Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Vanderbilt University/Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples (fall 2023)

Course description: Indigenous peoples have been intensely involved in struggles over their sovereign, legal, treaty, and human rights for centuries. This course looks at these efforts in the Americas from the people-to-people treaty making to the rise of local and transnational indigenous movements in the second half of the twentieth century. We will consider how indigenous peoples both respond to legal frameworks and press their positions into national and international human rights standards, on issues ranging from governance to cultural survival, from environmental management to language policy.

Students will critically assess the place of indigenous people in North American history articles, help put indigenous people on the map in Wikipedia, and create or thoroughly revise a Wikipedia article relevant to a research project.

Main article writing goal: Your goal for this assignment is to produce a page that meets the Good Article criteria (WP:GA?). That page explains these criteria, which can be summarized as well-written, with a defined structure, well-researched, broad in its coverage, and neutral. Your final article should be comprehensive and engaging without being excessively detailed. Length is not the primary criterion for judging your work, but contributions of fewer than 2,000 words of added or thoroughly revised prose are inadequately short. Wikipedia recommends that their articles not exceed 40 thousand characters (roughly 8,000 words).

Please note that all assignments are due by Sunday Night at the end of the assigned week. (Even though, for now, the calendar system uses Sunday to Saturday weeks.)

The Wikipedia Project Assignment sheet is on Brightspace and also avaliable here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqofkuo7mqrl8nr/Wikipedia%20Project%20Assignment%202020.pdf?dl=0

Some resources for researching and writing on this topic are here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Carwil/Indigenous_Rights_Resources

Writing advice: The Perfect Wikipedia Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_perfect_article | Writing Better Articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_articles