User:Elainecs/Comm321

Introduction

In the Comm 321 course, Communication in the Virtual Group, at the University of Southern California, students will edit several encyclopedic articles at Wikipedia.

There are seven students in the class. By the end of this assignment test-run, we hope to improve Wikipedia's article on Computer-mediated communication.

I, User:Elainecs will introduce students to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines.

Start date: The project will begin Wednesday, April 9, 2008.

Status: At that moment it has led to no editing other than that on the project pages. Please direct any comments to my user talk page.

Overview

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has over three million editors (Wikipedians) as of 2007, many of whom are students like you. The vast majority of them are volunteers who find editing this site to be an enjoyable experience, even a hobby. Therefore I hope you will enjoy this exercise and the course! After all, there are not many exercises that tell you to do something that over a million people think is 'fun'. :)

Wikipedia:Tutorial is the best place to start your adventure with this wiki. Please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the Help:Contents and if you cannot find what you are looking for, ask the friendly people at Wikipedia:Help desk - or just contact me.

Before making any major edits, it is recommended that you create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to work on any of the exercises in the next section (otherwise I won't be able to tell whether or not you've completed the exercise). After you create an account, please find your name in the relevant row of the Completed exercises page and add a link to your user page in the 'Student Wikipedia userpage' column in the row with your name.

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to the University of Southern California. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our Comm 321 course represents our university on Wikipedia to some extent, so please consider the impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—and of yourselves.

You can expect that I, other students, your friends, and even (or especially) other Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) may leave you messages on your talk pages. When working on the exercises below, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages often. Whenever you have a new message and are logged to Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message, 'You have new messages', on every Wikipedia page you access. To make this message disappear, you should click on it and read the message. Note that it is customary to leave new messages at the bottom of the talk/discussion pages, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk pages. If you want to leave somebody a message, make sure you are editing their talk page, not their user page. Remember to sign your talk and discussion messages.

Some other useful tips: whenever you are done with an edit and want to save a page, fill out the edit summary box and view a preview of the page after your edit to make sure it looks as you actually want it to look. Only then click the "Save Page" button. You may find the page history tool and watchlist tools to be very useful when you want to check what changes by other editors have been made to the article(s) you are working on.

Please direct any questions to my talk page. You can email me questions, or ask me in office hours / class, but check the very helpful Help:Contents.

Instructions

After you familiarise yourself with how Wikipedia works, it is time to put those lessons into practice. Your work on the following exercises will constitute your completion of Assignment 4. After you finish doing an exercise, please leave the information at the Completed exercises page.

Important note: make sure you are logged into your account before making any edits. If you are not logged in, I cannot verify who has done the edits, thus I will be unable to recognize your work and grade you on it. In other words, if you do any edits while not logged in, I won't be able to count those edits toward your assignment grade.

As mentioned in the introduction section above, you should let me know what your Wikipedia account nickname is by linking your Wikipedia account next to your name on the Completed exercises page. In the same manner, make sure you link the article you are working in during the exercises on that page.

1. You may want to start with this tutorial, which will take you through the basics of editing Wikipedia.

Create a userpage for yourself. Look at the top right corner, you will see your nickname in red. Click on it; write some text (about yourself, about the course, etc.), save the page. Repeat until you are satisfied. Upload an image and add it to your page. (Note that you won't be able to upload an image until your account has been autoconfirmed after 4 days.)

2. First, try expanding and improving an existing article. Wikipedia covers nearly every aspect of our life and culture, so you should be able to find something connected to your hobbies and interests. If you would like to edit articles relevant to the topics we have studied in class, all the better! The following pages may be useful to you at that stage:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types - this page contains an extensive list of stub articles, sorted by categories
Wikipedia:Requests for expansion - this page contains a list of articles that other users would like to see expanded, sorted by categories
Special:Shortpages - this page lists all Wikipedia articles deemed too short and thus in need of expansion.

Make sure you have read the guides mentioned in the introduction section and familiarised yourself with how wiki works before attempting to do this exercise. You may want to refresh your memory by rereading this page:

Wikipedia:How to edit a page

To complete this exercise, it is enough to expand any one article with a single meaningful sentence. Of course, if you feel you can do more, go right ahead. If you manage to expand (in a meaningful way) a stub article that it no longer qualifies as a stub, I will buy you lunch. Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed exercises page>.

3. After you are familiar with how to expand an existing article, you should try to create a new article. As in the previous exercise, there are several pages that will help you find a subject for your article:

However, before you create the new article, make sure it has the appropriate name - it you haven't so far, you may want to read Wikipedia:Naming conventions. And if you are unsure how to create a new article, you will want to read Wikipedia:Starting a new page.

Now that you have created your article, you should make sure it fulfills several important criteria.

It is important that an article is not orphaned - i.e. it should be linked from several other articles. To learn more about this, take one of the existing orphaned articles and link them into appropriate places. See Wikipedia:Orphaned articles for more details on this.
It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
It is likely the article you have created is a stub. In that case, make sure you assign it to the appropriate stub category.
It is extremely important that the article has references. Please see Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:References. You can use Wikipedia:External links as references for this exercise, but bear in mind that for your Working Paper you will be required to use academic books/journals as references as well.
If the article is long enough, it should have an introductory paragraph. See Wikipedia:Lead for details on what such a paragraph should look like.

To complete this exercise, you should create a new article and make sure it fits the above criteria. If you manage to create (in a meaningful way) an article large enough that it does not qualify as a stub, then I will still buy you lunch. Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed exercises page.

There are many other places you may want to check if you want to improve your Wikipedia-editing skills by editing Wikipedia. Feel free to check the following pages:

4. It is important to be able to distinguish between primary sources and secondary sources, as well as to be able to properly cite your sources. Next, we will concentrate on references. Please find an unreferenced article: you may look through some of the categories mentioned above, or browse the Category:Articles lacking sources. When you find an article that does not follow Wikipedia:Citing sources guideline, try to find reference for every important fact in the article. Please try to use academic, primary sources (like academic journals) instead of non-academic, secondary sources (like newspapers or non-academic websites). See also Wikipedia:Reliable sources for information on what sources are preffered.

Some examples of well-referenced articles: Katyn massacre, Welding, Section summary of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battle of Austerlitz, Military history of France, Monopoly (game), Astrophysics Data System, Mercury (planet), Søren Kierkegaard, Eric A. Havelock.

Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed exercises page.