Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/University of Portsmouth/Applied Human Geography (Spring 2014)/Course description

This course is run by the University of Portsmouth Department of Geography. Each student is assigned a different stub article for a village in Britain, and asked to expand it to provide a  rounded description of the place and, in particular, an account of its historical  development. In the first half of the year they do a different assignment based on fieldwork in the local area, but in the Wikipedia-based assignment the villages are at some distance from us and students are expected NOT to visit. In practice, this means they must rely mainly on other online resources, and they are expected to include very systematic references to their sources, which should usually work as hyperlinks.

Clearly, it is preferable that villages be written about by their own inhabitants, so we carry out a series of checks:


 * That the existing article is very short, and contains no socio-economic statistics other than the population in 2001 and/or 2011. We in fact start by using Toolserver to select only very short articles.


 * That the article is editable, but has not been edited other than by a bot for at least 12 months.


 * That the article is not actually about a parish whose main settlements are covered by separate and more substantial articles.


 * That there is an actual settlement there, visible on a modern map.


 * That this is not just a village but currently a Civil Parish. We check this by making sure it is included in the government's Neighbourhood Statistics site, which will mean that a substantial amount of data from the 2001 and 2011 censuses will be available.


 * That it has a substantial past existence as a Civil Parish, and in particular that a population time series covering at least three censuses is available on our own web site A Vision of Britain through Time. One of the sub-assignments is to construct a population time series graph combining modern data from Neighbourhood Statistics with these historical data.


 * That the Vision of Britain site includes a description of the village, computerised from a 19th century gazetteer.


 * That the Vision of Britain site includes occupational statistics computed from the individual returns from the 1881 census.

Provided all these conditions are met, we are fairly confident both that the article is not being actively developed by someone with local knowledge, and that there is additional information available which can be usefully added by someone without personal knowledge of the village. Two blog posts about this course are here:


 * Telling the stories of rural England with Wikipedia
 * Using Vision of Britain and Wikipedia in education

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