This page has information on the Wikipedia assignment for Professor Denbow's Human Traditions Course for the Fall of 2011 at the University of New England.
The goal of this assignment is for several groups of students to choose an underdeveloped or missing article on Wikipedia that is related to the course theme of Gender and Politics in the pre-modern world.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has many millions (!) of editors ( Wikipedians), 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 instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing or 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, it is recommended that you create an account ( video tutorial). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to do any wiki-related coursework (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise). After you create an account, if you know your group already, add your name to the relevant section of this page.
Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to our university. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university — and of yourselves.
You should expect that the instructor, 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 often. Whenever you have a new message and are logged in 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 ( you may want to watch this tutorial on using talk pages).
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 try to find answers to questions you have on Help:Contents. If you cannot find an answer, ask in class, at office hours, or direct questions to: my talk page.
Now that you are familiar with the Wikipedia environment, it is time to jump into your assignment.
Project overview:
Your assignment is to choose an underdeveloped or nonexistent article on a subject related to this course to research and write about on Wikipedia. You will perform a literature search on that topic, and work with an assigned group to create a new article or expand an existing one, following any and all Wikipedia standards first and foremost. During the active project phase, you will monitor and respond to feedback on your article, and assist other groups by reading and commenting on their work.
Project details:
This assignment is worth 30% of your grade for the course.
During class you will be assigned to a group and given a group number. This is your Wikipedia assignment group, and it is composed of the people you work with for the duration of the semester. You will be given time during lecture to meet with your group and discuss options and schedules. You and your group will choose an article and create or expand it. Once you have chosen your article, you will write up a one page proposal, outlining important information about it, what points you will cover in your article, and a short list of resources. You will then meet with me as a group to discuss your proposal. The deadlines for this assignment are listed below, as well as on the course syllabus.
Once you have gotten my approval, work together to create an interesting, in depth article about your chosen subject. Make sure you familiarize yourself with encyclopedia-type writing before you begin. We will discuss the appropriate type of writing in class, but note that writing for Wikipedia is very different from writing an essay, although not that far from writing a descriptive scientific paper. Please read the following guidelines to get a handle on how you should write your article BEFORE you start writing:
Wikipedia maintains a high standard of writing, and has taken great pains to improve these standards. You need to follow their directions to the letter, since deviating from these standards will invite article deletion.
Regarding the length of the article, quality of sources used, and such, see the articles other students have written for similar projects: here, here or here.<you may want to keep those as examples or replace with your own past courses or others you prefer>
Feel free to include photos, but remember that not all pictures on the web are free for the taking. Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia's Copyright Policy to ensure you are not doing anything wrong (copyright violation, in the real world, means what plagiarism means in academia). Remember that any violation will be caught and dealt with by the plethora of editors on the site (and you do not want your group article to suddenly sprout a copyvio template like [http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Food_power&oldid=327364463 this 2009 group did...).<again, this is an example you may want to change if you have something better you are more familiar with>
Your article must include at least one academic book or journal source per group member. However, keep in mind that this is a minimum requirement. You should also include a list of external links giving the reader more information on your subject, and link to your page from other Wikipedia pages, so your page is not an orphan. To answer that question in your head: yes, you can go on someone else's article and link to your own. That's the beauty of Wiki!
You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools (see tips section below) and seek creative comments on your article. In other words, if you can get other Wikipedia editors to help you, I am totally fine with that.
Once you begin writing your article, you are required to respond to any comments on your paper and act accordingly (make proper changes, defend your choices, etc). These comments will give you substantial feedback on your work, and allow you to make your final product better. (Besides, I'm going to spend the semester reading your work and commenting on it--if you listen to my feedback, you'll end up with a much better grade.)
Finally, you will read and evaluate/comment on your classmates' articles. Please make your comments constructive and useful. You will not get credit for such comments as "good article!" or "I liked it!" Suggest something that can be realistically improved, compare their article to yours and see if your group has learned any tricks that can help them. Also refrain from any abusive or inappropriate language. Remember, you are the face of our University for the semester--make us proud.
At the end of the semester, you will turn into me the following items in a print-out version:
Finishing the above three assignments on time is worth 2% of the Wikipedia assignment grade.
Completing the above two assignments on time and satisfactorily is worth 2% of your Wikipedia assignment grade.
Finishing the above assignment on time and satisfactorily is worth 2% of the Wikipedia assignment grade.
Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing will give you all the information you need to edit pages and start your own. Read it! Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Tutorial are very useful, too.
I suggest doing some practice edits on various pages, just to get a feel for how things work. You can start by adding material to your user page, but try to edit real articles, too.
If you are drawing a blank as to what you should edit for practice, there are many 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:
Whenever you edit, make sure that you are signed in (if in the top right corner of the screen you see "log in" button, you are not signed in!). If you are not signed in, I will not be able to verify that you were the person who made the edit and give you points for it.
Whenever editing a talk page, add four tildes ~~~~ to the end of all comments you make on talk pages. This will let people know who is talking. You can also just press the signature button ( you may want to watch this tutorial on using talk pages).
You can choose to create an entirely new article, if the topic you'd like to write about is missing. You can also expand an existing Wikipedia article, if there is ample room for expansion (rule of thumb: if the article has only a few sentences, it is a good choice for expansion, if it has a few long sections, probably not). Most articles assessed as a " stub" qualify for this assignment.
We are not doing any original research. You will not be collecting data, analyzing it, or writing about your experiences. We will not be writing an essay with personal opinions or judgments. Instead, we will be writing an encyclopedic article. See Wikipedia in brief for a short list of what an encyclopedic article we will be writing here is.
The simplest way to understand the style you are supposed to follow is to examine good articles. You can find some of Wikipedia's best articles here - Wikipedia:Featured_articles
The technical details are explained in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, but I find just looking at already-written articles much more helpful than studying the collection of the rules.
If you want to learn how to write nicely, check this guide:
Useful links:
Wikipedia is a project with millions of editors, who collaborate on all articles. We don't own the articles we work on. Don't be surprised if you receive comments from editors who are not part of the course, or if they do edit your article. All editors are here to help; don't hesitate to get extra help - Wikipedia has ton of places you can do so.
It is likely that over the course of the project, you will receive messages from editors outside our course, and that they will make edits to your article. Be polite in replying, and don't hesitate to ask them to explain something.
A. Don't work on a draft in Microsoft Word. Work on a draft in the article on Wikipedia. This way your colleagues (and instructor) will be aware of what you are doing the instant you do so, and can comment on it sooner.
B. Don't exchange comments by email. Exchange comments by using article's talk pages, for the same reasons as above (unless you are certain that your discussion have to stay private). If you like to receive email notifications, you can monitor the article's talk pages (and your own userpage talk page) by subscribing to that page RSS feed (see Wikipedia:Syndication).
Remember: gaining experience with wiki software may be more important to your future career than detailed knowledge of gender and politics in pre-modern times. Three years ago, Technorati's chief technologist states that in five years "knowledge of wikis will be a required job skill".
Plagiarism is not only against university and course policies, it is also against Wikipedia policies (see WP:PLAGIARISM). And attributing somebody doesn't mean cut and paste jobs are allowed ( WP:COPYVIO). Violations of plagiarism/copyvio policies will result in severe sanctions (per the university's policy). Please note that the course instructor is not the only person checking constantly for plagiarism and copyright violations; Wikipedia has a specialized group of volunteers specializing in checking new contributions for those very problems (you don't want your work to appear here or here!). In particular, note that extensive quoting is not allowed, and changing just a few words is still a copyvio (it doesn't matter if you attribute the source). Bottom line, you are expected to read, digest information, and summarize it in your own words (but with a source). For more info see: this plagiarism handout, Wikipedia:Copy-paste, Wikipedia:Quotations, Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing, a guide from Purdue University.
You can always ask the course instructor for help. You should not hesitate to ask your fellow students from other groups for help, for example if you see they have mastered some editing trick you have yet to learn. We are here to collaborate, not compete. If you can lobby and get help/assistance/advice from other editors to improve your work (for example by using Wikipedia:New contributors' help page, Wikipedia:Requests for feedback, Wikipedia:Peer review, Wikipedia:Help desk or Wikipedia:Reference desk), I am perfectly fine with it. Be bold and show initiative. It usually helps.
Based on other instructors' past experiences, here are common mistakes that tend to lower grades:
To avoid getting your grade weighted down, read the tips above, and in particular, follow those simple steps:
It is therefore NOT recommended that some group members specialize in tasks such as library research or off-wiki writing, which the instructor cannot verify.
Here is a checklist for article quality.
To get full points for your group's article you must do your share of the work.
How to fail the assignment:
<this looks scary only because it is not filled in, it is very easy to use - see example> Course instructor: User:Jdenbow (Jennifer Denbow)
You DON'T have to give your real name below, but if you don't, do email the instructor with your name and account so I know whose account is whose. I recommend using your first name and initial.
Please add your username and name below by adding your username and first name to [[::User:|]] ([[::User talk:|talk]] · contribs) (name) so that it looks in the edit mode like this {{user|Username}} (Name). Once you do so, it will look much nicer, like this: Jdenbow ( talk · contribs)
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
List here the article your group is editing, Once you do so, it will look much nicer, like Education ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Group 1: Medicine in the medieval Islamic world ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improved to )
Group 2: Women in the Sasanian Society ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improved to )
Group 3: Aisha ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improve to) ) **Our section begins After Muhammad**
Group 4: The Status of Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improved to )
This page has information on the Wikipedia assignment for Professor Denbow's Human Traditions Course for the Fall of 2011 at the University of New England.
The goal of this assignment is for several groups of students to choose an underdeveloped or missing article on Wikipedia that is related to the course theme of Gender and Politics in the pre-modern world.
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has many millions (!) of editors ( Wikipedians), 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 instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing or 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, it is recommended that you create an account ( video tutorial). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to do any wiki-related coursework (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise). After you create an account, if you know your group already, add your name to the relevant section of this page.
Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to our university. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university — and of yourselves.
You should expect that the instructor, 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 often. Whenever you have a new message and are logged in 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 ( you may want to watch this tutorial on using talk pages).
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 try to find answers to questions you have on Help:Contents. If you cannot find an answer, ask in class, at office hours, or direct questions to: my talk page.
Now that you are familiar with the Wikipedia environment, it is time to jump into your assignment.
Project overview:
Your assignment is to choose an underdeveloped or nonexistent article on a subject related to this course to research and write about on Wikipedia. You will perform a literature search on that topic, and work with an assigned group to create a new article or expand an existing one, following any and all Wikipedia standards first and foremost. During the active project phase, you will monitor and respond to feedback on your article, and assist other groups by reading and commenting on their work.
Project details:
This assignment is worth 30% of your grade for the course.
During class you will be assigned to a group and given a group number. This is your Wikipedia assignment group, and it is composed of the people you work with for the duration of the semester. You will be given time during lecture to meet with your group and discuss options and schedules. You and your group will choose an article and create or expand it. Once you have chosen your article, you will write up a one page proposal, outlining important information about it, what points you will cover in your article, and a short list of resources. You will then meet with me as a group to discuss your proposal. The deadlines for this assignment are listed below, as well as on the course syllabus.
Once you have gotten my approval, work together to create an interesting, in depth article about your chosen subject. Make sure you familiarize yourself with encyclopedia-type writing before you begin. We will discuss the appropriate type of writing in class, but note that writing for Wikipedia is very different from writing an essay, although not that far from writing a descriptive scientific paper. Please read the following guidelines to get a handle on how you should write your article BEFORE you start writing:
Wikipedia maintains a high standard of writing, and has taken great pains to improve these standards. You need to follow their directions to the letter, since deviating from these standards will invite article deletion.
Regarding the length of the article, quality of sources used, and such, see the articles other students have written for similar projects: here, here or here.<you may want to keep those as examples or replace with your own past courses or others you prefer>
Feel free to include photos, but remember that not all pictures on the web are free for the taking. Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia's Copyright Policy to ensure you are not doing anything wrong (copyright violation, in the real world, means what plagiarism means in academia). Remember that any violation will be caught and dealt with by the plethora of editors on the site (and you do not want your group article to suddenly sprout a copyvio template like [http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Food_power&oldid=327364463 this 2009 group did...).<again, this is an example you may want to change if you have something better you are more familiar with>
Your article must include at least one academic book or journal source per group member. However, keep in mind that this is a minimum requirement. You should also include a list of external links giving the reader more information on your subject, and link to your page from other Wikipedia pages, so your page is not an orphan. To answer that question in your head: yes, you can go on someone else's article and link to your own. That's the beauty of Wiki!
You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools (see tips section below) and seek creative comments on your article. In other words, if you can get other Wikipedia editors to help you, I am totally fine with that.
Once you begin writing your article, you are required to respond to any comments on your paper and act accordingly (make proper changes, defend your choices, etc). These comments will give you substantial feedback on your work, and allow you to make your final product better. (Besides, I'm going to spend the semester reading your work and commenting on it--if you listen to my feedback, you'll end up with a much better grade.)
Finally, you will read and evaluate/comment on your classmates' articles. Please make your comments constructive and useful. You will not get credit for such comments as "good article!" or "I liked it!" Suggest something that can be realistically improved, compare their article to yours and see if your group has learned any tricks that can help them. Also refrain from any abusive or inappropriate language. Remember, you are the face of our University for the semester--make us proud.
At the end of the semester, you will turn into me the following items in a print-out version:
Finishing the above three assignments on time is worth 2% of the Wikipedia assignment grade.
Completing the above two assignments on time and satisfactorily is worth 2% of your Wikipedia assignment grade.
Finishing the above assignment on time and satisfactorily is worth 2% of the Wikipedia assignment grade.
Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing will give you all the information you need to edit pages and start your own. Read it! Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Tutorial are very useful, too.
I suggest doing some practice edits on various pages, just to get a feel for how things work. You can start by adding material to your user page, but try to edit real articles, too.
If you are drawing a blank as to what you should edit for practice, there are many 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:
Whenever you edit, make sure that you are signed in (if in the top right corner of the screen you see "log in" button, you are not signed in!). If you are not signed in, I will not be able to verify that you were the person who made the edit and give you points for it.
Whenever editing a talk page, add four tildes ~~~~ to the end of all comments you make on talk pages. This will let people know who is talking. You can also just press the signature button ( you may want to watch this tutorial on using talk pages).
You can choose to create an entirely new article, if the topic you'd like to write about is missing. You can also expand an existing Wikipedia article, if there is ample room for expansion (rule of thumb: if the article has only a few sentences, it is a good choice for expansion, if it has a few long sections, probably not). Most articles assessed as a " stub" qualify for this assignment.
We are not doing any original research. You will not be collecting data, analyzing it, or writing about your experiences. We will not be writing an essay with personal opinions or judgments. Instead, we will be writing an encyclopedic article. See Wikipedia in brief for a short list of what an encyclopedic article we will be writing here is.
The simplest way to understand the style you are supposed to follow is to examine good articles. You can find some of Wikipedia's best articles here - Wikipedia:Featured_articles
The technical details are explained in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, but I find just looking at already-written articles much more helpful than studying the collection of the rules.
If you want to learn how to write nicely, check this guide:
Useful links:
Wikipedia is a project with millions of editors, who collaborate on all articles. We don't own the articles we work on. Don't be surprised if you receive comments from editors who are not part of the course, or if they do edit your article. All editors are here to help; don't hesitate to get extra help - Wikipedia has ton of places you can do so.
It is likely that over the course of the project, you will receive messages from editors outside our course, and that they will make edits to your article. Be polite in replying, and don't hesitate to ask them to explain something.
A. Don't work on a draft in Microsoft Word. Work on a draft in the article on Wikipedia. This way your colleagues (and instructor) will be aware of what you are doing the instant you do so, and can comment on it sooner.
B. Don't exchange comments by email. Exchange comments by using article's talk pages, for the same reasons as above (unless you are certain that your discussion have to stay private). If you like to receive email notifications, you can monitor the article's talk pages (and your own userpage talk page) by subscribing to that page RSS feed (see Wikipedia:Syndication).
Remember: gaining experience with wiki software may be more important to your future career than detailed knowledge of gender and politics in pre-modern times. Three years ago, Technorati's chief technologist states that in five years "knowledge of wikis will be a required job skill".
Plagiarism is not only against university and course policies, it is also against Wikipedia policies (see WP:PLAGIARISM). And attributing somebody doesn't mean cut and paste jobs are allowed ( WP:COPYVIO). Violations of plagiarism/copyvio policies will result in severe sanctions (per the university's policy). Please note that the course instructor is not the only person checking constantly for plagiarism and copyright violations; Wikipedia has a specialized group of volunteers specializing in checking new contributions for those very problems (you don't want your work to appear here or here!). In particular, note that extensive quoting is not allowed, and changing just a few words is still a copyvio (it doesn't matter if you attribute the source). Bottom line, you are expected to read, digest information, and summarize it in your own words (but with a source). For more info see: this plagiarism handout, Wikipedia:Copy-paste, Wikipedia:Quotations, Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing, a guide from Purdue University.
You can always ask the course instructor for help. You should not hesitate to ask your fellow students from other groups for help, for example if you see they have mastered some editing trick you have yet to learn. We are here to collaborate, not compete. If you can lobby and get help/assistance/advice from other editors to improve your work (for example by using Wikipedia:New contributors' help page, Wikipedia:Requests for feedback, Wikipedia:Peer review, Wikipedia:Help desk or Wikipedia:Reference desk), I am perfectly fine with it. Be bold and show initiative. It usually helps.
Based on other instructors' past experiences, here are common mistakes that tend to lower grades:
To avoid getting your grade weighted down, read the tips above, and in particular, follow those simple steps:
It is therefore NOT recommended that some group members specialize in tasks such as library research or off-wiki writing, which the instructor cannot verify.
Here is a checklist for article quality.
To get full points for your group's article you must do your share of the work.
How to fail the assignment:
<this looks scary only because it is not filled in, it is very easy to use - see example> Course instructor: User:Jdenbow (Jennifer Denbow)
You DON'T have to give your real name below, but if you don't, do email the instructor with your name and account so I know whose account is whose. I recommend using your first name and initial.
Please add your username and name below by adding your username and first name to [[::User:|]] ([[::User talk:|talk]] · contribs) (name) so that it looks in the edit mode like this {{user|Username}} (Name). Once you do so, it will look much nicer, like this: Jdenbow ( talk · contribs)
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
List here the article your group is editing, Once you do so, it will look much nicer, like Education ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)
Group 1: Medicine in the medieval Islamic world ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improved to )
Group 2: Women in the Sasanian Society ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improved to )
Group 3: Aisha ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improve to) ) **Our section begins After Muhammad**
Group 4: The Status of Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) (improved to )