Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/DeSales University/English 260 (Spring 2019)
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- Course name
- English 260
- Institution
- DeSales University
- Instructor
- Lisa Wilde
- Wikipedia Expert
- Shalor (Wiki Ed)
- Subject
- Victorian literature and culture
- Course dates
- 2019-01-15 00:00:00 UTC – 2019-05-11 23:59:59 UTC
- Approximate number of student editors
- 31
A Humanities core class covering the literature, ideas, social and cultural history of the era 1830-1900 in England.
Timeline
Week 3
- Course meetings
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- Monday, 28 January 2019 | Wednesday, 30 January 2019 | Friday, 1 February 2019
Week 4
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 4 February 2019 | Wednesday, 6 February 2019 | Friday, 8 February 2019
- Milestones
This week, everyone should have a Wikipedia account and a group assignment.
Week 5
- Course meetings
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- Monday, 11 February 2019 | Wednesday, 13 February 2019 | Friday, 15 February 2019
- Create your individual research journal
Although your individual contributions to the research process will be color-coded in your group notebook, you should also keep a permanent record of your work by doing your private notetaking/composing in an individual research journal.
To create your personal journal, visit the template file in GDocs (link here), then choose "File--> Make a Copy" and save a personal copy for yourself with the file name Yourlastname Individual Research Journal.
Once you've created your copy, please visit the Sharing settings and remove everyone else from sharing except yourself and me. (I need access so that I can use your notebook entries to evaluate the "research process" component of the assignment.)
Exercises in the individual journal are formatted to match the group notebook exercises, so a recommended workflow is to:
- complete each exercise first in your individual journal, then
- save and copy-paste your finished work to the group notebook for everyone else to use.
This way, you'll have a private space for messy/ in-progress work that's not quite ready to share with the rest of the group.
- In class - Introduction to the Wikipedia assignment
Welcome to your Wikipedia assignment's course timeline. This page guides you through the steps you'll need to complete for your Wikipedia assignment, with links to training modules and your classmates' work spaces.
Your course has been assigned a Wikipedia Expert. You can reach them through the Get Help button at the top of this page.
Writing and research for this project will take place across four online "spaces":
- *# Your individual research journal (on Gdocs), where you'll track your ongoing research progress and draft your contributions to the group research notebook;
- Your group's shared research notebook (on Gdocs), where all group members will contribute ideas, notes and writing segments to the evolving article project;
- Your group's shared research notebook (on Gdocs), where all group members will contribute ideas, notes and writing segments to the evolving article project;
- The group's shared Wikipedia sandbox, where your group will move the article draft for final formatting and peer review once it's completed (note: you may also use your individual Wikipedia sandbox for formatting your section of the article, if multiple group members need to work at once).
- The group's shared Wikipedia sandbox, where your group will move the article draft for final formatting and peer review once it's completed (note: you may also use your individual Wikipedia sandbox for formatting your section of the article, if multiple group members need to work at once).
- The official Wikipedia page for your article, where you'll post your group's completed, perfected and polished article expansion at the close of the project.
Resources:
- Editing Wikipedia, pages 1–5
- Evaluating Wikipedia
- Assignment - Get started on Wikipedia
Create an account and join this course page, using the enrollment link your instructor sent you. (Because of Wikipedia's technical restraints, you may receive a message that you cannot create an account. To resolve this, please try again off campus or the next day.)
- Assignment - Exercise
Find some sources and start learning about your topic!
In the initial phase of this project, each person should locate and post at least 3+ scholarly sources in your group notebook source list (Item 6). By next week, each person will need to "claim" (volunteer to interlibrary loan/ print/ check out, and then read + annotate) at least 2 of the most promising-looking sources from this group list.
The best way to initially find sources is to use the "bibliography bootstrap method": find just one other trustworthy person who's recently written about this topic in a scholarly context, then look at their sources for a good initial survey of available peer-reviewed scholarly books and articles on this topic. Most academic research works as a social network of multiple people writing about the same thing, so all you really need is one good scholarly source to give you a picture of how the conversation has worked so far.
To give everyone a head-start on finding that one trusted source for bibliography-mining, we've posted a list of "starter sources" for each topic in the Gdocs folderhere. Some items on the list are articles, some are online bibliographies, and some are books. At this stage, your job is:
- Comb through bibliographies until you find ideas for at least 3+ great-looking sources, and post the source info in Item 6 of your group notebook.
- Where promising sources are books or articles not in Trexler, use the Interlibrary Loan resource to order them ASAP, so they'll be available once we enter the reading phase (make sure to add a note in the group notebook, so everyone else knows you've ILL'd this!)
- In class - Discussion
Week 6
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 18 February 2019 | Wednesday, 20 February 2019 | Friday, 22 February 2019
- Milestones
- Suggest a model article for your group.
By the start of class on Wednesday, 2/19, please locate a high-quality Wiki article whose topic parallels your group’s chosen article topic. For example, if your group is writing an article on “Victorian cooking,” you might look around to find if there are good model articles on cooking in other historical/cultural contexts-- like “medieval cooking” or “Chinese cooking in the Song dynasty.” Or if that doesn't work, you might expand your search to other articles on domestic practices in historical context, like "Elizabethan needleworking."
Once you find a model article, please provide a link, the title, and a full topic outline in your group's Google Docs working notes.
- All interlibrary loan sources have been ordered
By the end of this week, any needed Interlibrary Loan orders should be complete.
Week 7
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 25 February 2019 | Wednesday, 27 February 2019 | Friday, 1 March 2019
- Assignment - Group's initial list of source articles is complete
By the end of Week 7, every individual should have looked over the topic-specific starter sources on Gdocs and used the bibliography bootstrap method to find 3+ additional promising-looking scholarly sources on this topic.
Please make sure to post all your source ideas in Section 6 of your group research notebook; with everyone's contributions, this will end up containing ~15+ total scholarly source ideas.
When you list a source, please also do some thinking about how your group could get hold of it. If you end up interlibrary loaning it, please note this in the appropriate column on the source list.
- Assignment - Every individual has acquired, is reading and annotating 2+ sources
To keep the research manageable, each group member will be responsible for acquiring and carefully reading 3-4 sources total (2+ in this initial phase, 1-2 more during revision). Please add notes in the rightmost column of the master source table (Section 6) to show which sources you'll be reading.
Since some other group members will need to access and use the information you find in your source, you'll need to take especially clear, careful, detailed and thorough notes as you read, covering not just portions of the source that are useful for your article section, but also any other facts that might be helpful for someone else's portion of the expansion. Section 7 of your research journal/ notebook contains a notetaking table with full details on how to format your notes.
As with the other exercises, please draft research notes in your individual journal, then copy-paste into the group notebook once you're finished.
Week 8
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 11 March 2019 | Wednesday, 13 March 2019 | Friday, 15 March 2019
- Assignment - Complete notes on all your assigned sources due by 3/15!
By the end of Week 9, each group member should have read, annoated and posted thorough, detailed notes on each of the 2+ sources assigned them in the initial research phase.
All research notes should be collected in Section 7 of the group research notebook, so that other group members can use them as they compose their section of the article expansion.
- Assignment - Draft an Outline of Your Expanded Article
Over the weekend of 3/15-3/17, please work as a group to create a basic section-level outline of your proposed article. This outline should reflect both the information needs of your readers (as brainstormed in Section 3 of your notebook) and the shape of available information on your topic (as reflected in the reading notes your group generated).
Group drafting can be either simultaneous (everyone logs onto Gdocs at once from their respective machines, drafting + chat is accomplished in real time) or asynchronous (group members add to the draft outline one after another over the course of a weekend), but every group member should clearly have contributed some portion of the outline (as reflected in the change log).
Your outline should include at least one new section (or subsection) per person in your group. This will allow groups to split the labor by assigning one section/subsection to each member.
You may expand and tweak this outline as you gather more information; the main goal is to have a working list of sections so that group members can get started on their individual writing tasks.
Week 9
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 18 March 2019 | Wednesday, 20 March 2019 | Friday, 22 March 2019
- Assignment - Begin writing your article section
Resource: Editing Wikipedia, pages 7–9
Week 10
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 25 March 2019 | Wednesday, 27 March 2019 | Friday, 29 March 2019
- Assignment - Article drafts are due to group notebook!
- Assignment - Peer review another group's article.
- Assignment - Peer reviews are complete
Every student has finished reviewing their assigned articles, making sure that every article has been reviewed.
Week 11
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 1 April 2019 | Wednesday, 3 April 2019 | Friday, 5 April 2019
- Assignment - Respond to your peer review
You probably have some feedback from other students and possibly other Wikipedians. Consider their suggestions, decide whether it makes your work more accurate and complete, and edit your draft to make those changes.
Resources:
- Editing Wikipedia, pages 12 and 14
- Reach out to your Wikipedia Expert if you have any questions.
- Assignment - Begin moving your work to Wikipedia
Now that you've improved your draft based on others' feedback, it's time to move your work live - to the "mainspace."
Resource: Editing Wikipedia, page 13
- Assignment - Continue improving your article
Exercise
Now's the time to revisit your text and refine your work. You may do more research and find missing information; rewrite the lead section to represent all major points; reorganize the text to communicate the information better; or add images and other media.
Week 12
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 8 April 2019 | Wednesday, 10 April 2019 | Thursday, 11 April 2019
- Assignment - Polish your work
Continue to expand and improve your work, and format your article to match Wikipedia's tone and standards. Remember to contact your Wikipedia Expert at any time if you need further help!
- Assignment - Final article
It's the final week to develop your article.
- Read Editing Wikipedia page 15 to review a final check-list before completing your assignment.
- Don't forget that you can ask for help from your Wikipedia Expert at any time!
- Assignment - Reflective essay
Week 13
- Course meetings
-
- Monday, 15 April 2019 | Wednesday, 17 April 2019 | Friday, 19 April 2019
- Milestones
Everyone should have finished all of the work they'll do on Wikipedia, and be ready for grading.