Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Poverty Justice and Human Capabilities (Diana Strassmann)/Initial Contribution

Entry to Wikipedia Mainspace
Due: Friday, March 15, 2013

The next step in creating your Wikipedia contribution is to begin writing directly for Wikipedia. By the end of this stage, you will have added your content to the main Wikipedia site, where it can be accessed by other editors and Wikipedia users.


 * 1) First, carefully consider the advice you have been given, both to your proposal when it was reviewed and graded, and to your contributions to your Project and Talk pages by any Wikipedia editors.
 * 2) If you are editing Wikipedia for the first time, you may practice Wiki-markup language in your sandbox prior to editing the Mainspace. Additionally, if you are creating a new entry or substantial new material, you may start your work in your Sandbox, so that you do not risk having the entry deleted before you have had a chance to provide full references.  (This is not an appropriate option for revising articles, since other editors may be making changes to the article while you are working, so better for you to start creating changes in the Mainspace.)
 * 3) For new articles, consider using Wikipedia’s Article Wizard.  The Wizard is a tool designed to help users creating articles for the first time.  To access the Article Wizard, type “wp:article wizard” into the Wikipedia search bar.  The Wizard is a six-step process that will ensure that you are ready to create a new article.
 * 4) When you begin contributing to the entry directly in Wikipedia’s main namespace, your changes will “go live” as soon as you make them. If you plan substantial deletions and over writing to an existing page, be sure that you have explained the problems on the talk page and noted your planned changes.
 * 5) Be sure to continually check the article’s discussion page and any WikiProject talk pages for user feedback and suggestions.
 * 6) Your proposed entry or revised edits should be a minimum of 2000 words, not including references. If you are working with a partner, your joint contribution should be a minimum of 3500–4000 words.

Technical Details
Highlighting Changes to an Existing Article (for showing your contributions) 1.	Save your page as a PDF. 2.	Open the PDF in preview. 3.	Click tools, then annotate, then highlight text. 4.	You can now highlight all sentence level changes you made. This will assist reviewers in knowing which changes are yours and which are not.
 * If Creating a New Entry Directly in the Wikipedia Mainspace: The easiest way to create a new article on the Wikipedia Mainspace is to log into your account and then type in the name of your topic into the search box on the upper right-hand side of the main page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). If no article exists, you will be prompted to create one. Click the italicized “Your topic” hyperlink colored red. This link will take you to a large text box where you can write your article. When changes are complete, press the “Save page” button.
 * If Revising an Existing Entry: Click the edit tab on your page. This will bring you to a new page with a text box containing the editable text of the current page. You can edit the text of the current article. When changes are complete, press the “Save page” button.
 * Plan your article to include a number of short sections. Headings allow a reader to jump around and find the information they want easily. (When you include a heading, a table of contents will be automatically generated when you post to Wikipedia.) Wikipedia allows the creation of article headings with relative ease. (Refer to the Wikipedia Editing Cheatsheet)
 * Include links in your article (the linking infrastructure is what helps users navigate to and discover new information). To add a link, double-bracket the word. For example, Capabilities Approach would link to the capabilities approach page. A link to a page that doesn’t exist will appear red.
 * Include citations for your research. When something in your article needs to be cited, type . Anything between the will be read as a citation and it will appear at the bottom of the article. (For more information refer to Citing sources)
 * Be sure to add the course-supported banner to your article’s Talk page (if you haven’t done so already) by copying and pasting this text on the top of the talk page:

Submission Instructions: Deadline: 18 March 2013 4:00pm

The following 3 items must be submitted to OWL-Space AND emailed to each member of your workshop group and to pjhcminor at gmail.com by Monday, March 18th, 4:00pm:


 * 1) A PDF of the sections of the article you have contributed to, with the changes you have made highlighted, entitled InitialContribution.pdf
 * 2) A separate file that briefly describes the changes you have made. InitialContributionDescription.pdf
 * 3) An outline of your article, showing with track changes the sections you have edited, deleted, or added. InitialContributionOutline.pdf. If you have multiple PDFs reflecting the parts of the same item, label each file as follows: InitialContribution1.pdf; InitialContribution2.pdf, etc.


 * Please note that OWL-Space limits the number of attachments to 4, so if you have more than 4 please use the additional assignment space on OWL-Space titled “Initial Contribution: Extra Attachments.”

Be sure to include page numbers (in Word documents) and to proofread and double-space all text, except the outline, which may be single-spaced. For PDF entries, be sure the font size is legible. Points will be deducted for items that do not follow these instructions.

How to take screenshots

 * If the page you are viewing has unnecessary information, please use a selected screenshot instead of a full screenshot as this will make the image larger and, therefore, more legible.

To zoom-in on the screen

 * In Firefox and Google Chrome, you can zoom in by simply pressing “Control” or “Ctrl” and scrolling up. Then you can take your screenshot and the font will be larger.

On a MAC

 * For a selected screenshot, hold “command” and “shift” and then press 4. Use your cursor to then select the area to screenshot.


 * For a full screenshot, hold “command” and “shift” and then press 3.


 * The screenshots save to your desktop and can be renamed to .jpg or .pdf (they default as .png files).

On a PC

 * please follow the steps provided at this link: http://www.wikihow.com/Take-a-Screenshot-in-Microsoft-Windows

Highlighting Changes on MACs

 * 1.	Save your page as a PDF.
 * 2.	Open the PDF in preview.
 * 3.	Click tools, then annotate, then highlight text.
 * 4.	You can now highlight all sentence level changes you made. This will assist reviewers in knowing which changes are yours and which are not.

Proposed topics by Diana Strassmann is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.