Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Washington/Communication Theory Development (Autumn)

The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to the multiple ways scholars theorize communication. Our hope is that students will learn to draw connections across scholarship produced within the wide variety of different approaches to our field within a setting that honors many different types of theory.

Week 1
Welcome to your Wikipedia project's course timeline. This page will include links to tutorials and other details. As is usual, however, all critical detail about the assignment and deliverables will be kept updated on the class syllabus.

This page breaks down writing a Wikipedia article into a series of three stepsThese steps include online trainings to help you get started on Wikipedia.

If you're interested you should feel free to to review the following handouts:


 * Editing Wikipedia pages 1–5
 * Evaluating Wikipedia

There are three things as part of this assignment that you'll need to do to get started on Wikipedia:


 * 1) If you don't already have one, create an account and join this course page, using the enrollment link your instructor sent you.
 * 2) Work through a set of online tutorials. These should take about an hour total and are linked below:
 * 3) * Wikipedia Essentials — Critical
 * 4) * Editing Basics — Critical
 * 5) * Sandboxes and the Mainspace — Contains important detail you'll need when constructing your articles and publishing them.
 * 6) * Sources and Citations — Mostly about finding sources which you won't need to deal with. But it's short and you can skim it since it does have some information about citation finding tools in Wikipedia.
 * 7) * Plagiarism — As grad students, you can skim or even skip this (in a nutshell, don't copy, paraphrase, translate, etc.) but you will be responsible for it. Wikipedia has an absolutely zero tolerance policy on plagiarism due to copyright concerns. It's the only unforgivable sin. Read this if you are at all unclear.
 * 8) * Contributing Images and Media Files and Translating Articles — I don't anticipate you'll be doing either of these but you're welcome to look over this information if you think it would be valuable and if it's something that's interesting to you.
 * 9)  When you finish the trainings, practice by introducing yourself to a classmate on that classmate's Talk page.

This week, everyone should have a Wikipedia account.

Week 2
'''Creating a new article?

'''


 * Write your article in your sandbox.

'''Improving an existing article?

'''


 * Identify what's missing from the current form of the article. Think back to the skills you learned earlier. Work on a draft of your improved version of the article in your sandbox.

Week 3
Once you've made improvements to your article based on peer review feedback, it's time to move your work to Wikipedia proper - the &quot;mainspace.&quot;

'''Editing an existing article?

'''


 * NEVER copy and paste your draft of an article over the entire article. Instead, edit small sections at a time.
 * Copy your edits into the article. Make many small edits, saving each time, and leaving an edit summary. Never replace more than one to two sentences without saving!
 * Be sure to copy text from your sandbox while the sandbox page is in 'Edit' mode. This ensures that the formatting is transferred correctly.

'''Creating a new article?

'''


 * Read Editing Wikipedia page 13, and follow those steps to move your article from your Sandbox to Mainspace.
 * You can also review the Sandboxes and Mainspace online training.

'''Before you're done:

'''


 * 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!


 * Optional: For new articles or qualifying expansions of stubs, compose a one-sentence “hook,” nominate it for “Did you know,” (see the DYK instructions handout) and monitor the nomination for any issues identified by other editors. Wiki Education staff can provide support for this process.

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Handout: