Wikipedia:School and university projects/CS345

Introduction for non-students

One assignment in a University Studies/Computer Science course at Portland State University will ask students to write Did you know articles for Wikipedia. Each article will be written by a group of 2-4 students, and in the Fall of 2009 there will be approximately 20 students in the course, CS345. Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account.

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

Start date: The assignment will be distributed in class on September 29, 2009. The due date is given on the course syllabus.

Status: The assignment is complete. Please direct any comments to my user talk page .

Introduction for students

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has over ten million editors (Wikipedians) as of 2009, 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 assignment and the course! After all, there are not many assignments that tell you to do something that over a million people think is 'fun'. :)

The Assignment

You will form a team of 2-4 students. Your team has three responsibilities. The first is to add a new article, or add substantial content to an existing article, on Wikipedia. The result of your efforts should be at least 750 new words added to Wikipedia. (You can count numbers of words by copying them into a word processor like Microsoft Word and using Tools/Word Count.) Your efforts must also qualify as a Did You Know article, according to the Did You Know Selection Criteria. I realize that those selection criteria require only 1500 characters, or a fivefold increase in an existing article, however, I am also requiring you to add 750 new words to Wikipedia.

Your team's second responsibility is to make a presentation to the class and hand in a hardcopy report to me, on the date given in the class syllabus. Your class presentation should be 10-20 minutes and should discuss (1) the process you went through to decide what to add to Wikipedia, (2) the interactions you had with Wikipedia editors during the process of adding material, and (3) your final product – what do your additions look like in Wikipedia now? Your presentation can use Power Point or Word, etc. Bring your slides/document to class on a USB flash drive – you can also use the web browser on the computer in class. The hardcopy report you give me at the start of your presentation should include your slides and any other material you wish to share with me to help me evaluate your project. Your presentation may show, using the history page that we discussed in class, that you submitted 750 new words and others wrote over your words to improve and extend the article.

Your team's third responsibility is for each of you to sign up for a Wikipedia account and email to me (len@pdx.edu) your names, account names, and the members of your team. Keep me informed if your team changes members.

Evaluation

I will evaluate your work on this assignment using these criteria:

Did you follow the requirements described in the previous section?
Were you responsive to the suggestions of Wikipedia editors about your submissions?
Did you follow Wikipedia guidelines, policies and etiquette?
Were your presentation's slides/document easy for the class to read?
Did your spoken presentation follow your slides/document?
You will lose points if you did all your work at the end of the course.

Getting to know Wikipedia

Before you dive into creating your article it will help to get to know the Wikipedia community. This is best done by making small edits to existing articles. Each time you look at a Wikipedia article, consider how you could make it better. Sometimes articles ask for help, with templates saying the article needs references, expanding, etc. Other times you will see grammatical errors, opportunities for clarifications, etc. Please try to edit articles so you can participate in the process.

I've spoken to you in class about how to get an account, and where to get help. As a reminder, see Help:Contents and WP:Questions, especially the live chat help there and the helpme template placed after a question on your talk page.Remember to log in to your account whenever you are doing any editing.

Wikipedia:Tutorial is the best place to start to learn how to edit a Wikipedia page.

Choosing a topic

Your next task is to choose a topic for your article. There are several approaches to this task. As you consider these approaches you will be looking at articles - consider making small edits in them:

Look at Wikipedia's requested articles, which are organized by category - look at the bottom of the article. If you find a topic there that interests you, write the article for Wikipedia.
Look at missing encyclopedia articles articles in other encyclopedias, not in Wikipedia. Note that you cannot copy text from other encyclopedias - this is forbidden by copyright laws. If you find an article in another encyclopedia that interests you, write your own version of the article, based on your own research.
Look at Stub articles in Wikipedia. These are articles that editors have declared to be too short to qualify as meaningful. They are organized by topic so it should be easy to find a topic you are interested in, then to see all the stubs in that topic, and choose one you wish to expand.
Look in Wikipedia for articles that interest you. (You can search Wikipedia in several ways, for example, Wikipedia classifies its articles by Category, or you can submit a keyword and click on Search, or you can use third-party search tools.) In those articles that interest you, look for red links, as we have discussed in class. These indicate topics for which there is no article in Wikipedia.

In choosing a topic, be sure to check that it does not already appear in Wikipedia, by doing a search on the topic and synonyms of it.

It is very important that your topic meet Wikipedia's Notability criteria, in particular there must be several reliable published sources about your topic. Before you think about writing the article, gather at least 3-4 good, solid, reliable published sources about it. To learn what a reliable published source is, read the article at WP:RELY. Finding reliable published sources is the most challenging problem in writing an article and lack of such sources is the main reason that articles are deleted.

Other helpful information can be found on Wikipedia's article about starting a new article.

Editing your article in your sandbox

If you are creating a new article, I strongly suggest that you do all your editing in your own sandbox. Here's how to create your own sandbox.

Go to your user page by clicking on your user name at the top of any Wikipedia page
Click the "edit this page" tab and type in a wikilink to [[/my sandbox]].
Click on "Save page" and then click on the (red) link /my sandbox . That will create, and take you to, your personal sandbox. You can get to your sandbox any time by going to your user page and clicking on the (now blue) /my sandbox link.

Even if you are expanding an article, especially if the existing article is very short, you may wish to do your editing in your own sandbox. This way you avoid editors commenting on your article before it is done, and you avoid others taking over your article.

Beginning to edit your article

It will be helpful in writing your article to imitate other similar articles. Look at articles that are similar in content and in format to your article, to get ideas. You can see how an article has been constructed by clicking on the "edit this page" tab, or the [edit] next to each section. When you are done, just click on the Back Page arrow in your browser to get back to Wikipedia, or click on the "user page" tab.

As you edit your article, Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) will leave you various messages on your talk pages. 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 recipient's talk/discussion page, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk page. 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 with four tilde's.

You may wish to put the following template on your user and/or talk pages:

Portland State University Project CS345
This user is editing Wikipedia as part of a university project. Please feel free to contact the supervisor, via User talk:Lenshapir.

If you are writing a new article, I suggest the next thing you do is to write a summary of your article, including all the references to published articles you have gathered, then post a question at the requests for feedback page asking if the editors think the article is noteable. This will help you in four ways. First, if the editors give you negative feedback then you can choose another topic and avoid putting a lot of work into an article that will be rejected eventually. Second, they may point you to a different, but related, topic that is noteable. Third, they may give you advice that will help you organize your article better. Fourth, if you finish and submit the article and some other editors say it is not noteable, you can point out the feedback you were given earlier on and it will help you make a strong case. If you look at requests for feedback page and its archives you will see the kind of feedback that editors give, and you will see that all four of these cases have occurred.

If you plan to expand an existing article significantly, you may still wish to write a summary of your plans on the requests for feedback page and ask for feedback. In this case you will not be working in your own sandbox, but in the main article space, so you will likely be getting comments from editors as you expand the article.

When you ask for feedback, be sure to mention that your article is a class assignment, and refer to this course page, WP:School and university projects/CS345.

Remember to use "Show preview" to preview your work so you can see your results and edit the article at the same time. Click Show preview again to update the contents as you make changes. Then when you are satisfied, fill in the Edit summary box and click on Save page. Don't leave the screen unedited for several hours, or Wikipedia may lose your session. If that does happen, copy the edit box contents onto your clipboard (ctrl-A, ctrl-C) log out of your account at the upper right corner, log in again, and copy the contents back into the edit screen (ctrl-V).

If you forget what you learned in the tutorial, look at WP:EDIT.

The main task of editing your article

As your article gets longer, simplify your work by editing one section at a time. Do this by clicking the [edit] button next to each section.

To write the best possible article, see the links below.

It is important that an article belongs to a category, so that others can find it. See Wikipedia:Category for more details. To find categories to use, look at WP:CATS.

When your article is about 1/3 and 2/3 done, feel free to ask for feedback on the Wikipedia feedback page. Or by that time you may have picked up a favorite Wikipedia editor whom you can ask directly for help.

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to Portland State University. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our course is the first one at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, as you can see from Wikipedia:School and university projects#Current projects so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—and of yourselves.

You are welcome to send me email, or drop by to see me during my office hours (see the syllabus ) to ask about Wikipedia how-to. Also remember Help:Contents and WP:Questions.

Submitting your article

If you are editing your article in your sandbox, then when you are done editing your article, be sure you are logged in and create your new article as follows:

Check that the account you are using is an autoconfirmed account. Do this by clicking on "my preferences" at the top of the page, then "user profile" and look at "member of groups".
On your sandbox, click the move tab at the top
You will be asked for the name of the new page. Fill in your article name.
There will be a box indicating whether to move the talk page. Leave it checked.
Fill in a reason for the move, like "submitting a new article from my sandbox".

When you have submitted your article, the next step is to submit it as a Did You Know proposal. This is explained on the Did You Know page. You are not required to submit an image with your Did You Know proposal. When you have finished the Did you know proposal, email me (len@pdx.edu) so I can watch the proposal process, and good luck!

Once you have completed your article, check back at least once a week on the history and discussion pages of your article to see if any changes have been made to it or any comments made on it. You will need to take these into account in your class presentation.

You are now a Wikipedian! I encourage you to use the skills you have learned, to contribute further to Wikipedia.