Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Behavioral Ecology (Joan Strassmann)/Writing for wikipedia

Get back to course page

CONTRIBUTING TO WIKIPEDIA: OVERALL GUIDELINES AND EVALUATION CRITERIA

Wikipedia has increasingly become the first resource many internet users consult whenever they encounter an unfamiliar topic. This reliance on Wikipedia is simultaneously exciting in its potential to democratize the availability and production of knowledge and troubling given the possibility that inaccurate, and even malicious, information will be spread and reinforced through the site.

This semester you will have the opportunity to intervene in these debates by participating in the construction and revision of Wikipedia sites relevant to the themes of this course. For this assignment, you will propose and then carry out either a substantial revision of an existing Wikipedia entry by rewriting it and creating additional sections, expand a “stub” for a topic that is not sufficiently covered on the site, or create an entirely new entry. (Since new sections added to existing entries receive far more traffic than completely new entries, which can be orphaned in Wikipedia, you will need to provide a justification if you propose to create a new entry rather than revise or expand upon an existing entry.)

Through this assignment, you will have the opportunity to educate readers and be part of a worldwide conversation about these issues. Most immediately, during the semester you will join the Article Discussion page and WikiProject page, under which your entry falls, and participate in the discussion.

The Five Pillars of Wikipedia

Wikipedia operates under five fundamental principles that should be kept in mind while you are planning and writing your entry. They are:

1.	Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, not an advertising platform, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a dictionary. 2.	Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). Wikipedia avoids advocacy and aims to present issues in a balanced and impartial manner instead of sparking debate and controversy. All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy using references; unreferenced material may be removed. 3.	Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify, and distribute. Since all contributions are freely licensed to the public and no editor owns any article, contributions can and will be edited and redistributed. 4.	Editors should interact with each other in a respectful and civil manner. When discussing articles with fellow Wikipedians, avoid personal attacks, avoid edit wars, and assume good faith on the part of others. 5.	Wikipedia does not have firm rules. Because rules in Wikipedia are likely to change in wording and interpretation, be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes.

Sources and Verifiability

Use as your sources original peer-reviewed research articles by researchers who have conducted studies or provided scholarly analyses of your topic. A quick way of seeing if an article is appropriate is to see if it has references in it. Journals like Science, Nature, PNAS, Proceedings B of the Royal Society, Biology Letters, Animal Behaviour, Behavioral Ecology, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Auk, Ibis, Insect Behavior, and many others are suitable. You may search for such sources via Google Scholar or by journal title. For information on citations, please see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CITATION and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_templates

Be aware that your entry will likely be deleted if it is deemed “original research.” (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research.) Thus, you cannot include your own observations of a phenomenon or your own new theories or opinions on the research in your entry. Instead you need to summarize and cite the work of other researchers, showing how their theories and evidence illuminate the subject of your entry. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability.)

Maintaining a Neutral Point of View

Your work will be original in the sense that you are compiling information and studies relevant to your topic, choosing what to include, and suggesting how the different studies or pieces of information relate. However, your tone must be neutral and evenhanded, so as to appear factual and based on the scholarship of others, rather than in the form of presenting your own innovative ideas and scholarship.

Read the following Wikipedia articles for more information on maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV). These pages extensively cover information, tactics, and resource information for how you can be sure your contribution content is neutral and conforms to Wikipedia’s guidelines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Words_to_avoid

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view/FAQ#There.27s_no_such_thing_as_objectivity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Describing_points_of_view

See also:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/01/15/blinded-by-science-how-balanced-coverage-lets-the-scientific-fringe-hijack-reality/

Additionally, a good article meets the following criteria. Bear these in mind as you plan your contribution, whether you are revising and adding new sections to an existing article or creating a new one. Wikipedia: The Perfect Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_perfect_article

Guide to writing better articles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Guide_to_writing_better_articles

Countering systemic bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias

This assignment is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Attribution: This version is modified from the original work of Diana Strassmann.

Get back to course page