Wikipedia:School and university projects/IDIS110

Introduction

Specific introduction for students is in the next section.

During Fall 2009, the "IDIS110: Introduction to Information Literacy" introductory college research course taught by Thomas Arendall User:InformationLiterate at the University of Baltimore will ask students to add sources to Wikipedia articles that need them, primarily relating to Sociology, Philosophy and the class theme, "Courts and Society."

The class consists of 21 college freshmen who will work individually. Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, and each will choose an article lacking sources (see Category:Articles_lacking_sources) and add reliable sources to support the facts in the article.

Supervisors: Professor Thomas Arendall, User:InformationLiterate, will take care of introducing students to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines.

Start date: The project will take place in September 2009.

Introduction for students

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. Many more people around the world use Wikipedia as a source. In order to better understand when and how people should use Wikipedia, you will learn how Wikipedia is built, by adding content yourself.

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.

Before making any major edits create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to work on the Encyclopedia Assignment (otherwise your professor will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise). After you create an account, find your name in the relevant section of the Completed assignments page and add a link to your user page in the 'Student Wikipedia userpage' section under your name.

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to the University of Baltimore. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our IDIS110 class is one of the first courses at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—and of yourselves.

You should expect that the course leader, other students, your friends, and even (or especially) other Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) will leave you various messages on your talk pages. When working on the assignment below, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages as often as you check your email (I strongly recommend you read 'as often' as 'at least daily'). 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.

Students should post any questions to the Questions conference of the course's WebTycho page. You are welcome to send me emails, or drop by to see me during office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

The Encyclopedia Assignment that students in IDIS110 will be working on is currently available here: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dct2wjk6_23t9zkk2dz

Every time you make some progress on the assignment, please leave update the "Progress" section under your name at the <Completed assignments page>.

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