Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Stanford Law School/Advanced Legal Research (Spring-2019)

The ALR Wikipedia article assignment is intended to provide students with an opportunity to edit or create an article on a legal topic. Students will provide substantive research and analysis, written for a general audience. The goal is to provide a meaningful public service while exploring information assessment, reliability and accessibility of the law and legal literature.

Week 1
Welcome to your Wikipedia assignment's course timeline. This page guides you through the steps you'll need to complete for your Wikipedia assignment, with links to training modules and your classmates' work spaces. Please ignore the dates under the section headings.

Your course has been assigned a Wikipedia Expert. You can reach them through the Get Help button at the top of this page. They're a good person to contact with questions about editing Wikipedia, or about this Wiki Edu website; for questions about the assignment, please contact your instructors.

We expect you to complete the trainings and exercises in this section by Monday, April 29. We'd also like you to have finalized a topic by that date. We strongly recommend that you check in with us about your topic ideas before the due date; the &quot;Topic Selection&quot; section below, as well as the Canvas module for this assignment, contains some tips and resources for choosing a topic.

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.)

Exercise
Evaluate an article

Exercise
Add a citation

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

Exercise
Choose a topic

Resource:  Editing Wikipedia, page 6

What makes a good topic for this course? In addition to the tips in the modules above, we suggest selecting a topic that...


 * Involves several of the sources and skills we've introduced in class; e.g., an article about a statute that includes some of its legislative history and/or implementing regulations, or a biographical article about a judge that includes some of their major decisions.
 * Is primarily or exclusively about US law. We won't cover foreign and international legal research in this course.
 * Isn't too large or too small. This is hard to judge, and we'll let you know if we think there's a potential issue with your topic, but keep point #1 above in mind and think realistically about the timeframe.

Suggested resources for finding topics:


 * United States law stubs
 * American jurist stubs
 * Legal terminology stubs
 * WikiProject Law
 * Your instructors. If you're having trouble finding something, we're happy to offer suggestions.

Finalize your topic / Find your sources

Week 3
Guiding framework

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.

Week 4
Biographies

History

Political Science

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

Exercise
Add links to your article

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. You should also format your article to match Wikipedia's tone and standards.

When you're ready to submit your article:


 * Read Editing Wikipedia page 15 to review a final check-list before completing your assignment.
 * To submit your article, upload your research log to the assignment in Canvas. Don't worry if another Wikipedia user has made (or will make) edits to your article; we'll only be grading based on your own work, whether it &quot;sticks&quot; in the article or not.