Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Northeastern University/Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (Spring 2021)

This seminar explores how we tell stories and make arguments in the age of the internet and “big data.” We will investigate literary works from a variety of eras and genres—including fiction, poetry, film, and video games—to see how writers and readers have grappled with the implications of new reading and informational technologies throughout history. Students will develop skills for making sense of textual data, as well as for writing about data and writing with data through a variety of media, including this unit on researching and writing for Wikipedia.

Week 4
Before you received the link to this Wikipedia dashboard, you completed pre-writing asking you to reflect on how you think about Wikipedia now, and how those ideas have been shaped by prior contexts in the classroom and beyond. Details about that assignment, if you need a refresher, can be found on the course Canvas.

As a centerpiece of this class, we will spend significant time learning about Wikipedia, building to each student substantively editing a Wikipedia article of their choice. This project will require you to think about writing in very different ways from most papers you might have written in online classes, though many principles of evidence will be similar. You will first learn to make small edits and improvements to articles before undertaking more substantive edits on an article related to our special collections holdings at Northeastern.

This dashboard will help keep our Wikipedia assignments organized, though I've tried to include the major assignment milestones in Canvas as well.

Resources:


 * Editing Wikipedia, pages 1–5
 * Evaluating Wikipedia

Create an account and join this course page, using the enrollment link your instructor sent you. (Because of Wikipedia's technical restraints, you may receive a message that you cannot create an account. To resolve this, please try again off campus or the next day.)

This week, everyone should have a Wikipedia account.

Week 5
Amanda Rust, the digital humanities librarian from Snell Library, has compiled a list of articles related to Northeastern's Archives and Special Collections for you to consider editing in this assignment. Those articles can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AmandaRR123/topics

You will choose one of these to work on or propose an alternative article. If you propose a topic not on this list, you should articulate how your chosen article meets a content gap (see unit below). Your chosen article should be a starter or stub class, or could be entirely new. You should not, however, focus on an article already well established (a C rating or higher). For more information about article classes, see this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Content_assessment

Biographies

History

LGBT+ Studies

Women's Studies

Week 6
For this assignment, you should identify at 4-6 sources you can use to evidence your chosen article. You will annotate these sources with 3-4 sentences apiece to indicate:


 * 1) What aspect(s) of your topic each source helps evidence,
 * 2) How each source aligns with Wikipedia's guidelines for reliable sources,
 * 3) Whether additional evidence is necessary for a given source's information.

You will submit these annotated source lists through Canvas (see assignment there). In your submission, your sources should be formatted according to Wikipedia's citation guidelines.

Week 7
Reach out to your Wikipedia Expert if you have questions using the Get Help button at the top of this page.

Resource: Editing Wikipedia, pages 7–9

Everyone has begun writing their article drafts.

Guiding framework

Every student has finished reviewing their assigned articles, making sure that every article has been reviewed.

Week 8
You probably have some feedback from other students and possibly other Wikipedians. Consider their suggestions, decide whether it makes your work more accurate and complete, and edit your draft to make those changes.

Resources:


 * Editing Wikipedia, pages 12 and 14
 * Reach out to your Wikipedia Expert if you have any questions.

Now's the time to revisit your text and refine your work. You may do more research and find missing information; rewrite the lead section to represent all major points; reorganize the text to communicate the information better; or add images and other media.

Now that you've improved your draft based on others' feedback, it's time to move your work live - to the &quot;mainspace.&quot;

Resource: Editing Wikipedia, page 13

Week 9
Continue to expand and improve your work, and format your article to match Wikipedia's tone and standards. Remember to contact your Wikipedia Expert at any time if you need further help!

It's the final week to develop your article.


 * Read Editing Wikipedia page 15 to review a final check-list before completing your assignment.
 * Don't forget that you can ask for help from your Wikipedia Expert at any time!

Everyone should have finished all of the work they'll do on Wikipedia, and be ready for grading.

Week 10
This reflective essay will bookend the pre-writing you did at the beginning of this unit, asking you to consider how your ideas about Wikipedia, its editors, its community, and the information in it have shifted over the past six weeks. Please see the course Canvas for more details.