User:MargaretRDonald/sandbox/WikipediaClassSyllabus

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Wikipedia Class Outline

Session one[edit]

People[edit]

Things around & within the article:[edit]

  • Infobox: (what does it look like? Introduction to a template. )
  • Table of contents: shape of an article
  • Left: wikidata, wikicommons, links, other languages
  • Bottom: unique referencing of a person (authority control)
  • Pageviews
  • Top: talkpage

Talkpage[edit]

  • Top: A review of sorts: stub class, start class etc. How is this useful?
  • Top: projects, classification etc
  • Top: Asking us to play nicely (making Wikipedia a safe place)
  • Talk: what happens here?

Other pages[edit]

History:[edit]

  • Who is editing this article?
  • What did they do?
  • Document control

How to start[edit]

  • Register as a contributer. You can contribute without doing so, but I think it is far far better to be in some way identifiable. There are ways of protecting your identity and of preventing your Wikipedia account from being hacked, and if hacked, of restoring your identity. However, most wikipedians don’t bother . (Make yourself a small target by being courteous at all times.)
  • Upload some photos, and put them in an article.
  • Change some irritating English. Arjuna
  • Fix some references.
  • Find some references & add them.
  • Write an article, using your sandbox, or write a very minimal article. See, e.g., Initial article for Chellapilla Venkata Rao (Careful here, all new articles are IMMEDIATELY reviewed and you may find your article proposed for deletion almost immediately.)
  • Find a stub article to work on. Go to Banksia formosa and find the hidden category “All stub articles’’, and click on it. If this doesn't work, go to Wikipedia:WikiProject Banksia#Assessment statistics and click on the section of the table labelled "stub". This will lead to you to a Banksia stub and from there you can find the hidden category "all stub articles". (Alternatively, and perhaps more usefully, go to the "Category:Top-level stub categories" (at the bottom of this page) and work from there, choosing something which interests you.

Homework[edit]

  • Create a universal account
    • Find someone else's user page & copy & modify some code to introduce yourself
  • Find an article you would like to work on, or choose something you wish to write on.
  • upload a photo/image (that is your own work) to the commons

Session two (bring your computer)[edit]

Working from a stub[edit]

Banksia formosa What's wrong with this article? What do you think we might want to change?

  • Are all statements referenced?
  • Inline referencing?
  • Have we a description? Where might we find one? Does the article, as it stands, help us?
  • How will we reference it?

Referencing[edit]

Adding a reference using

Where to put them?

  • inline (can make it difficult to read text, but you can use the "Segregate refs for editing" tool).
  • Named references in a reference list

Reference resources[edit]

  • Google scholar
  • trove
  • google
  • libraries

It is permissible to cite material which is not available online.

Internal links[edit]

  • setting them up
  • Finding them

Articles for improvement[edit]