Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Louisiana State University/HNRS 1035 Natural disturbance and society (Spring 2016)

Natural disturbances shape our world, causing disruption to our lives, while simultaneously benefiting ecosystem composition and structure. This course will introduce disturbance ecology and explore the effects of natural and anthropogenic disturbances on ecosystems using past and recent disasters. We will discuss the influence these events have on ecological and societal aspects and how past practices have shaped current responses. The course will also emphasize science literacy across disciplines and is communication-intensive, focusing on written and spoken communication.

Week 1

 * Overview of the course
 * Introduction to how Wikipedia will be used in the course
 * Understanding Wikipedia as a community, we'll discuss its expectations and etiquette.

Handout: [http://wikiedu.org/editingwikipedia Editing Wikipedia ]


 * Create an account and then complete the online training for students. A detailed description of the homework is posted on Moodle in the Wikipedia folder. During this training, you will make edits in a sandbox and learn the basic rules of Wikipedia.

Resources: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Training/For_students Online Training for Students ]

Week 2

 * Select 4 different disturbance/disaster articles related to lectures presented and make the following improvements:


 * Identify the articles you will improve on our Wikipedia course page
 * Search for plagiarism in existing content
 * Select an unreferenced sentence and search for it verbatim in Google
 * Re-phrase the sentence if it is plagiarized and provide a reference
 * Add 2-3 sentences of new information, supported by appropriate scientific references (at least 1 article)
 * Add 1-2 links to other Wikipedia articles and/or external webpages
 * Indicate in your User sandbox what contributions you made
 * Indicate in the article Talk Page why you made these contributions (Not that it was part of an assignment)
 * Be sure to consider audience when updating the science. This can include elaborating where appropriate on the societal aspect of the article.

Due dates are as follows:


 * First contribution February 2
 * Second contribution March 1
 * Third contribution March 31
 * Fourth contribution April 26


 * Evaluating articles
 * Using the Sandbox &amp; Mainspace effectively
 * Sources and Citations
 * Plagiarism and Copyright
 * Contributing Images and Media files