Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Boston College/History of the American West (2013 Q1)

Hi,

I enjoyed presenting about Wikipedia to your class. I hope that you found it to be a useful introduction to editing. As you work on this assignment, please feel free to leave a message on my talk page if you have any questions.

Here are a few links that you may find helpful as references:
 * You can download the PowerPoint I gave here:.
 * Cheatsheet - quick list of the Wikipedia syntax
 * Manual of style (and subpages) - a useful reference for any style questions
 * Neutral point of view - our core content policies
 * Verifiability
 * No original research
 * WikiProject American Old West - WikiProjects are collaborations amongst editors on a specific topic. What's particularly useful is that WikiProjects break down all of the articles on a topic in terms of their quality and their importance. There are lists on this page of the best articles on the Old West that you can use as samples.

Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about images, a subject that I didn't have time for during class. Wikipedia is somewhat limited in the images that we can use because of copyright laws. However, any image taken before 1923 or any work of the Federal government is considered in the public domain and okay to use.



Searching for images:
 * Start at Wikimedia Commons . This is a repository of 16 million images and other files that are specifically cleared for Wikipedia's (or anyone's use). These include 125,000 images from the National Archives. Maybe you'll find something on your topic. As a quick demonstration, I chose an 1876 image of gold miners in Deadwood, South Dakota. I found the image by browsing through a list of different categories of national archives images (it's probably more efficient to search) and clicking on one that interested me. To insert that image into this page, I copied the title and pasted it into th edit box and added the square brackets  and  to make it a link and then added a few parameters to put the image on the right side of the page and to shrink it down. The final result is:
 * [[File:Mining crew drifting for gold below discovery point, Deadwood, Dak. Terr. Bystanders pose for photographer S. J. Morrow, - NARA - 533169.tif|250px|right]]
 * You can find out more about how to format pictures for Wikipedia at Picture tutorial.
 * If you can't find a picture that you like at Wikimedia Commons, consider searching here: search.creativecommons.org. This site allows you to search Google Images or Flickr for images that are licensed in a way that they can be used on Wikipedia.
 * You may also have some luck searching the Library of Congress website at loc.gov.

Good luck, and please don't hesitate to let me know if you have any questions! GabrielF (talk) 17:18, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Sandboxes looking great!
Hi, all! I took a peek at a few of your sandboxes (those who've edited in the last day or so), and it looks like you're making really great and substantive expansions to the articles. Great job; I can't wait to see how your articles look once you move your content to the article namespace! Keep up the great work :), JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 19 March 2013 (UTC)