Wikipedia:School and university projects/LING1100-WritingSystems

Welcome to Wikipedia and the LING 1100-102 project page. LING 1100-102 is a freshman writing seminar at Cornell University on the topic of writing systems and decipherment taught by Teresa Galloway in the spring 2009 semester. Each student in our class (17 in all) will create a separate Wikipedia account and be asked to choose a stub on a writing system and expand it as close to the level of Featured Article as they can.

Introduction for students in LING 1100-102
Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has over three million editors (Wikipedians) as of 2007, many of whom are students like you. The vast majority of them are volunteers who find editing this site to be an enjoyable experience, even a hobby. Therefore I hope you will enjoy this exercise and the course! After all, there are not many exercises that tell you to do something that over a million people think is 'fun'. :)

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to Cornell University. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read the Wikiquette guidelines. I only know of one other course at Cornell that has used Wikipedia to such an extent (BEE 464 Fall 2006), so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—and of yourselves.

Please direct any questions to our project discussion page or my talk page. You are welcome to send me emails, or make an appointment to see me during my office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Grading

 * The successful completion of preliminary excercises 1-4 below will be graded simply as credit/no-credit, and will count as part of your class participation grade.


 * The completion of all three parts of the main assignment below will be taken together to determine your final project grade, contributing 20% of your final course grade.

Editing Guidelines

 * Make sure you are LOGGED INTO your account before making any edits.
 * If you are not logged in, I cannot verify who has done the edits, and will be unable to recognize your work and grade you on it. (You will be creating a user account as part of the first assignment).


 * Add this tag to the top of any page about Writing Systems you edit for this project:
 * This will indicate that this page is being edited as part of a University Project.
 * This will indicate that this page is being edited as part of a University Project.


 * Whenever you are done with an edit and want to save a page, fill out the edit summary box and view a preview of the page after your edit to make sure it looks as you actually want it to look. Only then click the "Save Page" button. You may find the page history tool and watchlist tools to be very useful when you want to check what changes by other editors have been made to the article(s) you are working on.


 * After you finish doing each exercise, please leave the information at the Completed assignments page.


 * Do not vandalize or deliberately add incorrect or spurious information. Doing so will result in a "F" for this assignment.  Edit in good faith.

Preliminary Exercise 1: Getting Started
To be completed by February 4, 2009 at 11:30pm


 * 1) Set up a Wikipedia user account for yourself.


 * This exercise is important, since you must have set up an account before attempting to work on any of the later Wikipedia class assignments so that I will be able to confirm that you have completed the exercises.


 * 2) Create a userpage for yourself. Look at the top right corner, you will see your nickname in red. Click on it; write some text (about yourself, about the course, etc.), save the page. Repeat until you are satisfied. Upload an image and add it to your page.


 * You may want to start with this tutorial, which will take you through the basics of editing Wikipedia.


 * 3) After you create an account and userpage, please find your name in the relevant row of the completed assignments page and add a link to your user page in the 'Student Wikipedia userpage' column in the row with your name.

Preliminary Exercise 2: An Easy First Edit
To be completed by February 16, 2009 at 11:30pm


 * This assignment is intended to familiarize you with how Wikipedia works and give you experience in wiki technology before you begin your main research project.


 * For this assignment, you can choose an article on any topic that you enjoy and know a lot about. It does not have to pertain to writing systems.  Wikipedia covers nearly every aspect of our life and culture, so you should be able to find something connected to your hobbies and interests.


 * 1) Find an existing article that you feel needs to be expanded. The following pages may be useful to you at this stage:
 * WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types - this page contains an extensive list of stub articles, sorted by categories
 * Requests for expansion - this page contains a list of articles that other users would like to see expanded, sorted by categories
 * Special:Shortpages - this page lists all Wikipedia articles deemed too short and thus in need of expansion.


 * 2) Expand the article you have selected with a single meaningful paragraph. Of course, if you feel you can do more, feel free to do so.


 * 3) Make sure you add a link to the article you have edited and mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page.

Preliminary Exercise 3: Identify an Article on a Writing System that Needs to be Expanded
To be completed by February 25, 2009 at 11:30pm (so that you are ready before we have our library visit)


 * Wikipedia has many many articles on writing systems, most of which are comprehensive and accurate. However, there are still many which need attention--either the entry is unclear or disorganized, or it is extremely brief.


 * 1) Look through the articles in the list of writing systems currently in Wikipedia, and find one that is brief enough to be considered a "stub", and is on a system that you feel could be interesting to research.


 * 2) Once you have chosen a Wikipedia article to expand and a writing system to research, add a link to the page you intend to edit on the Completed assignments page. You don't have to edit the page yet, that will be coming later.

Preliminary Exercise 4: Use the Library
''To be completed by March 9, 2009 at 11:30pm Photocopies and notes as to chosen references handed to me in class the next day (October 23)


 * 1) Go to the library to hunt out sources for the page you will be editing. A good place to start is to consult the copy of The World's Writing Systems by Daniels and Bright (Oxford Univeristy Press, 1996) which is in Olin library's non-circulating reference section (call no. P211 .W714 1996).  Suggestion: If the information found in Daniels is not much more than what is already on Wikipedia, you may want to choose a different writing system to research.


 * 2) Once you have found the relevant section(s) in Daniels, make two photocopies of the section(s) (including bibliography)--one for you to keep and one for you to give to me.


 * 3) Look through the bibliography at the end of the article in Daniels, and also use the library resources you learned about during our tour to locate at least two additional scholarly sources for reference. Be sure that these references are written in English (or a language you understand!).


 * 4) To hand in electronically:


 * a) An annoted bibliography of the sources you plan to use (you need to list at least three sources, of which Daniels can be one). For each source, write a brief sentence or two telling me why you chose this source and whether or not you have successfully obtained this source from the library (for instance if you are still waiting for an interlibrary loan).


 * b) A brief paragraph or two letting me know more of your progress so far. Do you think that you will be able to successfully expand you chosen page using the resources you listed?  If so, indicate a few areas of the Wikipedia article which you are planning to expand, and which sources will be useful for those areas.  If not, let me know what went wrong, and if you have ideas for choosing another writing system.  This is simply graded credit/no-credit.  I just want to know where you are in your research.


 * Note: if you need to choose another writing system, you may do so, but I still want the above report by the given due date.

Main Assignment Part 1: Preliminary Edit and Expansion your Chosen Article, Including Citations
To be completed by April 1, 2009 at 11:30pm


 * 1) Using the sources you identified in preliminary exercise 4 and during our Library visit, subtantially edit and expand your chosen article. You must add the equivalent of 2 paragraphs of new material or re-writes to your chosen article.  (In some cases, this could mean sprinkling several new edits throughout the article rather than adding complete paragraphs).


 * When editing your article, it may be helpful to consider whether it adequately addresses the following topics:


 * the origin and development of the writing system
 * how it is structured and works
 * how it can be classified in terms of other writing systems
 * which langauges of the world use it or currently use it
 * the history of its decipherment (if applicable)
 * how adaptable it is to use by other languages
 * what medium it is most often used in


 * Any facts or claims that you state in your article must be properly sourced. You may also find that statements already existing in the article were improperly sourced, and when possible, you should try to fix these problems as well.  Note that you must use at least two academic, non-internet sources (such as an academic journal) as references for your work.  See also Reliable sources for information on what sources are preferred.


 * Some examples of well-referenced articles on Wikipedia: Katyn massacre, Welding, Section summary of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battle of Austerlitz, Military history of France, Monopoly (game), Astrophysics Data System, Mercury (planet), Søren Kierkegaard, Eric A. Havelock.


 * 2) Add this tag to the page you have edited:  .
 * This will indicate that this page is being edited as part of a University Project.


 * 3) When finished, add a link to the page you have improved on the Completed assignments page and note the status as "first revision".

Main Assignment Part 2: Collaboration
To be completed by April 15, 2009 at 11:30pm


 * Working in groups of three or four, comment on each other's work from Exercise 4 (every student should comment on at least two other students' work, and receive, in turn, comments from at least two other students).
 * Use the Wikipedia Talk page for the articles you are commenting on.
 * In your comments, make suggestions for further revision of the page, either in terms of expansion, clarity, organization, formatting, or citation of sources.
 * Make at least two substantial comments for each of the two articles you review.


 * Note: You should expect that other Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) could also leave various messages on your talk pages. When working on your revisions, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages frequently. Whenever you have a new message and are logged to Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message, 'You have new messages', on every Wikipedia page you access. To make this message disappear, you should click on it and read the message. Note that it is customary to leave new messages at the bottom of the talk/discussion pages, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk pages. If you want to leave somebody a message, make sure you are editing their talk page, not their user page. Remember to sign your talk and discussion messages.

Main Assignment Part 3: Revision
To be completed by April 28, 2009 in class


 * Revise your article again in light of the suggestions you have received on your talk page(whether from students in this class or elsewhere). If you decide to ignore one or more suggestions, you must respond to each comment explaining why you think the article should stay as it is.  The final state of your article will be the largest consideration towards your final project grade, so consider carefully before you reject any comments.