Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Valdosta State University/Mixture and Miscegenation (Fall 2019)

Despite popular images of America as a “melting pot” of races and ethnicities, our institutions, values, and practices have often tried maintain spatial and social distance between groups defined as racially or ethnically different. This course will explore the ways in which American literature has transgressed those boundaries or found other ways to imagine life across cultural lines in the nineteenth century. More specifically, we will explore narratives of miscegenation, race mixture, and passing to better understand how racial identities were constructed and policed in this period. Along the way, we will pay close attention to how these narratives also engage issues of class, ethnicity, and gender. We will examine literary perceptions of people of mixed ancestry; their social experiences; the development of various mixed-ancestry communities; and historical attempts to limit interracial socializing, relationships, and marriage. Students will look at texts by a variety of authors, including Thomas Jefferson, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, Charles Chesnutt, and Pauline Hopkins—among others.

Week 3
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. Your course has been assigned a Wikipedia Expert. You can reach them through the Get Help button at the top of this page.

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.

Exercise
Evaluate an article

Thinking about sources and plagiarism

Week 5
Choose your topic / Find your sources

Books

Cultural Anthropology

History

LGBT+ Studies

Sociology

Women's Studies

Exercise
Add a citation

Week 7
Resource: Editing Wikipedia, pages 7–9

Everyone has begun writing their article drafts.

Week 8
Guiding framework

Thinking about Wikipedia

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

Week 9
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 10
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

Nominating your article for Did You Know

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.

Week 12
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!

Week 13
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!

Guiding questions

Week 14
Everyone should have finished all of the work they'll do on Wikipedia, and be ready for grading.