Wikipedia:School and university projects/Indiana CMCL

Hello CMCL C121 students and welcome to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit! For those of you who are unfamiliar, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is distributed freely on the web and is written entirely by volunteers. Anyone can edit (almost) any page at any time, including this one! Since every change made is kept, dedicated users can call back up old versions of articles and as a result you should feel free to edit the encyclopedia. Please, however, don't vandalize although this can be fixed it is very annoying.

You, no doubt, will want to complete your extra-credit assignment. Here is what you will need to do.

Preliminaries[edit]

First, you should create an account. Although you can edit wikipedia without one, you must register in order to receive credit for completing this assignment. You do not need to give your email address if you don't want to. Next you should learn a few basic things about wikipedia before you start editing. You can read the tutorial or start playing around in the sandbox. Please, if you just want to try things out, use the sandbox and not a regular article. If you have any problems there are lots of help pages that will help you along the way.

Adding to wikipedia[edit]

Once you feel comfortable adding to wikipedia, you are now ready to complete you assignment. Go to the most current version of the page you were assigned by following one of the links below. (Please don't use the link that Korryn gave you, as this might lead you to an older version of the article.) Keep in mind that people may have changed the article since we printed it out, so it might look a little different.

There are three things that you can do to these articles in order to complete your assignment. Before you edit, though, be sure that you are logged in. You can tell if at the top right corner of the window it has your user name and some other text like "my talk". If it says "Create and account/Log in" you are not logged in.

Adding information[edit]

If you've found information about your topic that was not in the article or was found to be wrong, you have struck gold! You should insert that information into the article. Start editing the article by clicking the "edit this page" tab at the top of the page and then insert your information. Please put it in what looks like the best place and write it in a coherent fashion. Also, please add a reference to where you found it by following the instructions for adding references in the next section. Once your finished editing put something in the edit summary box and click "Show preview". Take a look at your article and make sure it looks the way you want it to. If it does, click the save page button and you're done!

Adding references[edit]

There is a good chance that you found something in your article that was not cited. This is bad practice and you now have a chance to fix it. Before adding citations, look over the page on how to cite material on wikipedia. We don't care what format you use, but try to make it fit the article. Go to your page, click on the "edit this page" tab and add your citations. Once your finished, add an edit summary and click "show preview". Take a look at your changes and make sure they look good. If they do, click the "Save page" button and you're done.

Removing information[edit]

If you found something in the article that is false, you have found something very important that should be fixed. If the information is widely believed, but you have a source that says it isn't true edit the page and change it to say something like "it is widely believed that... but in fact... " and add your reference like you would above. If on the other hand, you've found something completely false. Remove it from the article by deleting the sentence. You should ALSO put a note on the "talk page" for that article explaining what you removed and cite the source you found that proved it was false. You can get to the talk page by clicking on the "discussion" tab at the top of the page. Then click the little "+" that is next to the discussion page and add your comment. If you don't add something to the talk page, someone might think your just vandalizing and will reinsert the false thing.

Finishing up[edit]

Once you have added everything, send an email to Korryn telling her your account name. She will then look through all of the edits you made and give you extra-credit based on how much you add. Remember she can see every edit you make, so don't make any edits you don't want her to see. If you do anything disruptive you will not receive any points. Don't worry about making mistakes, however, everybody does!

Now you're done! Wikipedia thanks you for adding information, and invites you to stay and contribute. If your interested in being more involved, check out the Community Portal and dive right in. Happy editing!