Wikipedia:School and university projects/Dr. Aaij's Freshman comp

Introduction

Specific introduction for students is in the next section.

This is a project for English 1010, CRN 3121, at Auburn Montgomery. Please direct any comments to my user talk page or to the project talk page.

There will be around 25 students. Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, and each will choose a stub, or a requested article, and asked to expand it to the level eligible for a Did You Know? nomination.

Supervisors: I, User:Dr Aaij, will take care of introducing students to Wikipedia and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines.

Start date: The project will start in January 2010.

Introduction for students

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has millions of editors, or Wikipedians, more than eleven million of whom have signed up, and many of whom are students like you. The vast majority of them are volunteers who find editing this site to be an enjoyable experience, and many of them, fortunately, are mentally quite sane.

Tutorial

Wikipedia:Tutorial is the best place to start your adventure with this wiki. Please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the Help:Contents. If you cannot find what you are looking for, ask the friendly people at Wikipedia:Help desk - or contact me.

Create an account

The first thing you should do is create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to work on any of the exercises in the next section, or I will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise. After you create an account, please find your name in the relevant row of the Completed assignments page and add a link to your user page in the 'Student Wikipedia userpage' column in the row with your name.

Etiquette

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to Auburn Montgomery. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our English 1010, Freshman composition course, is the first one at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university--and of yourselves.

Talk pages

You should expect that the course leader, 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 as often as you check your email (I strongly recommend you read 'as often' as 'at least daily'). Whenever you have a new message and are logged to Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message, 'You have new messages'. 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.

Edit summaries

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--and keep in mind that anyone can work on "your article": there is no ownership of articles on Wikipedia (see WP:OWN).

Help!

Please direct any questions to the discussion page or Dr. Aaij's talk page. You are welcome to send us emails, or drop by to see us during our office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

After you familiarize yourself with how Wikipedia works, it is time to put those lessons into practice. This is important; not only will it give you experience in wiki technology before you begin your Working Paper, but the successful completion of the below exercises in itself will impact your quiz/participation score. After you finish doing an exercise, please leave the information at the Completed assignments page.

Important note: make sure you are logged into your account before making any edits. If you are not logged in, we cannot verify who has done the edits, thus we will be unable to recognize your work and grade you on it. In other words, if you do any edits while not logged in, we will not count those edits toward your grade in this course.

Exercise 1

Start with this tutorial, which will take you through the basics of editing Wikipedia.

Create a userpage for yourself. Look at the top right corner, you will see your nickname in red. Click on it; write some text (about yourself, about the course, etc.), save the page. Repeat until you are satisfied. Upload an image and add it to your page. Feel free to butter up your teacher by pasting this userbox on your user page:

ALAThis user is an Alabama Crimson Tide fan.

Exercise 2

Try expanding and improving an existing article. The following pages may be useful to you:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types - this page contains an extensive list of stub articles, sorted by categories;
• Wikipedia:Requests for expansion - this page contains a list of articles that other users would like to see expanded, sorted by categories;
• Special:Shortpages - this page lists all Wikipedia articles deemed too short and thus in need of expansion.
• If this is too much trouble, just click on "Random article" (look on the left).

Make sure you have read the guides mentioned in the introduction and familiarized yourself with how wiki works before attempting to do this exercise. You may want to refresh your memory by rereading How to edit a page.

To complete this exercise, it is enough to expand any one article with a single meaningful sentence and the addition of a reference to a reliable source. Of course, if you feel you can do more, feel free to do so.

Sources and references

It is vitally important to properly cite your sources; part of exercise 2 is concerned with references. Familiarize yourself with the Wikipedia:Citing sources guideline, and try to find a reference for every important fact in the article. Academic sources (like academic journals and books published by academic presses) are preferred over non-academic sources (like newspapers). You do not want to use personal websites; you do not want to use opinionated sources--such as clearly partisan websites, or editorials and opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines. See also Wikipedia:Reliable sources for information on what sources are preferred.

You should be especially careful when editing the biography of a living person: all information should be cited, and anything that could be considered derogatory or libelous is probably best left out. Vandalizing Matt Damon carries severe penalties!

Some examples of well-referenced articles: Katyn massacre, Welding, Section summary of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battle of Austerlitz, Military history of France, Bacon explosion, Astrophysics Data System, R. K. Narayan, Søren Kierkegaard, Eric A. Havelock.

Please note that any attempt to cheat on Wikipedia will be regarded as seriously as academic plagiarism.

Exercise 3

• To start or improve an article and bring it up to Did You Know? standards.

Start

After you are familiar with how to expand an existing article, you are ready to move on and either create a new article or expand a stub. You may not use the article from the previous exercise. For this exercise, if you need suggestions, look at:

• Wikipedia:Requested articles
• Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs
• Wikipedia:Most wanted articles

You may also look at my suggestions at Wikipedia:School and university projects/Dr. Aaij's Freshman comp/Suggested articles.

Before you create the new article, make sure it has the appropriate name - it you haven't so far, you may want to read Wikipedia:Naming conventions. And if you are unsure how to create a new article, you will want to read Wikipedia:Starting a new page.

Start your article in a sandbox, so you will have enough time to write and expand the article: DYK nominations (see below) have to be for articles created or expanded in the last five days.

Criteria

The article you created or expanded should be eligible for Wikipedia's Did You Know? section, where you will find a complete list of the rules. In short, the requirements are:

1. A new article should be at least 1,500 characters long, not including bibliographies, infoboxes, etc.
2. An expanded article should be at least 5 times as long as it was before.

Some other requirements:

1. It is important that an article is not orphaned - i.e. it should be linked from several other articles. To learn more about this, take one of the existing orphaned articles and link them into appropriate places. See Wikipedia:Orphaned articles for more details on this.
2. It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
3. It is imperative that the article have references. Please see Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:References.
4. If the article is long enough, it should have an introductory paragraph. See Wikipedia:Lead for details on what such a paragraph should look like.