Wikipedia:Writing Wikipedia Articles course/February 2014
 | This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. It was a course on how to write a Wikipedia article that last ran in 2017. |
|
Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond | 
|
| a free six week course |
| HOW TO ENROLL |
|---|
After each step, be sure to come back to this page! Here's a shortcut: enwp.org/WP:WIKISOO/NOW
|
- In February, we are pleased to offer this course in conjunction with a graduate course at the University of Mississippi: Topics in Higher Education/Open Educational Resources and Practices (Edhe 670). Some of our students will be enrolled in this class, while others have no connection with the university; but all will cover the same course materials. (Students may wish to join us for another course immediately preceding this one, running February 5 to 19: Open Content Licensing for Educators. This is entirely optional!)
Writing Wikipedia Articles is a free six-week course offered in collaboration with the School of Open, and conducted (mostly!) here on Wikipedia.
If you can read Wikipedia, you can learn to build it! In this course you will learn about the software, rules, and cultural values that drive and support this ubiquitous and community-built online encyclopedia. We will focus on articles about openness in education: open educational resources, MOOCs, Creative Commons licenses and more. Students will learn about the values and culture that have driven hundreds of thousands of volunteers to build Wikipedia, which in its 12-year history has generated millions of free articles in hundreds of languages. We will cover the technical skills needed to edit articles, as well as share practical insights into the site's collaborative norms and social dynamics. Students will gain confidence in taking on technical challenges and editorial disagreements, and will graduate with an ability to compose useful articles, and a sophisticated understanding of how Wikipedia works, and how to search and read it.
Students who successfully complete the course and the final project will earn the WikiSOO Burba Badge.
Course calendar
The course will begin between February 20 and 27; exact class dates and times will be announced shortly. It will be conducted during the day in North America's Central Time Zone.
Week 1: Wikipedia under the hood
What is Wikipedia? What has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to volunteer their time to build millions of articles in hundreds of languages? We begin with a survey of the project's history, values, and culture.
We will explore how learners increasingly use Wikipedia as scaffolding, as they begin to build a general understanding of a topic. Herein lies an opportunity: how can we work toward a broader understanding of a topic like Open Educational Resources (OER)? Does Wikipedia help us speak a common language about openness in education? If not, what can be done to improve that? The session will conclude with practical steps to create a Wikipedia account and get started editing.
Week 2: Who am I to edit Wikipedia? Identity & collaboration
We survey issues of expertise, credentials, anonymity, privacy, conflicts of interest (COI). What are Wikipedia's standards? What kinds of conflict arise around editor identity and behavior? How can they be avoided or resolved? We will also examine avenues for on-wiki collaboration.
We will look at both success stories and controversies in Wikipedia's history, and discuss best practices. This will lead into an exploration of how to find and work with Wikipedians who share your interests, or who can help you solve problems.
Week 3: What is quality?
We explore the concept of quality in Wikipedia, as well as reviewing and expanding on Week 2's focus on communicating with other Wikipedians.
We consider several peer review processes within Wikipedia, and explore articles of low and high quality. We'll also look at techniques for gathering information about a page. For instance, how many Wikipedians are "watching" an article for changes? How many page views have there been in the last month? We'll also talk about how Wikipedians with similar interests find each other and collaborate to improve the site, and how you can get involved in projects outside our class.
Week 4: Build it bigger - Roundtable one
We'll look at how a Wikipedia article can evolve and improve over time, and how a good Wikipedia article can impact the world. A panel of experienced Wikipedia community members will share their experiences. We will discuss topics like how to build up a Wikipedia article on a smaller topic, where authoritative sources are hard to come by, and how Wikipedians work together.
Week 5: The deep dive - Roundtable two
We will hear from experts in open educational resources, in a panel discussion exploring how Wikipedia's coverage of this topic can be improved.
Week 6: The takeaway and student showcase
By now, students should be nearing completion of the final project! Students will have an opportunity to present their work (whether or not it is complete) to the rest of the class.
In this final week, we will helping students cross the finish line with the final project; we will devote more time to questions and discussion than we typically do in class sessions.
Helping you find ways to remain engaged with Wikipedia: how to find, join, and get engaged with a WikiProject; how to find local Wikipedians to work with; how to help your peers get involved with Wikipedia (or at least appreciate the value of your contributions!)
How it works (overview)
The page you are currently looking at is our course's "home page".
| Several easy ways to get back to this home page |
|---|
Finally, you can put the shortcut on a Wikipedia page -- like your user page -- for easy reference! We'll cover this in the first class. |
Each week, visit the class page for that week, linked in the #Course calendar section above. That will tell you everything you need to know for that week: what we'll cover in the session, what the homework is, and links to informative videos and text documents. You can get to each week's class page from the "navigation box" at the very bottom of this page. Watch for updates on this page too -- we'll be adding information throughout the course to help you all keep in touch and move through your projects!
We conduct weekly classes and lab sessions using the webinar software Blackboard Collaborate (details below).
The central place to interact with us, and with other students, is the course's "talk page" (which we share with WikiProject Open). You can always get there by typing the shortcut WT:OPEN into the Wikipedia search bar; or from most of our course pages, you can click "talk" near the upper left corner of the screen.
For those who use Twitter or other social media, we use the hashtag #WIKISOO (which stands for Wikipedia/School of Open), and we mainly tweet from the account @CommOER. Students will be working in small teams, and you can decide within your team if you wish to use additional tools like Google Hangout, IRC, etc.
Tools we use for live weekly classes & labs
Each week you will find a link to connect with Blackboard Collaborate, the webinar tool we use to conduct our classes, at the top of that week's wiki page.
You'll need a Mac, Windows, or Linux-based computer; an up-to-date version of Java; headphones (or speakers) and microphone (optional, but desirable); and a reliable internet connection (wired Ethernet connection if available).
If you'd like to learn more about Blackboard Collaborate now, these may help: Blackboard Collaborate overview • Getting Started for Participants Quick Reference Guide (PDF) • Blackboard Collaborate Support Portal (with OS and Java check!)
We'll also use Etherpad during the class and lab to take collaborative notes.
Student teams
One of your first tasks in this class will be to join a team, and introduce yourself! Instructions will be provided before the first class. (Be sure to take the survey and enroll properly in the course, so we know how to contact you!) Teams will consist of four people. If students come and go, we might adjust, trying to keep them within about 3–5 people.
You will interact with your team every week between classes. This may be as short as sending them a brief note to say what article(s) you worked on, or to share why something you read was interesting or worthwhile. Some students will find their teams become highly active, while for others they are just a touchstone for your homework assignments; please feel free to experiment, find what works for you, and report back!
Lab sessions, getting help, and working together
We offer weekly lab sessions for homework, asking questions, presenting ideas, etc. These are less structured than the regular class. We highly recommend that you attend; students in previous classes have found a lot of value in these sessions. Homework may be taken on in your own time, but the labs are a great opportunity for peer support and extra help. Labs are held at the same time of day as our class sessions, on Thursdays. Course instructors Pete and Sara will be online for (at minimum) one hour, and we invite students to continue working together following the scheduled session.
Our main tool is Blackboard Collaborate, same as our class sessions: j.mp/wikiSOOconf. During lab we also use an etherpad page for shared note-taking.
If you have a question or comment during the week, please post it on our class talk page. This is our main tool for ongoing discussions.
Please feel free to use other communication channels, especially within your team! Some tools that have worked well with our course's previous rounds:
- Twitter (hashtag #WIKISOO)
- Freenode IRC, in the #oer channel
- Skype
- Google Hangout
- Jitsi
Grading
Students are expected to work toward the WikiSOO Burba Badge. To earn the badge, there are two requirements:
- Do one of the following:
- Start a new Wikipedia article, and bring it to at least "Start" class on the Wikipedia quality scale; or
- Improve an existing Wikipedia article at least one level on the quality scale.
- Make 200 or more edits to Wikipedia
Past students have done some incredible work, and been awarded the WikiSOO Burba Badge for the efforts. Some examples include:
- open educational resources
- PhET Interactive Simulations
- Recursos educativos abiertos (Spanish article about OER)
Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics and Beyond (Round 3, August–September 2013) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Classes are on Tuesdays, lab sessions on Thursdays (for the Americas, Europe, and Africa). Class time is 15:00 UTC; click here to find your local time. | ||||||
| | |||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||