User:Uttsinghuajoint2014/sandbox/Timeline

Some Clarifications to Wikipedia Editors
a) The goal of the student project is twofold:

(1) to help students understand how a typical social media platform works in supplying corporate relevant information to the public;

(2) to increase Wikipedia’s coverage of public companies, to make it a more powerful platform for individuals to learn and share information about public companies. b) The nature of the companies added to Wikipedia:

We create, maintain, and enrich entries for publicly traded companies. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has repeatedly emphasized that it is extremely important for individuals to have unbiased information about ALL publicly traded companies (http://www.sec.gov/about/whatwedo.shtml). To our surprises, we found that several hundreds of publicly traded companies did not have their corporate entries on Wikipedia. Also, for public firms currently covered by Wikipedia, a lot of corporate information is incomplete or outdated.

c) The nature of the information added:

We ask students to search online, to find important and verifiable information about companies’ facts. We ask students NOT to add any subjective opinions or anything based on rumors.

d) How do we work?

(1) To help students get started, we provide students with templates for user page and corporate entries on Wikipedia. We strongly encourage students to modify and personalize.

(2) The two courses at University of Toronto and Tsinghua University will work continuously on these companies in the future. We will continue to maintain and enrich Wikipedia entries for publicly traded companies.

(3) Students will work as teams, which we hope helps ensure the NPOV of information added. (For example, in the Fall semester at Tsinghua university, there are currently 6 teams (each team with 5-6 students) and each team is asked to create about 30 corporate pages.) (4) Each of our two courses has a TA who is assisting the students in the assignment. These TAs are postgraduate students at the University of Toronto and Tsinghua University. Their main responsibility is to monitor the involved entries and ensure that the modifications do not violate Wikipedia policies.

e) Compliance to Wikipedia’s spirit and policy

We confirm that all of our activities are part of an educational program, and all of our activities are conducted by professors and students for educational purposes. Students are urged to carefully study guidelines and polies of Wikipedia (e.g., copyrights, NPOV, facts rather than opinions, etc.).

f) A long-term initiative:

We aim to improve Wikipedia pages continually in the two courses in the future. Right now, given that students in each session have limited time, some of the pages may appear preliminary. But this is the nature of Wikipedia and we hope our work will attract more and more useful contributions from other users. Many students in our courses, including those at the University of Toronto, are not native English speakers. It is possible that their contributions are not organized in perfect English. We will do our best to provide support to avoid it. At the same time, we would like to (gratefully) ask for understanding and patience from Wikipedia editors. We hope our efforts in creating new entries and improving the quality of existing pages can be recognized and appreciated.

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