User:Tomcloyd/QUICK-START RESOURCES for Wikipedia Global University Program faculty & students new to the wiki

About this page

(Current status of this page: as of 2011-11-02:0112 Mountain time, all but the sections on "community" and "faculty" are essentially complete and ready for comment. I hope to complete this work by late tomorrow at the latest.)

You're new to Wikipedia, and you want to acquire a base of knowledge fast, so you can get on with editing content, yes? Good! It can be done, using an incremental, structured approach, coupled with some already existing study and practice aids. How fast? In thirty minutes or less. You won't be a master at that point, but you'll be on your way. How far you go is limited only by you. This page is for students (and interested faculty) who are mostly or completely new to Wikipedia. My purpose on this page is to launch you quickly into this remarkable, fascinating, and challenging world. If learning, knowledge sharing, and the social construction of intellectual resources interests you, there is no better place to be on the Internet.

After a basic orientation below, I take up three fundamental topics on this page:

1. Writing in/for Wikipedia - Encyclopedia writing is different from other kinds of writing, and Wikipedia is a bit different from other encyclopedias you may know. You need familiarity with form, style, and content standards.
2. Editing Wikipedia articles - "Editing" is what we call [a] getting writing to appear on a Wikipedia page, [b] fixing the inevitable mistakes you'll find (in your writing and in that of others), and [c] making additions and deletions to articles to improve them. There are some modest technical skills you will need to write successfully in Wikipedia. There are also some optional tools which can make your work easier.
3. Participating in the Wikipedia community - Wikipedia has its own culture, which has evolved a set of rules and traditions over time, the principal goal of which is simply to help us all get the work done. Working together, we (usually!) produce better work than we would working individually.

Basic orientation to the world of Wikipedia

These three steps will get you launched as a Wikipedia "editor", our term for anyone who works on the content of Wikipedia pages - be it correcting spelling and punctuation or creating whole new articles.

1. Understand that this is a wiki. (DO click that link and read what you find there, if you're new to wikis in general.) It's a fault-tolerant world, with some definite rules. As you're learning the rules, remember that it's really hard to break things here. We can virtually always go back to an earlier version of a document if we need to. All changes to articles are meticulously tracked. We know who made the change, when it was made, and what it was. We can return to an earlier version, if necessary. Other editors will gladly help you, often without your asking. Do your best, don't worry too much about making mistakes (if you don't fix things someone else often will!), and have as much fun as you can while you're learning to create significant content here.

2. Download and read your official Welcome to Wikipedia. In 18 well-organized pages it will teach you how to:

• Understand how Wikipedia works
• Create a Wikipedia user account
• Understand Wikipedia's user interface
• Understand the different ways you can contribute to Wikipedia
• Communicate with other users through your My talk page
• Understand how an article evolves in Wikipedia
• Know the attributes of a quality article
• Create a new article

3. Get started NOW! It's easy. As soon as you have created a user account, go to your User Account page (search for "User:{...}" to find it, if you need to - replacing {...} with your Wiikpedia account name). Click the edit link on your account page, and add this text to the page, which will be blank, initially:

[[User:{your Wikipedia name}/My sandbox|My sandbox]].

Save the page. You should now see My sandbox on your page. This is a link, but to a page that doesn't yet exist. To actually create the page, click the link. Then, you can now use this page as a test area, as you read through the materials here.

Here is the link of this sort I have created on this page, just to show you - My sandbox - it's a live link (the page does exist), and you can go to the page if you wish (there's a surprise there for you).

Now, let's learn about writing...

Writing in/for Wikipedia

The best articles on Wikipedia are classified as "good" or "featured". If you compare several of these articles, you will see come common patterns. In the beginning, you do well to copy these patterns, to whatever degree fits your subject. I suggest you take the time to read through the following resources. There is much more available, but these will get you off to a good start, and set you up for more sophisticated learning, later:

• Attitude: You're advised at Wikipedia to BE BOLD! - This is a very useful page for beginning editors (who be overcome with timidity, at times) to read. The Wikipedia editing community takes it seriously, and respects intelligent, good faith boldness.

• Wikipedia:Article_development - A useful review of the stages of Wikipedia article development.
• Article quality is a constant concern in the Wikipedia editor community. For a quick orientation, read:
  • Good article criteria - Wikipedia articles can be qualitatively ranked. The top ranking is Featured article, and Good article is right below that, in the ranking. It's a good goal to aim for when you become seriously involved with an article.
  • Defending article quality - Discusses maintaining article quality, once it's achieved.
  • Quality control - Reviews the several ongoing systems which act to monitor and improve article quality.
• Plagiarism - "Wikipedians are more vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism than are most writers...", so learn how best to manage this problem.
• Content licensing - Essential knowledge about copyright, copyleft, and other commonly used licensing frameworks. While a bit long, and certainly rather legalistic, this is essential information - at least to the extend that you should know where to find it in case you need it.
• Learn about the reliability of Wikipedia, so you can talk about it knowledgeably with those less informed.

So, we next learn about the technology of getting writing onto the page.

Editing Wikipedia articles

Basics

Most of the time, editing is pretty straightforward. Just dive in and you'll see that it's easier than you may think -

1. Do this brief Wikipedia editing tutorial. It's a great overview, a good basic training, or a nice brushup for the experienced, depending upon your level of knowledge.

2. Download and keep handy this one-page Wiki markup quick reference to the most frequently used wiki markup commands.

Now, know that a general rule, when you see something interesting on a page, you should just click the "edit" link to see how it's done, then hit your browser "back" button and make a note of what you just learned. Imitating what's working elsewhere is a quick route to all sorts of nice effects!

Great FREE resources - A Wikipedia how-to book - AND a comprehensive reference book

Wikipedia: The Missing Manual - Written by John Broughton in 2008, and published by O'Reilly, this book was reissued under a license compatible with Wikipedia in 2009.

• Read it at:Google books
• Purchase it for $30 at O'Reilly, or for $20 atAmazon OR....
• Read or DOWNLOAD IT FREE at its WikiProject Wikipedia-Books page. What's really interesting about this version of the book is that it's been updated, since the publication of the 2008 edition, by both the author (an experienced Wikipedia editor with thousands of edits to his credit) and the general community of Wikipedia editors. It thus is the most current version available, and will continue to be updated in the future.

How Wikipedia works: and how you can be a part of it - Written by Phoebe Ayers; Charles Matthews; Ben Yates, and published in 2008 by No Starch Press. This brief article on the book suggests that it may best serve as a detailed reference work, rather than a how-to manual.

• Read it a Google books, or
• Download it free at the Internet archive.

Useful editing tools

After you have some basic editing experience, you may wish to try out some tools which can make editing go faster and more smoothly. You can do this by adding "gadgets" to your account. A "gadget" is "...a JavaScript and/or aCSS snippet that can be enabled simply by checking an option in your Wikipedia preferences (<= click here to see and edit your account preferences). When added, your editing interface changes in some way that is considered useful (at least by some of us).

Here are two popular gadgets I use which you may wish to consider adding to your account:

WikED	ProveIt
"...a full-featured integrated text editor." It works in the Firefox, Safari, and Google Chrome browsers. It will greatly elaborates your editing interface, and offers a better differentiated text editing area. Compare the interface in the following image with the default interface you are most likely using right now. (CLICK IMAGE to enlarge)	"a powerful GUI tool for viewing, editing, adding, and inserting references"
Screenshoot of WikEd interface.	Screenshot of ProveIt software.

Community

• Dispute resolution - It is not unusual for people with divergent points of view to edit the same article. Disputes break out - this is a common part of the Wikipedia editing experience. This article will help you better manage yourself and your point of view when this happens.
• [more to be added shortly]

Special - for faculty

The central link for faculty is the "For Educators" page of the Wikimedia Outreach Wiki. [more to be added shortly]

This article - Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia aims to quickly tell academics and researchers how to contribute to Wikipedia.

Special - for Campus Ambassadors

For you, especially, here are some essential resources.

And finally... (for students, faculty, Campus Ambassadors, and the rest of us)

Bookmark this link - the Wikipedia help index - the gateway to a world of help resources for Wikipedians, here you will find resources to aid you in all aspects of your engagement with Wikipedia and the community of Wikipedians. Some will already be familiar to you, from the links above, and some will make more sense after you've invested some time working with Wikipedia articles.

Immediately below are some additional articles for your reading pleasure.