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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Piotrus (talk | contribs) at 22:45, 29 August 2005 (→Exercises for students). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Introduction for Wikipedians

Introduction for students is in the next section.

At an introductory course to sociology (0005 Societies) at the University of Pittsburgh we will ask students to write several articles at Wikipedia (of course, encyclopedic ones, we are well aware of Wikipedia:No orginal research policy). There will probably be around 40 groups of 5 studends each. Each student will have a separate wiki account, and each group will be assigned a sociology-stub and asked to expand it to the level as close to that of a Featured Article as they can. The Teaching Assistants for this course, Piotr Konieczny and Amy, will take care of introducing studends to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines. The course leader is The main page of this project is this page. The project will begin in September 2005 and should end by December 2005. Please direct any comments to my user talk page or to the project talk page.

Introduction for students

Please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students and the extremly helpful page of Help:Contents. There are many ways you can familiarise yourself with how Wikipedia works and at the same time help with improving Wikipedia. Wikipedia:Tutorial is a also a very good place to start your adventure with wiki.

Before making any major edits, it is recommened that you create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definetly need to have an account before attempting to work on any of the excercises in the next section (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have completed the excercise). After you create an account, please find your name in the relevant row of the Completed assignments page and add a link to your user page in the 'Student Wikipedia userpage' column in the row with your name.

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project subordinate to the University of Pittsburgh. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our '0005 Societies' course is the first one at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, so please try to think what impression do you want other Wikipedians to have with our university - and with yourselves.

You should expect that Dr. Larsen, TAs (Amy and Piotr), other students, your friends and even (or especially) other wikipedia editiors (not affiliated with our course) will leave you various messages on your talk pages. When working on the below excercises, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages as often as you check your email (I strongly recommend you read 'as often' as at least 'daily'). Whenever you have a new message and are logged to Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message 'You have new messages' on every Wikipedia page you access. To make this message dissapear, you should click on it and read the message. Note that it is customary to leave new messages at the bottom of the talk/discussion pages, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk pages. If you want to leave somebody a message, make sure you are editing his or hers talk page, not their user page. Remember to sign your talk and discussion messages.

Some other useful tips: whenever you are done with an edit and want to save a page, fill out the edit summary box and view a preview of the page after your edit to make sure it looks as you actually want it to look like. You may find the page history tool and watchlist tools to be very useful when you want to check what changes by other editors have been made to the article(s) you are working on.

Please direct any questions to this page discussion page or Piotr's talk page or Amy's talk page. You are welcome to send Piotr and Amy emails or drop to see us in our office hours and ask about Wikipedia how-to, but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

After you familiarise yourself with how Wikipedia works, it is time to put those lessons into practice. This is important; not only it will give you experience in wiki technology before you begin your Working Paper, but the successfull completion of the below excersises in itself will impact your quizz/participation score. After you finish doing an excersise, please leave an information at the Completed assignments page.

Important note: make sure you are logged into your account before making any edits. If you are not logged in, we cannot verify who has done the edits, thus we will be unable to recognize your work and grade you on it. In other words, if you do any edits while not logged in, we will not count those edits toward your grade in this course.

As mentioned in the introduction section above, each student should let his Teaching Assistant know what his Wikipedia account nickname is by linking his Wikipedia account next to his name on the Completed assignments page. In the same manner, make sure you link the article you are working in during the excercises on that page.

Excercise 1

First, try expanding and improving an existing article. Wikipedia covers nearly every aspect of our life and culture, so you should be able to find something connected to your hobbies and interests, but for this excersice you should preferably find a subject related to sociology. The following pages may be useful to you at that stage:

Make sure you have read the guides mentioned in the introduction section and familiarised yourself with how wiki works before attempting to do this excercise. You may want to refresh your memory by rereading this page:

To complete this excercise, it is enough to expand any one article with a single meaningful sentence. Of course, if you feel you can do more, feel free to do so. If you manage to expand (in a meaningful way) a stub article that it no longer qualifies as a stub, then you may receive some additional points. Make sure you mark the excercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This excercise should be completed by

Excercise 2

After you are familiar with how to expand an existing article, you should now try to create a new article. As in the previous excercise, there are several pages that will help you find a subject for your article:

However, before you create the new article, make sure it has the appopriate name - it you haven't so far, you may want to read Wikipedia:Naming conventions. And if you are unsure how to create a new article, you will want to read Wikipedia:Starting a new page.

Now that you have created your article, you should make sure it fits several important criteria.

  1. It is important that an article is not orphaned - i.e. it should be linked from several other artricles. To learn more about this, take one of the existing orphaned article and link them into appropriate places. See Wikipedia:Orphaned articles for more details on this.
  2. It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
  3. It is likely the article you have created is a stub. In that case, make sure you assign it to the appopriate stub category.
  4. It is extremly important that the article is references. Please see Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:References. You can use Wikipedia:External links as references for this excercise, but bear in mind that for your Working Paper you will be required to use academic books/journals as references as well.
  5. If the article is long enough, it should have an introductory paragraph. See Wikipedia:Lead for details on how such a paragraph should look like.

To complete this excercise, you should create a new article and make sure it fits the above criteria. If you manage to expand (in a meaningful way) a stub article that it no longer qualifies as a stub, then you may receive some additional points. Make sure you mark the excercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This excercise should be completed by

There are many other places you may want to check if you want to improve your Wikipedia-editing skills by editing Wikipedia. Feel free to check the following pages:

Working Paper

A list of short, stub sociology-related articles selected by Dr. Larsen and/or the TAs will be available here before work on the Working Paper will begin. Each group of students should chose one article and work on it. Make sure you report your choice on the Completed assignments page and cross out the article from the list below (you can cross out the articles by using <s></s> tags before and after the word to achieve the following effect). Note that this means that the groups which decide early on their articles will have a wider choice and the groups which wait until the end will have few articles to chose from. If instead of expanding an existing stub you would like to create a new article from scratch, this is possible, however make sure you consult the subject of this article with your TA and receive their approval before stating the project.

You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools and look creative comments on your article. If you manage to make your article a Wikipedia:Featured Article, you may receive additional points. However, please refrain from voting for each other's articles during this process (note also that anonymous and new user votes are commonly disregarded during FA voting process to prevent any abuses. In additon, please not that any attempt to cheat on Wikipedia will be regarded as seriously as academic plagiarism.

    • List of all sociology-stubs. We will chose the most appoproate stubs for our 'Societies' course and list them below for your convinience.

Make sure you mark the excercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This assignment is due by

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