without cluttering up the actual content of the page itself.
- Look at your user profile page. It, like all other pages on the site, is editable. Feel free to place as little or as much information about yourself as you wish. It also has a discussion section primarily used for leaving messages.
- Search for an article on a subject you're interested in. Enter your search in the box in the sidebar.
- Go read a random page.
- Check out recent changes to see where other people have been making changes to the Glossary. The page is a list that can be configured to show the last "x" changes, changes in the last "y" days, minor versus major edits, as well as all changes after a specific point in time.
- Explore the history of any given page by clicking "history" at the top of the page. Every edit and revision to a page on a wiki is saved on that page's history, as well as information about the user who contributed that particular edit. You can also compare versions of pages side-by-side where changed portions of lines are highlighted.
- Or you can create a new page. Once a new page is created, any other user can edit and improve the page as well.
- Create one of the pages on the most wanted pages list. This list contains nonexistent pages that other pages have links to.
- Use your watchlist to track changes made to particular pages you're interested in. Click "watchlist" on the top of the page. Use the watchlist to keep track of pages you work on without having to follow all of the recent changes.
- Find the pages that link to any given page by clicking "What links here."
- Look for, and report, pages that may have been vandalized, contain inappropriate content, or might contain copyrighted material used without permission.
Do I have to create an account?
To view pages on the Glossary, you do not have to create an account; however, if you wish to contribute to the Glossary, you must create an account.
Why must I create an account to edit pages?
Creating an account means that all of your contributions will be linked to your account and your identity. Edits you make while logged in will be assigned to your user name. You may view the history of your edits by clicking "my contributions" at the top of the page. If you have an account, you also have access to many helpful editing and community features, as well as a space to put up information about yourself if you wish.
Additionally, providing a valid email address means you can be contacted in the future. It also allows for the retrieval of forgotten passwords, as well as the ability for other users to contact you (this is done anonymously; anyone who emails you does not know your email address).
What am I supposed to be writing, anyway?
Please see the User's Guide.
Copyright
What rights do I give Reuters, by contributing to the Glossary?
By contributing to the Glossary, you, the author, give Reuters a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to do things like reproducing your work, distributing your work, displaying your work in public, and more.
All Financial Glossary authors will retain their copyrights. They are free to use their work in any manner they choose. Reuters and the chosen Creative Commons License does not restrain you from using your work in any manner you like.
You can find out more on our copyright pages.
As an author, what rights am I giving up?
You are granting Reuters a a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license. The key here is the non-exclusivity. Reuters respects the intellectual property of others. You, as the author, are not giving up any of your rights, merely giving us a license to use is as part of the terms of contributing to the site.
You are still the copyright holder of your work, and thus are free to do as you wish with your own work, including reproducing it, transmitting it, distributing it, and more.
You can find out more on our copyright pages. For more information on copyright in general, please see the Wikipedia entry on copyright (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright).
Can I link to the Glossary content?
We allow anyone to link to the Reuters Financial Glossary in any way that they choose to do so.
Can I republish the Glossary content?
Yes, you may. In fact we encourage reuse of the Financial Glossary. All of the pages of the Glossary are licensed under a Creative Commons licence, Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/).
This license lets others remix, change, and build upon the Financial Glossary non-commercially, as long as credit is given, and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
