Post on 16-Jan-2016
Introduction to Wikipedia & Wikipedia assignment
Highly popular
Wide variety of uses
Wide variety of uses
The encyclopedia that anyone can edit
The encyclopedia that anyone can edit
Goals of Wikipedia assignment
• Become an “expert” in some topic relevant to the course
• Provide a public good– Return some of what you’ve learned back to the world by
improving Wikipedia • Become a better writer• Become a more informed consumer of digital
information• Provide common ground for class
– Wikipedia as an interesting online group/community
Digita lLiteracy
Wikipedia Culture
Critical Thinking
Course Material
Writing Literature Review
Writing Clearly
Reliability of Sources
Explain Public
Article Topic
Wikipedia Technical
1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
How valuable was the Wikipedia writing assignment in help-ing you learn this material? (N = 230 students in 37 courses)
History
• Founded in Jan 15, 2001 as a feeder to Nupedia, an expert-authored, peer-reviewed, free encyclopedia
• Co-founders– Jimmy Wales – Larry Sanger
• Heavily subsidized by bomis.com (1996), Wales’ search portal, ad and porn company
Jimmy Wales
Larry Sanger
Growth• English version
– ~4.9 M articles in English language Wikipedia
– 30k active editors/month (>5 edits)
– Doubling number of articles every 40 weeks
– Slower growth starting in 2007• All versions
– 290 languages– 11 language versions > 100K
articles– 22M editors over all time
• Spin-offs– Wiktionary, wikibooks,
wikiversity, wikinews, wikispecies, wikiquote, wikisource
Article growth per month
Misalignment in Wikipedia: Iron Man
13
10,189 words
Major source of information on most psychological concepts
Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology were impoverished or out of date
Start Quality
Little content
687 words
8 references
Wikipedia Assignment
Substantially improve an existing one on a topic relevant to the course
Original
1 article combing bio
and theory
Sections: 7
Words: 831
Images: 0
References: 5
External links: 7
New
2 pages with bio
separated from theory
Sections: 27
Words: 5,669
Images: 1
References: 35
External links: 18
Editing
Revisions: History of the articleMar 17, 2010 Sep 7, 2015
Article discussion pages: Where coordination gets done
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carnegie_Mellon_University#Rankings
Principles and policies
What Wikipedia is not
To get started
• Look through the assignment at http://orgcom15.hciresearch.org/content/wikipedia-assignment
• Create a Wikipedia account & user page, and then enroll in Communication in Groups & Organizations on the Wikipedia educational portal <http://dashboard.wikiedu.org/courses/Carnegie_Mellon_University/Communication_in_Groups_and_Organizations__(Fall_2015)/enroll/bpowhali>.
• Then start the training.
Timeline & important deadlines
Week Activity
2 Create a Wikipedia account & user page, and then enroll; Training
3 Post 3 to 5 potential Wikipedia articles to course forum
4 Add 1–2 sentences of new information to a Wikipedia article
5 Select and article and partner, and start planning improvements.
6 Meet with the course instructor to discuss your article
7 Move portions of your edits into real Wikipedia article
8 Choose articles to peer review
9 Complete first draft. This is the version your peers will review.
10 Complete peer review and copy editing
11 Respond to the peer & community feedback about your article.
12 Continue to improve your article.
13 Finalize and submit the final article & reflection essay