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User:Ryan McGrady/spring2014/com257

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This is the course assignment page for sections 001 and 002 of COM 257, Media History and Theory, during the Spring 2014 semester at North Carolina State University. Here you can find information about the assignment, a timeline of lab dates and when milestones are due, workshop pages, and all sorts of useful information to help you along the way. This course also uses the Wikipedia Education Program extension for organizational purposes only, accessible via Education Program:North Carolina State University/COM 257 Media History and Theory (Spring 2014).

Course instructor: Ryan McGrady
Optional extra credit project: Adding photos to the Commons

Timeline

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Friday 2014-01-17 (Week 2)

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Workshop day. Meet in Laundry 216.

Monday 2014-01-27 (Week 4)

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Meet in Winston 209
Due by the start of class
  • Wikipedia article ideas
  • note: this was previously due Friday 2014-01-24 but was pushed back when class was cancelled for 1/22.

Friday 2014-01-31 (Week 4)

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Workshop day. Meet in Laundry 216.
Due by the start of class

Friday 2014-02-14 (Week 6)

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Workshop day. Meet in Laundry 216. CLASSES CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER
Due by the start of class:

Monday 2014-02-17 (Week 7)

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Meet in Winston 209
Due by the start of class

Friday 2014-03-07 (Week 9)

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Workshop day. Meet in Laundry 216.
Due by the start of class

Friday 2014-03-28 (Week 12)

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Workshop day. Meet in Laundry 216.
Due by the start of class

Monday 2014-04-21 (Week 16)

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Workshop day. Meet in Laundry 216.

Wednesday 2014-04-23 (Week 16)

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Meet in Winston 209.
Due by the start of class

Grading

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The Wikipedia article assignment counts for 15% of your final COM 257 grade.

The assignment grade will be determined as follows:

  • Each of project milestones (as reflected in the timeline and course schedule) count as 1 point for a total of 5 points.
    • The first milestone, "article ideas," is an individual grade whereas the others are group grades.
  • 5 points are based on my assessment of the final article, using the good article criteria as a loose rubric. This score will be awarded to all members of the group.
    • Being part of a group means working with the group. If you either did not contribute anything to the article or failed to communicate and coordinate with your group for most or all of the semester, you will not receive any points for the group part of the grade.
  • 5 points are based on your individual contributions to the final article.
    • Everybody's had the experience of being in a group with someone who didn't pull his or her weight (or maybe you've played the latter role). This becomes quite obvious with Wikipedia-based assignments as the software makes it easy to see who is doing what work as well as when the work was done.
    • Individual contributions are not quantified by a number of edits or number of words but on the substance of your work. If you find yourself worried about how much you've added to the group at the end of the semester, making 20 inconsequential edits probably won't help.
    • "Contributions" here refers to additions to the article itself as well as work behind the scenes researching, coordinating, taking pictures, etc.
    • Contributions are visible through the article's history page, the article talk page, classroom discussions, and any other venue used for collaboration.
    • Don't turn it into a competition. You are not expected to have exactly equal numbers of edits, words added, changes made, etc. I've been using Wikipedia and writing papers long enough to understand that sometimes tasks like finding and citing a single good reference or concisely summarizing complex information can take as much time as making dozens of grammatical changes or writing a big block of text.
    • There will also be an opportunity at the end of the semester for internal group assessment.
  • Total: 15 points

Policies, etc.

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A note on academic integrity

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Some people think Wikipedia is kind of a free-for-all when it comes to copying/pasting to/from it. Although Wikipedia is not copyrighted, almost everything else is. That creates a legal problem, so text that you copy/paste from another website, article, book, etc. into your article will almost certainly be removed by someone, the article tagged for deletion in particularly egregious cases, and a warning or ban for you. Additionally copyright is totally separate from plagiarism and academic integrity. Even though a source like Wikipedia or something published by the US Government is technically free to use, failing to cite your sources creates at least one or two problems: first, on Wikipedia no original research is allowed and practically everything must be verifiable in secondary sources; second, if it seems you are claiming the work as your own, that amounts to plagiarism which -- as I'm sure you've heard several times by now -- is a big issue at the University level potentially leading to academic probation, a failing grade, or expulsion.

Note that close paraphrasing can also constitute plagiarism and/or a copyright violation. Please refer to the Wikipedia essay on close paraphrasing for more specific information about this.

Resources

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General help

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Wikipedia:Tutorial is a good place to start. Also Help:Contents. If you can't find what you need, you can contact those at Wikipedia:Help desk or contact me.

Wikipedia:Your first article is a good explanation of just that.

Wikitext / WikiMarkup

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For most basic tasks, see The Wikipedia Cheatsheet.

Also see the Editing Wikitext Wikibook.

Finding an article

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Images

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Images are required for the final draft. You are responsible for beginning work looking for them early. If you wait until the week before the final draft is due to email an organization requesting permission to use an image and they take more than a week to get back to you, that's not a good excuse. Search now.

How to add images to an article

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Wikipedia:Picture tutorial is dedicated to the question of how to add pictures to your page.

Important policies and instructions on image use

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Wikipedia:Image use policy - Important: You cannot link to or display images from other websites. The Wikimedia Commons is a website dedicated to hosting media files for use by Wikipedia. An image must be uploaded there to use. The Commons is a sister site of Wikipedia, so your account will work there as well. You are free to upload your own photos (as in, pictures you took yourself), but there are copyright issues with uploading some random image you found on Google Image search, on another website, etc. The image must be free to use or you must have written permission in order to do so. Also see Wikipedia:Requesting copyright permission. Basically, if the image was published prior to 1923, it is out of copyright. Everything else requires proper licensing.

Finding images

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First, see the finding images tutorial.

A few places to look
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  • Google Advanced Image Search -- under "Then narrow your results by:" change the item "Usage rights" so that it says "free to use, share or modify, even commercially."
  • Wikimedia Commons
  • Some Wikipedia editors maintain a list of sources which offer free copyright-free (public domain) images at Wikipedia:Public domain image resources. The quality of these sites varies significantly, and the list is subject to frequent nonsense being added (e.g. people creating a WordPress, adding 2 photos, declaring them public domain, filling the site with ads, and trying to get people to visit), but most are good.

Uploading your own images

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Uploading your own work is encouraged. For those of you working on local subjects, it may be far easier to simply take your own photo than to search for one and ask for permission.

Wikipedia:Uploading images contains instructions for how to upload images.

Finding sources

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Checking the following should be a given:

Citing sources

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The basics

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Per the verifiability policy, any statement that is or could reasonably be contested should be accompanied by one or more reliable sources to back it up. Likewise, all sources quoted, referenced, or otherwise utilized in the writing of an article must be properly cited. There are a couple ways to do this, but the citation style should be consistent throughout each article.

  • If contributing to an existing page, use whatever style is already in place or start a discussion on the talk page explaining why you'd like to change it.

General information about citing sources on Wikipedia

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ProveIt

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I recommend you use ProveIt, a tool that makes the citation process a bit easier. Go to Special:Preferences, go to the Gadgets tab, and check the appropriate box to enable ProveIt.

While editing with ProveIt enabled, you will see a toolbar in the bottomright part of your browser with two tabs: "References (#)" where # is the number of references currently on the page, and "Add a Reference."

Detailed instructions are available here but basically you just click Add a Referenc and fill in as many fields as appropriate -- including a unique "<ref> name." When you're done filling in information about the source, click in the edit box, placing your cursor where you want the citation to go, and click "Insert into edit form" at the bottom of the ProveIt "Add a Reference" tab.

To reuse a reference, click the "References (#)" tab and click the reference you want to reuse. It will first highlight the citation in the edit box. Click in the edit box to place the cursor where you want the additional use of the citation. At the bottom of the "References (#)" tab click "Insert this reference at cursor."

To edit a reference you've already added, select the "References (#)" tab, click the reference you want to edit, select "edit this reference," and save when done.

ProveIt has some quirks that may prove annoying. A good practice is to save the page any time you make a change, then edit the page again to allow ProveIt to refresh.

The rest of this citations section assumes you're not using ProveIt and/or want more control over your citations

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In-text citations
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Although Wikipedia does not specifically mandate it, footnotes are preferred--and far more common--than parenthetical citations in-text. For most people, this is probably the biggest difference between citing sources on Wikipedia and doing so in an academic research paper. Footnotes are handled through the <ref></ref> tags and in almost all cases should be placed at the end of a sentence after the ending punctuation.

What goes between the <ref> and </ref> tags is either a full or short citation, but use of one or the other should be consistent throughout the article.

  • A full citation is equivalent to what you would see in a Works Cited list: it should be formatted in a standardized citation style like APA or MLA, all citations should follow the same citation style, and it should provide as much information as possible to allow a reader to find the source (a hyperlink is ideal).
  • A short citation is equivalent to what you would see in a parenthetical in-text citation, the exact details of which depend on the citation style you choose for the article (APA, MLA, etc.). It contains basic information that can be cross-referenced with a separate list of sources.
Reference list
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The kind of reference list you use partly depends on the kind of in-text citations you've chosen.

  • If you've used full citations in the text, you simply need a separate section called "References" at the end of the article which will contain all of the full citations.
  • If you've used short citations in the text, you will need two separate sections at the end of the article:
    1. a "Works Cited," "Bibliography," or "References" section which will contain a list of full citations (kind of like a Works Cited section of a research paper). None of the footnotes link to this section.
    2. a "Notes" or "References" section that contains all of the short citations. It is this section the footnotes will link to, which the reader can then cross-reference with the other section above.
Examples of articles using the "full citations with references" method
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Examples of articles using the "short citations with bibliography and references" method
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Relevant wikimarkup to use when citing sources
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The easiest way to figure out how references are managed is to see how they've been done in the past. Edit a page that already uses them (preferably a Featured or Good article) and compare the wikimarkup inside to how the page looks.

Add a reference by using the <ref></ref> tags. Just put your citation in between them and it will appear in the references list at the bottom.

If one doesn't exist, you'll need to include the tag {{reflist}} at the bottom of the page in a separate section called something like "Notes" or "References."

If you want to reuse the same source, give the tag a name. For example, <ref name="McLuhan">McLuhan, Marshall. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.</ref>. Later, if you simply put <ref name="McLuhan"/> it will refer back to the citation above without having to duplicate the citation itself.

Wikipedia norms, etiquette, and style

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WikiProjects

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Articles almost always fall under the domain of one or more WikiProjects. These are groups of editors who have declared a common interest and commitment to improving articles relevant to that interest. Figuring out which make sense for your article is expected, but the extent to which you engage with those groups is up to you. WikiProjects may be a good resource if you're looking for help, sources, ideas, direction, or even people who may be able to help you improve your article. See WP:WikiProject directory for a list of all WikiProjects.