User:PhDeviate/WGS Assignment

One of your options for a final project for WGS111 ("Women, Culture, and History" at Suffolk University) will be to craft a well-researched and cited article for WikiProject Women's History. You may choose any historical figure, event, or topic related to the themes of this course, as long as its existing Wikipedia article is new and incomplete.

Why edit Wikipedia?

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but according to the New York Times, only about 15 percent of the people who've ever edited Wikipedia are women. (The WikiMedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has a woman (Sue Gardner) as its executive director.) One of the side-effects of this is that Wikipedia articles about women, especially historical women, tend to be underdeveloped compared to topics lots of guys care about (for example, military history.)

If you choose this assignment, you'll learn how to research, write, and edit a good Wikipedia entry, and you'll get involved with a community of people (WikiProject Women's History) who are actively working on increasing women's participation in Wikipedia. Your research will become part of Wikipedia and will be read by people all over the world.

How to get started

In order to complete this assignment, you'll need to follow a few steps:

The 3 sections of a Wikipedia page

(Give a sample article that shows good examples of how these pages work) Content

Talk/Discussion

History

Creating a user account and a basic user page

First, read about getting started as a Wikipedia editor.

Now, create a Wikipedia user account following the directions provided by Wikipedia. You do not have to use your real name on the account (and there can be good reasons not to, but you must use this same account in order to receive full credit for your work.

Learning to edit

Wikipedia is written in a simple text format; it can be a challenge to learn, but there's plenty of help available. Start with the Tutorial and work your way through the instructions it provides. You may also want to read how to edit a page.

While you're practicing, you can test out your editing on the Sandbox page. You might want to consult the Cheatsheet for help remembering how to format things (italics, bold, links, and such.)

Your user page

Get to know about user pages in general, and find your own user page. Practice editing it. You don't need to include any personal information on your user page, but it's where other Wikipedia users ("editors") will go to find out more about you. For examples of what people put on their user pages, see the list of participants in WikiProject Women's History, most of which have links to user pages.

If you're interested in how someone made their user page look a particular way, remember that you can always click on the "edit" link there to see what they did. (Just don't edit their page by accident! That's bad etiquette.)

Your talk page

Every entry on Wikipedia has a talk page where discussion about that article happens; look for the "Talk" link just above the article's title. (The bell hooks entry's talk page is at Talk:Bell_hooks; there, you can read other editors' questions and complaints about the article.)

Users have talk pages too. My talk page is at User_talk:PhDeviate. Once you've created an account, leave me a note there. Be sure to sign your note with four tildes (~~~~), which Wikipedia will expand into a date and time signature for you. (Learn more about signatures if you want to customize yours.)

Your watchlist

You have a watchlist where you can keep track of changes being made to a page you care about. For the purposes of this project, you should add at least 3 pages to your watchlist:

This assignment page
This assignment's talk page
The WikiProject Women's History talk page

Once you've selected an article to work on, you'll also want to add that article and its talk page to your watchlist so that you can see what other people are doing to improve it and when they comment on your work.

Creating your own sandbox page

Make your own sandbox page as a sub-page of your user page. To do this:

go to your user page, and edit the URL in the address bar by adding a forward slash (/) and the name of the page you would like to create. Hit Enter.

For example: My user name is PhDeviate. My user page is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PhDeviate. When on this page, if I go to the address bar and add to it, like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PhDeviate/Sandbox, the wiki software will begin the process of creating a page for my final project. Navigate to this page, and the system will show you where to click to create and start editing that page.
Once you've created your sandbox page, add a link to it from your user page.

You'll follow this same process to make your own copy of the article you decide to edit.

Selecting an article and beginning work

Identifying an article you want to work on

Visit the home page for WikiProject Women's History and learn more about the project. To get a sense of the other people who work on it, look at the members page and read the talk page, where the editors discuss what they're working on. (Your ability to follow the goals and policies of WikiProject Women's History will be part of your assessment for this assignment.)

WikiProject Women's History, like other Wikipedia projects, rates existing articles for their quality and importance using a set of assessment standards. Read them to get a sense of what makes an article both high-quality and important.

Here's a count of the existing articles the project is working on and their importance/quality assessments:

Women's History articles by quality and importance
Quality	Importance
Quality	Top	High	Mid	Low	NA	???	Total
FA	4	35	67	121			227
FL		2	1	7			10
FM					187		187
A		2	1	1			4
GA	2	64	281	533		6	886
B	25	401	1,294	3,336		131	5,187
C	35	448	2,668	11,522	1	1,178	15,852
Start	12	256	2,691	20,119	3	5,492	28,573
Stub	1	8	545	8,944	2	2,752	12,252
List	1	36	278	600	6	60	981
Category					5,210		5,210
Disambig					42		42
File					69		69
Portal					1		1
Project					196		196
Template					171		171
NA		14	30	264	566		874
Other					59		59
Assessed	80	1,266	7,856	45,447	6,513	9,619	70,781
Unassessed				2		9	11
Total	80	1,266	7,856	45,449	6,513	9,628	70,792
WikiWork factors (?)		ω = 296,810			Ω = 4.72

Using the grid above, identify an existing article which has a quality rating of "Start" or "Stub." For this project, I suggest that you look at articles of "top," "high," and "mid" importance, since they're most likely to merit a 2000-word article. If you want to write an entirely new article, pick a topic from the WP:WMNHIST list of requested articles.

Leave a note on my talk page with a link to the article that you'd like to work on, and add that page and its talk page to your Watchlist. I'll contact you to approve your selection.

Optional: making your own copy of the article

Once I've approved your article selection, you'll probably want to make your own copy of that article that you can edit, at least until you get the hang of how Wikipedia editing works. This will give you a chance to do your own editing out of public view before making it part of the real article.

To do this, you'll use the same process you followed to make your own sandbox page. Once you've made a new page, cut and paste the entire existing article into yours.

Note: It is possible not to copy the original article, and to edit the entry the world sees. For the purposes of this assignment, I'm discouraging you from doing this, at least for your first pass through the article. What would be excellent would be to make a copy for your user page, and then make a note on the article talk page (if you have chosen an article that already exists) that you are making a substantial revision to the page, and to link from the talk page to the copy you've made.

Improving the article

Note: what I've written below assumes you're editing your own copy of the article, but it applies equally if you're editing the article in place.

When you start working on your own copy of the article, make a new topic on the main article's talk page to notify readers that you're working on improving the article, and provide a link to your improved-article-in-progress.

Research the topic you've selected using books, articles, and reputable internet sources, and write up what you've learned in a way that's clear and easy for a general reader to understand. You should follow Wikipedia's guidelines for citing your sources; most of your citations will probably be in the form of footnotes.

As with many academic assignments, working in small chunks may be helpful. When you've written a few sentences or a paragraph that you think are good enough to include in the main entry, copy your changes over to the main entry.

Getting feedback from other editors

TODO

Editing and Community Interactions

TODO

Grading criteria

(TODO: How many sources, of what kinds, do good entries need to cite?)

I will assess your article by examining the article's history section and seeing what you've added. I'll also look at your contributions page to see how you're participating in the project as a whole.

Extra points will be given for active participation in and engagement with the wikipedia community by requesting feedback on your drafts and revising accordingly. Look carefully at the articles on this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women's_History labeled "Featured Articles." While it is not required that you submit it to general review by the wikipedia community (required in order to achieve a quality ranking of "GA" or "FA"), engaging the larger wikipedia community may prove useful for the development of your project.

In order to keep projects commensurate with each other, you are required to produce between 2000 and 2500 words for this assignment. The final result may not be 2000-2500 words in length, if, for example, you draft a 1500 word entry, receive feedback on it that causes you to delete 250 words and write 500 more, you will have ultimately written 2000 words, though your entry is 1750 long. This does not mean that you are encouraged to produce and re-produce inferior drafts in order to have written adequate numbers of words.