User:PhDeviate/WGS Assignment

One of your options for a final project will be to craft a well-researched and cited article for WikiProject Women's History. You may choose any historical figure, event, or topic related to the themes of this course, as long as either its existing WIkipedia article is incomplete or it does not exist yet on Wikipedia.

Why edit Wikipedia?
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. The executive director of the WikiMedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, is a woman (Sue Gardner). However, according to the New York Times, only about 15 percent of the people who've ever edited Wikipedia are women. One of the side-effects of this is that Wikipedia articles about women, especially historical women, tend to be underdeveloped compared to topics lots of men care about (for example, military history.)

Wikipedia is an ongoing community that works to produce the articles people read, and it's always engaged in discussion about what the entries should say. Everyone who works on Wikipedia volunteers their time because they want to, often because they think it's fun.

Wikipedia encourages editors to be bold but careful in helping to make content better. If you see something that's wrong, you can fix it yourself.

If you choose this assignment, you'll learn how to research, write, and edit a good Wikipedia entry, and you'll learn more about helping one community of people (WikiProject Women's History) who are actively working on increasing women's participation in Wikipedia. Your research will become part of Wikipedia and will be read by people all over the world.

Wikipedia behind the scenes
When you look up a topic in Wikipedia, like Rosa Parks, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Every Wikipedia article has 3 components you should know:
 * the content about the topic
 * a talk page, linked above the article's title with the word "Talk" or "Discussion". The Rosa Parks talk page lets you see how members of the Wikipedia community have discussed what should be in the entry itself.
 * a revision history, linked at the top with the word "History" This is where you can find out how the article has changed over time and who has worked on it. So, for example, when you read the history of the Rosa Parks entry, you can see that some of the recent edits have involved corrections of wording and undoing vandalism.

The Rosa Parks entry is a Wikipedia Featured Article, usually abbreviated FA; that means it's basically complete. For the purposes of this assignment, you'll work on improving a just-beginning Wikipedia article and making it better, or you'll create an article from scratch.

How to get started
In order to complete this assignment, you'll need to follow a few steps:

Identifying an article you want to work on
Visit the home page for WikiProject Women's History and learn more about the project. To get a sense of the other people who work on it, look at the members page and read the talk page, where the editors discuss what they're working on. (Your ability to follow the goals and policies of WikiProject Women's History will be part of your assessment for this assignment.)

WikiProject Women's History, like other Wikipedia projects, rates existing articles for their quality and importance using a set of assessment standards. Read them to get a sense of what makes an article both high-quality and important.

Here's a count of the existing articles the project is working on and their importance/quality assessments:

Using the grid above, identify an existing article which has a quality rating of "Start" or "Stub." For this project, I suggest that you look at articles of "top," "high," and "mid" importance, since they're most likely to merit a 2000-word article. If you want to write an entirely new article, you may pick a topic from the WP:WMNHIST list of requested articles, or you may propose an article of your choosing.

''Note: Wikipedia pages on living persons are far more likely to prove contentious than pages on historical figures. While you may choose whatever topic you wish-- including non-biographical entries about historical women-- know that this assignment will be much easier if you choose someone who has already died.''

Once you have identified the article you would like to create or work on, you are ready to craft your one-page proposal to me, due on March 31. In it, you will identify the existing article, or describe the article you seek to create. Refer to the "Final Project" handout on Blackboard for the complete description of your one-page project proposal.

Creating a user account
First, read about getting started as a Wikipedia editor.

Now, create a Wikipedia user account following the directions provided by Wikipedia. You do not have to use your real name on the account (and there can be good reasons not to), but you must use this same account for all your editing in order to receive full credit for your work.

Learning to edit
Wikipedia is written in a simple text format; it can be a challenge to learn, but there's plenty of help available. Start with the Tutorial and work your way through the instructions it provides. You may also want to read how to edit a page.

While you're practicing, you can test out your editing on the Sandbox page. You might want to consult the Cheatsheet for help remembering how to format things (italics, bold, links, and such.)

Your user page
Get to know about user pages in general, and create your own user page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:(YOUR USER NAME HERE). Practice editing it. You don't need to include any personal information on your user page, but it's where other Wikipedia users ("editors") will go to find out more about you. For examples of what people put on their user pages, see the list of participants in WikiProject Women's History, most of which have links to user pages.

If you're interested in how someone made their user page look a particular way, remember that you can always click on the "edit" link there to see what they did. (Just don't edit their page by accident! That's bad etiquette.)

You can mark yourself as a participant in WikiProject Women's History by following these directions to add a userbox to your user page and by editing the list of participants to include your user name.

Your talk page
Users have talk pages too. My talk page is at User_talk:PhDeviate. Once you've created an account, leave me a note there. Be sure to sign your note with four tildes ( ~ ), which Wikipedia will expand into a date and time signature for you. (Learn more about signatures if you want to customize yours.) You can look at your talk page by clicking "My talk page" at the top of any Wikipedia page once you're logged in.

Your watchlist
You have a watchlist where you can keep track of changes being made to a page you care about. You can get to it by clicking on "My watchlist" at the top of any page, if you're logged in. To add a page you're reading to your watchlist, click the little star icon next to the word "History" at the top of the page.

For the purposes of this project, you should add at least 2 pages to your watchlist:
 * This assignment page
 * The WikiProject Women's History talk page

Once you've selected an article to work on, you'll also want to add:


 * The article page you're working on
 * The talk page of that article

This will help you see what other people are doing to improve the article and to be notified when they comment on your work.

Any page you edit is also automatically added to your watchlist.

Your contributions page
You have a contributions page, which you can see by clicking on the "My contributions" link at the top of any page. That'll show you a summary of every change you've made to any page, and it's how I'll see what you've done as part of this assignment.

Creating your own sandbox page
Make your own sandbox page as a sub-page of your user page. To do this:
 * go to your user page, and edit the URL in the address bar by adding a forward slash (/) and the name of the page you would like to create. Hit Enter.


 * For example: My user name is PhDeviate. My user page is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PhDeviate. When on this page, if I go to the address bar and add to it, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PhDeviate/Sandbox, the wiki software will begin the process of creating a page for my final project. Navigate to this page, and the system will show you where to click to create and start editing that page.
 * Once you've created your sandbox page, add a link to it from your user page.

You'll follow this same process to make your own copy of the article you decide to edit.

Making your own copy of the article
Once I've approved your article selection, you'll probably want to make your own copy of that article that you can edit, at least until you get the hang of how Wikipedia editing works. This will give you a chance to do your own editing out of public view before making it part of the real article.

To do this, you'll use the same process you followed to make your own sandbox page. Once you've made a new page, copy and paste the entire existing article into yours.

''Note: It is possible not to copy the original article, and to edit the entry the world sees. For the purposes of this assignment, I'm discouraging you from doing this, at least for your first pass through the article. What would be excellent would be to make a copy for your user page, and then make a note on the article talk page (if you have chosen an article that already exists) that you are making a substantial revision to the page, and to link from the talk page to the copy you've made.''

Improving the article
Note: what I've written below assumes you're editing your own copy of the article, but it applies equally if you're editing the article in place.

When you start working on your own copy of the article, make a new topic on the main article's talk page to notify readers that you're working on improving the article, and provide a link to your improved-article-in-progress.

Research the topic you've selected using books, articles, and other reliable sources, and write up what you've learned in a way that's clear and easy for a general reader to understand. Wikipedia describes itself as not a place for original research. What this means in their terms is that Wikipedia is devoted to summarizing what's already been published about each topic it covers. Another way to think about this is to remember that Wikipedia is a tertiary source, and your research will be summarizing primary and secondary sources to add to this tertiary source. You should follow Wikipedia's guidelines for citing your sources; most of your citations will probably be in the form of footnotes. Wikipedia also has a really good article on Writing better articles which will give you a lot of suggestions.

As with many academic assignments, working in small chunks may be helpful. When you've written a few sentences or a paragraph that you think are good enough to include in the main entry, you may copy your changes over to the main entry if you wish.

Getting feedback from other editors
Once you've gotten your draft article to a point where you think it's good enough for others to read, you should solicit comments on it from other Wikipedia editors.

Post to the article's talk page
When you started editing, you told other editors that you were working on a revision. Once you're ready for people to review it, post to the same talk page again to ask for their comments. You may want to use words similar to the ones in the next section.

Contacting other editors directly
You should also post your request for reviews to the talk pages of selected editors. How do you identify editors who might be interested in reviewing your work? Start by looking at your article's talk page and seeing who has commented on it recently. You should also look at the WikiProject Women's History editors list and that project's talk page to identify editors who've been active recently.

When you post to someone's talk page requesting a review, you might say something like the following: (Replace Josephine Goldmark with your own article's title.)

Wikipedia editing marks
When someone reviews your article, they may insert cleanup templates into it-- little messages in curly brackets marking what needs work. For example, they may edit your article to include, which will result in a little message in the article that looks like this:

They may also include inline templates like, which shows up like this:

"'Well-behaved women rarely make history.'"

Editing and Community Interactions
Some parts of Wikipedia have reputations for being hostile, but WikiProject Women's History tries to be friendly and supportive to new editors. If you're having trouble understanding something, please don't hesitate to reach out to the active editors by posting on the project's talk page.

Here are some links to Wikipedia's basic guidelines and policies for participating:

Grading criteria
This assignment should entail as much, or nearly as much, research as a research paper. You should cite no fewer than 6 sources which, for these purposes, should include a mixture of primary sources and scholarly secondary sources. For more on what that means, consult Wikipedia's guide on identifying reliable sources.

Extra points will be given for active participation in and engagement with the Wikipedia community by requesting feedback on your drafts and revising accordingly. I will assess your article by examining the article's history section and seeing what you've added. I'll also look at your contributions page to see how you're participating in the project as a whole. Look carefully at the WikiProject Women's History Featured Articles. While it is not required that you submit it to general review by the Wikipedia community (required in order to achieve a quality ranking of "GA" or "FA"), participating actively in the larger Wikipedia community may prove useful for the development of your article.

In order to keep projects commensurate with each other, you are required to produce about 2500 words for this assignment. The final result may not be 2500 words in length, if, for example, you draft a 1500 word entry, receive feedback on it that causes you to delete 250 words and write 500 more, you will have ultimately written 2000 words, though your entry is 1750 long. This does not mean that you are encouraged to produce and re-produce inferior drafts in order to have written adequate numbers of words.