User:Jdfoote/Editathon

Welcome to the 2016 Big Shoulders Edit-a-thon at Northwestern University! We will be providing lots of hands-on support and question answering during the Edit-a-thon, but we wanted to put together a few resources that may be helpful.

Starting out on Wikipedia
There are lots of great resources for getting started on Wikipedia. The Contributing to Wikipedia page provides a good overview of what Wikipedia is, how editing works, and also has links to a number of tutorials and other resources. Here are a few that could help you to get started quickly:


 * "Editing Wikipedia guide" - a 20 page PDF booklet introduction to editing
 * Newcomer tutorial - a very brief tutorial for newcomers
 * Tutorial - a longer tutorial about editing, talk pages, etc.
 * The Wikipedia Adventure - an interactive, mission-based tutorial
 * Wikiedu Training - training modules put together by Wikiedu

Finding an article to edit

 * Special Collections Articles — Jason Nargis, a Special Collections Librarian here, has compiled a list of Special Collections and Archives resources. This file shows whether or not a Wikipedia article exists on each subject, as well as whether the article, if it exists, needs to have Special Collections sources added to it. This is a great place to start, and is an opportunity to provide sources to Wikipedia that are much easier for us to access than other editors. This guide to finding archival material is a great starting point for locating primary source citations.


 * Wikiproject Chicago Open Tasks — A group of Wikipedians interested in Chicago works together to create and improve Chicagoland articles. This is what they see as the most important tasks.


 * Wikiproject Chicago Stub Articles — This page shows all of the Chicagoland articles which are marked as stubs, meaning that they have been identified as needing content added. You can also see this a list of all Chicago articles. The infobox on this page shows all of the articles, ranked by importance and quality.


 * Female Scientists — Wikipedia suffers from gender inequality, with females underrepresented both as editors of Wikipedia and as subjects of Wikipedia articles. Emily Temple-Wood, a very active Wikipedian in Chicagoland, has compiled a fantastic list of female scientists. If a scientist's name is a red link, then that means that a page needs to be created for that person.


 * Requested Articles — This is a list of articles that others have asked to be created. It is sorted into categories and sub-categories. When you're looking at the list, remember that it's possible that somebody else has "gotten" to them first and forgot to remove it. Remember that a red link indicates that there is no page with that name.


 * List of WikiProjects — you can use to locate lists of articles and sort them by class (i.e., find stubs).

Note: Members of Aaron Shaw's Online Communities and Crowds class are very strongly encouraged to choose a Special Collections, Chicagoland, or Female Scientists article to work on.

Getting Help
A few of us who have some experience on Wikipedia will be available to give hands-on support during the Edit-a-thon.

Teahouse is also a great resource for asking questions or getting help if you are stuck.

This wikimarkup cheatsheet may be helpful for formatting edits, adding links, etc.