Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Poverty Justice and Human Capabilities (Diana Strassmann and Michael Emerson)/Proposed Topics

Assignment: Identifying Your Topic

Due Date: Friday, February 10

Choosing your topic is the earliest decision you need to make for this project. Potential topics can be drawn from course readings, news postings, outside lectures, and your own and other students’ power point presentations. In addition, you may have encountered potential topics through prior course work or internship work.

To come up with a good topic, you will need to spend a substantial amount of time browsing through Wikipedia and looking at existing entries. You should also carefully review the document Contributing to Wikipedia: Overall Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria so that you have a good sense of what to aim for with possible topics, and to get a sense of whether an existing entry is sufficient or how it could be best revised or expanded. Careful selection of a workable topic will also make a huge difference to your ability to complete this assignment easily.

Plan to spend some time looking at the examples of successful contributions, and browse through contributions of students in past classes. Think carefully about possible topics that might interest you. Look to see what is already there on Wikipedia. If you go to the talk page of an article, you can see what Project Groups it may be affiliated with. Check out the affiliated Project Groups and read what other contributors have suggested for new and revised entries. Additionally, read the Article Discussion pages for pages relating to topics that might interest you. As you begin to consider possible topics, consider whether it would be best to add sections to and rewrite an existing entry, to expand an existing stub, or to create an entirely new entry.

Prepare a list of two to three potential topics. For each topic, supply a few sentences to explain your interest and possible revisions, eight to ten references (five minimum), and then rank the topics in order from most to least desirable. One of these topics will become your final topic and the rankings may be used to form groups of two based on common interest (if you indicate you would like to work in a pair). If you know you want to work with a particular class member, you could submit the topic proposals jointly, indicating how you might split up the work.

If a topic you might wish to use is extremely controversial (for example the article on Microcredit, Wikipedia may restrict changes to the site or your changes may be quickly reversed by others. Also note that highly trafficked pages (such as the article on economics) may be changed by other users quickly, making implementing revisions difficult. Please avoid such topics.

Instructions:

1) Prepare a list of two to three potential topics.

2) For each topic, supply a few sentences to explain your interest and possible revisions to articles on Wikipedia

3) Supply 8-10 relevant references (5 minimum)

4) Rank the topics in order from most to least desirable

5) Label your document WikiTopics.doc and submit it to OWL-Space by Friday, February 10

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