Wikipedia Project: Setup

By the end of this course, you will edit several Wikipedia articles. To help prepare you, this guide provides an introduction to contributing to Wikipedia. While actual editing won't begin until later in the course, it's important to start learning the process now in order to plan and prepare.

The goal: Wikipedia's accuracy and credibility depend on good references in its articles. Good references allow readers to verify information and explore topics further. By adding references to Wikipedia articles, this project will also serve as a valuable learning exercise: it will allow you to develop your research, critical thinking, and information evaluation skills, all while contributing to a valuable online resource. In short, this project will encourage you to draw upon all the topics we have covered since we started this course.

Readings

Please review the following Wikipedia articles to understand important editing practices.

Becoming a Wikipedia Editor

Your task is to identify three Wikipedia articles that you would like to edit by adding references to them. Over the next few weeks, you will search for information sources from the library and the web to add to these selected articles. You will collect those sources in your reference manager (RM), and then later edit the Wikipedia articles by adding these references to them.

To help prepare you for this, we have covered the following topics that will help us with our project:

  1. Information sources and resources
  2. Reference managers
  3. Web information retrieval
  4. Database information retrieval
  5. Evaluating information sources

Upcoming lessons will continue coverage of specific library and web resources, how to use them, and how to incorporate them into your work flows. Over the next few weeks, you should have collected enough material to edit the Wikipedia articles that you identify this week.

Details

For this week, your task is to identify three Wikipedia articles to edit. You may choose any articles, but note that some articles have stricter editing policies. You will analyze the article for lack of references or articles that need more references, and collect sources that will address those shortcomings using the search skills and resource knowledge you have acquired this semester. For the main project, you will need to add two references to each of the three articles. Overall, you will need to identify three sources from the library and three from the general web. At the end of this semester, in the second part of this project, you will edit the Wikipedia articles, and add your references to the articles that you identified.

For now, your job is to:

  • Create an account on Wikipedia (if you do not already have one).
  • Identify three Wikipedia articles that you would like to add references to.
  • Begin to collect and describe at least six sources over the course of the next few weeks that you will use as references.
    • Three sources will come from the library.
    • Three sources will come from the general web.