Wikipedia:School and university projects/HardenPsy101

Course description
Introduction to Psychology is an introductory overview of the field of psychology. It is an examination of behavioral, cognitive, psychoanalytic, humanistic and biological viewpoints in psychology. The course includes learning principles and applications, motivation, emotions, stress, psychobiology, personality, abnormal behaviors and approaches to therapy. The course fulfills Associate of Arts general education requirements.

Assignment overview
Ultimately, you will be either creating a new psychology article or improving an existing psychology article on Wikipedia. Even though you are amateurs in the field of psychology there are many 'stub' class articles on Wikipedia that you will be able to significantly improve. Treat this assignment like a research paper, but instead of turning it in to me, you will be contributing to the sum of all human knowledge on Wikipedia.

It is important for you to follow instructions and not get behind in following the assignment timeline, there will be little or no credit for late assignments. If you are struggling with any aspect of this assignment see me during my office hours ASAP.

My general advice is to worry firstly about generating good content (doing the research and writing it up), and secondly about the technical aspects of Wikipedia. Remember that you can edit any page on Wikipedia so if you don't know how to do something, find where someone else has done that and copy them. This is assignment is incremental, so don't get behind. If you are having any trouble at all please come see me during office hours!

Instructor and Ambassadors

 * Instructor: Mitch Harden


 * Campus Ambassadors:
 * Elonka 00:01, 19 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Online Ambassadors: Cind.   amuse  (Cindy), Mike Christie (talk), Cullen328

Assignment timeline
This is a summary of the key due dates and the expected timeline for the Wikipedia-related assignment(s).

Overview

 * 1) Create a Wikipedia account
 * 2) Create a user page containing:
 * 3) Information about you
 * 4) Psych-student template
 * 5) A Section listing your class-related activities
 * 6) Sign up on the list of students at the bottom of this page.
 * 7) Practice using talk pages with other students
 * 8) Engage in Wikipedia article related talk
 * 9) Help protect the Wiki
 * 10) Write a reflective essay
 * 11) Read and Write about psychology-related Wikipedia articles

Detailed list

 * Creating a Wikipedia account (50 pts)
 * Welcome to Wikipedia
 * Video on creating an account
 * Should you use your real name?
 * Wikimarkup cheatsheet
 * Five pillars


 * Creating a user page (50 pts)
 * Account and user page creation handout
 * Wikipedia policy on User Pages
 * The User Page Design Center
 * Add the WAP psych student template to your user page. It should look like this (so "edit" this section and copy the code for it):


 * Adding yourself to the user list (30 pts)
 * Wikicode cheatsheet
 * Follow the format of the others by using the UserSand template


 * Practice talk with classmates (30 pts)
 * Help with using talk pages
 * Wikipeida talk page guidelines
 * Talk pages tutorial video


 * Now try talking in the mainspace (repeatable up to three discussions for credit) (30pts ea / 90 pts max)
 * Popular psychology pages
 * Join the discussion on one of the popular psychology pages.
 * Help on watching pages
 * Be sure to watch for replies to the discussion


 * Anti-vandalism (repeatable, up to six patrols for credit) (15pts ea / 90 pts max)
 * WP:Vandalism
 * Check out both the Recent Changes Patrol and Counter-Vandalism Unit
 * Use an anti-vandalism tool (I like User:Lupin/Anti-vandal_tool) to patrol and revert five instances of vandalism


 * Wikipedia Reflective Essay 1 (150pts)
 * How to write a reflective essay
 * Write a 2+ page reflection on your experience with Wikipedia in this section.


 * Wiki-research 1 (150pts)
 * Psychology-related article grading scheme
 * Good Psych-related article
 * Psych-related stubs
 * Write a 2-5 page paper summarizing two psychology-related Wikipedia articles (one good, and one stub). Explain what makes the good article good, and what makes the stub insufficient. Suggest ways that the stub could be improved. Do you think that the good article is accurate, and could it be considered a reliable source for academic writing?