Wikipedia article authoring
This assignment asks you to write a completely new Wikipedia article for a person who doesn’t currently have one. My goals for this assignment are that you will learn:
- a new form of typesetting. Wikipedia has a specific syntax for links, which is similar to Markdown but not quite the same.
- quality reference-finding skills. In journalistic writing, you rarely make direct citations to where you got your information, but that doesn’t mean you don’t reference source material. You need every statement to be factual and backed up by proof. Writing Wikipedia articles gives you the experience of explicitly writing out those sources.
- a neutral writing style. Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, it can’t include opinions in any way.
- some form of versioning. Every time you make an edit in Wikipedia, you need to describe what you did in that edit, to help keep a record about how the article was built up. We’re not going to be using git and GitHub in this course, but I think the versioning in Wikipedia is a good exposure to the base ideas.
The resources on our Wiki edu are designed to help you as you start working on your article.
For the first draft, I would like you to attempt to author a “full article.” This means filling out as many sections as you can about the person, based on the references you were able to find. The sections may include Work/Career, Personal Life, Awards, Education, or whatever might be relevant. You can look at other Wikipedia pages for inspiration. Here are a few examples from my previous class who did this exercise! Those pages can also help you see what (approximate) length I am looking for. Most are fairly short, but have sections and are full of references. It’s been over a year since my students wrote these articles, so some have been added on to more than others.
link your article at least one other place by editing another Wikipedia page
I’ll be honest and say that it’s pretty unlikely everyone’s article will actually be accepted by Wikipedia, so that’s not a criterion for grading. Instead, I just want to see that you have done it.
Peer editing
I have assigned you another student’s Wikipedia page to edit. Your job is to read through the article at least three times. We are going to do more direct editing than is suggested in the Wikipedia training, but will follow the general guiding framework.
I would like you to do least two “Publish changes” with Edit summaries on your peer’s article:
- The first pass is for spelling and grammar. Read the article outloud to yourself, and change anything that sounds off. You can call this “spelling and grammar” or similar in the edit summary.
- In the second pass, try to find at least one additional place to put a link out to another Wikipedia page. Write what link(s) you added in the edit summary.
These are small things that you see, that are easier for you to just change rather than to write them a comment. As you work, consider these bigger-picture questions:
- First, what does the article do well? Is there anything from your review that impressed you? Any turn of phrase that described the subject in a clear way?
- What changes would you suggest the author apply to the article? Why would those changes be an improvement?
- What’s the most important thing the author could do to improve the article?
- Did you notice anything about the article you reviewed that could be applicable to your own article? Let them know!
You’ll write up your answers to this question as a message on your peer’s talk page, as explained at the end of the Wikipedia training.