User:Zazpot/Charles Matthews session 2017 06 22

My notes from Charles Matthews's Wikipedia training session at the Betty and Gordon Moore Library, 22 June 2017.

Charles used these links as a basis.

Article evaluation
Mnemonic:


 * Sources
 * Traffic
 * Ratings
 * Edit history
 * Writing and formatting
 * Discussion

Histories
Be aware of the histories of the following entities:


 * Pages
 * Editors
 * Wikipedia itself

Wikipedia history
Exponential growth in casual editors until ~2007. Then quality became paramount over growth, and the number of active editors decreased. At the same time, there was an inflection in the curve of number of articles against time.

This was a watershed in Wikipedia's history.

Expanding articles
Be aware of:


 * cruft
 * trivia
 * niches
 * egregious facts
 * dead links
 * sources that are themselves wrong (even normally reliable sources, such as ODNB)

Amending sources
Wikipedia is sometimes wrong, but as seen above, so are highly reputed sources such as the ODNB. So, online fact-checking is hard, and Wikipedia gets an unfair rap.

It's not only Wikipedia that needs correcting; so do established sources. And we need to be able to correct those, too, if they are really to be considered good sources.

If the ODNB is wrong, contact them and they will correct their error in their next update. They update about thrice yearly. This is how good sources should work: they should acknowledge and correct errors. (NTS: some newspapers are the same.)

Q&A

 * Q: Has Wikipedia looked into ranking contributors with a score, in the way that Stack Overflow does?
 * A: Not sure that would be a good idea. It would be very hard to distil the reputation of a contributor into a single scalar that would be acceptably objective. (NTS: there has been some research done on this.  )

Hands-on training session

 * Introduced Citation hunt tool, noting that Wikipedia is:
 * not censored, so unpalatable content might appear; click "Next" if so;
 * imperfect, so if obvious errors or vandalism appears, flag it up to an experienced editor (e.g. Charles or me) for fixing.


 * Discussed Article message boxes#Categories and colours.
 * Showed Template:POV as an illustration of this.
 * Showed Template:Refimprove to explain how this correlates to referencing. Noted that ~250k articles are tagged with this: overwhelming number for a newbie.
 * Showed Category:Citation_and_verifiability_maintenance_templates as a way to dive into smaller categories.
 * Suggested Template:Weasel inline as a smaller category, perhaps more manageable. Explained what weasel words are.

Petscan

 * https://petscan.wmflabs.org - great entry point to find pages by category, by template, etc.