Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Rollins College/Victorian Modernity (Fall 2015)

The Victorians self-consciously felt themselves to be living in a moment of rapid change, as they witnessed events we still associate with modernity: the expansion of voting rights, the spread of evolutionary theory, the expansion of the railroad, and the invention of photography and the telegraph. In this course, students will survey major Victorian texts, considering how those texts engage with the concept of modernity and how they might help us face historical changes in the twenty-first century. Readings will cover Eliot (we’ll read all of Middlemarch), Tennyson, the Brownings, Carlyle, Mill, the Rossettis, Dickens, Wilde, Ruskin, and others. In lieu of standard papers, students will create fictional facebook and LinkedIn profiles to explore distinction between the personal and professional Dickens’s Great Expectations; contribute to a course blog; deliver pecha-kucha presentations, based on research about particular historical context for Middlemarch; and add to Wikipedia.

For the Wikipedia assignment, students will be looking at pages (people, events, texts) related to a topic they have researched. They'll look for incomplete pages, and update them. Grading will be based on a self-assessment, in which students will compare the process (including their knowledge of the policies) to the process of creating the Oxford English Dictionary.

Week 1
Students will complete a research project and presentation. This will be a starting point for their Wikipedia edits.

Week 2: Assignment Introduction

 * Introduction to how Wikipedia will be used in the course: students will be using a prior research project as a starting point, and looking over pages related to Victorian literature and culture to find pages that need expanding.

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Handout: Editing Wikipedia


 * Create an account and join the class page

Week 3: Victorian Crowdsourcing
Students will read Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman and two articles about Wikipedia (by Aaron Swartz and Jenny Kleeman). In class I will explain the five pillars and show students how to find pages they can edit. Students will complete the training.


 * Complete the online training for students. During this training, you will make edits in a sandbox and learn the basic rules of Wikipedia.

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Resources: Online Training for Students

Week 4: Editing Wikipedia
Part of this week's class meeting will be devoted to students' edits to Wikipedia.

Students will complete their edits by December 7th. The graded portion of the assignment will be a self-evaluation, as students explain the changes they made and how they improved the pages they edited (including staying consistent with Wikipedia policies).