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Wikipedia:School and university projects/Shaping the Modern World SP2010

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Introduction

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Specific introduction for students is in the next section.

In a required World history course at Duquesne University, students will write encyclopedia articles for Wikipedia. The project extends from 8 January 2010 – 1 May 2010.

There will be around 40 students, some of whom will work in groups of two. Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, and each group will expand a stub, or a select a requested article, and expand it to the level as close to Featured Article as they can in the time allotted, or identify a topic of their choice which is not already covered in the Wikipedia, and bring that article as close to Featured Article Status as they can within the time allotted.

Supervisors

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I, User:Auntieruth55, introduce students to Wikipedia and ensure they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines.

Status

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  • 18 January 2010. The project has led to no editing other than that on the project pages. Please direct any comments to my user talk page or to the project talk page.
  • 25 January 2010. No students have enrolled as editors in the project.

Introduction for students

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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 contact me.

Create a user account

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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 we will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise). After you create an account, please find your name in the relevant row of the Completed assignments 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 Duquesne University. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our Shaping the Modern World course section may be the first one 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.

Wikicommunities

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You should expect that the course leader, TAs, 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 exercises below, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages as often as you check your email (I strongly recommend you interpret 'as often' to mean 'at least daily'). 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.

Edit summaries

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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.

Questions and contact

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Please direct any questions to this page's talk page or my talk page. You are welcome to send me emails, or arrange a meeting with me, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

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After you familiarise yourself with how Wikipedia works, it is time to put those lessons into practice. This is important; not only will it give you experience in wiki technology before you begin your Working Paper, but the successful completion of the below exercises in itself will impact your quiz/participation score. After you finish doing an exercise, please leave the information 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, we 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.

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

Exercise 0

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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.

Exercise 1

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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, but for this exercise you should preferably find a subject related to sociology. The following pages may be useful to you at that stage:

Make sure you have read the guides mentioned in the introduction section and familiarized yourself with how wiki works before attempting to do this exercise. You may want to refresh your memory by rereading this 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, feel free to do so. If you manage to expand (in a meaningful way) a stub article that it no longer qualifies as a stub, then you may receive some additional points. Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This exercise should be completed by February 1.

Exercise 2

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
  3. It is likely the article you have created is a stub. In that case, make sure you assign it to the appropriate stub category.
  4. 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.
  5. 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 you may receive some additional points. Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This exercise should be completed by

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:

Exercise 3

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It is vitally important to be able to identify reliable sources as well as to be able to properly cite your sources. In this exercise 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 sources (like academic journals) instead of non-academic sources (like newspapers or non-academic websites). See also Wikipedia:Reliable sources for information on what sources are preferred.

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.

Working paper

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See Wikipedia:School and university projects/Shaping the Modern World SP2010 for a dedicated working paper boilerplate

A list of short, stubs of history-related articles selected by course leader and/or the TAs will be available here before work on the Working Paper will begin. Each group of students should chose one article and work on it. Make sure you report your choice on the Completed assignments page and cross out the article from the list below (you can cross out the articles by using <s></s> tags before and after the word to achieve the following effect). Note that this means that the groups which decide early on their articles will have a wider choice and the groups which wait until the end will have few articles to chose from. If instead of expanding an existing stub you would like to create a new article from scratch, this is possible, however make sure you consult the subject of this article with your TA and receive their approval before stating the project.

You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools and seek creative comments on your article. If you manage to make your article a Wikipedia:Featured Article, you may receive additional points. However, please refrain from voting for each others articles during this process (note also that anonymous and new user votes are commonly disregarded during FA voting process to prevent any abuses. In addition, please note that any attempt to cheat on Wikipedia will be regarded as seriously as academic plagiarism.

For a list of "stubs" in the general category of history, please see Category:History stubs Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This assignment is due by April 20.

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