User:Fransplace

I am an interdisciplinary academic and teach at the University of Sydney. I have been teaching students to improve Wikipedia articles since 2012. Students from many different disciplines enrol in units I coordinate and over the last 4 years, the courses have concentrated on teaching students about the nature of encyclopedic writing as a genre. Students complete the Wikipedia Training Modules on the outreach dashboard before editing any articles. They are taught to carry out research on stubs of their choosing and when they know that enough peer-reviewed, non biased source materials are available, they begin drafting articles in their sandboxes. Over the weeks that follow, they help to resolve issues with articles that have been listed 'for improvement', verifying facts using reliable sources, adding citations where they are missing, and generally correcting other issues that have been tagged. As well as improving and expanding articles on these 'improvement' lists, students improve and expand a stub or multiple stubs, adding media, infoboxes, categories etc, hoping to raise the quality and status of the article or articles.