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Wikipedia: A readers guide

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This page is for members of the Glen Eira U3A who are interested in the initiative by Wikimedia Australia to run a new course which explains the free encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The course is about using Wikipedia as a reader. It will explain the background on what Wikipedia is, how it is organised, and how to get the most out of it.

This course will show you how to navigate within Wikipedia to find interesting articles.

Wikipedia is run by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation; that's why you don't see advertising on any of its pages. Wikipedia is not a publisher of original thought, it is not a directory, a manual or guidebook and not an indiscriminate collection of information. Wikipedia has always defined itself as an encyclopedia—a reference work with articles on all types of subjects. Wikipedia has lots of organising features depending on how you want to browse, like overviews, portals, lists, indexes, and categories.

Wikipedia has its own search engine, but you can also use an outside search engine such as Google to search Wikipedia. Another way to find information is to navigate from the main page via different starting points such as: categories, portals, and the A-Z index.

We will endeavour to answer any questions you have concerning Wikipedia. If time permits we will show how to write and edit articles on Wikipedia.

The course is one of the Glen Eira U3A Courses and will commence on Monday February 3, 2014 and run for six weeks.

Additional Course

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As a follow up to International Women's Day on 8 March, I am considering running a course aimed at increasing the number and quality of articles related to Victorian women on Wikipedia. The course will show the basics of Starting an article including gathering references to use as source(s) of your information and also to demonstrate notability of your article's subject matter and how to avoid common mistakes. If you would be interested in doing such a short 5 to 6 week course, commencing in April, please leave me a note at Glen Eira U3A reception with your contact details.

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. —Jimmy Wales (Co-founder of Wikipedia)


Welcome to Wikipedia

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Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world. It is created and maintained by more than 100 thousand contributors from around the world. Every month, Wikipedia receives over 388 million unique visitors. Wikipedia features more than 23 million articles in over 280 languages. It is free to use, free to edit, and free of advertisements.

After taking the Wikipedia course, you will be able to:

  • Understand how Wikipedia works
  • Understand Wikipedia's tools and concepts
  • Learn how an article evolves
  • Appreciate the attributes of a quality article


How does Wikipedia work?

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Everything on Wikipedia has been written by people like you. In fact, Wikipedia would not be the world's largest online encyclopedia without people continuously contributing information, images, and data. The English Wikipedia grows by nearly 1200 articles per day.

Many contributors (Wikipedians) share an aspiration to provide free knowledge to everyone. That is the reason why people all over the world volunteer their time to protect and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles. By allowing everyone to access, download, and reuse content, Wikipedia provides many options for sharing knowledge.

Wikipedians create so many new articles and edit existing articles so often that it would be almost impossible to have a team large enough to review and validate every single change made to the encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia relies on input from contributors around the world to create the world's largest repository of encyclopedic content.

Most people who participate in making Wikipedia better find that it is both an entertaining and rewarding exercise. While the social aspect of working toward a goal is fun, most active users are driven by their passion to distribute free knowledge to the world.


Wikipedia user interface

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The Wikipedia Main Page.

  • Talk appears at the top of each article. Talk is a place for you and other contributors to plan article structure, discuss and build consensus on article content, and ask for help from one another.
  • Recent changes shows you the edits made to all Wikipedia articles in chronological order. This allows you to monitor articles for mistakes and vandalism.
  • Help provides assistance to learn more about how Wikipedia works.
  • Wikipedia languages Wikipedia exists in over 250 languages.
  • Create account, at the top right of the page, gives you access to all features of Wikipedia and helps build your online profile.
  • View history allows you to view and compare past versions of the page.
  • Search takes you to the article that matches your query. If the article does not exist, it displays the articles in which the word(s) appears.


Life of an article

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Although the articles in Wikipedia should be detailed and well written, no one is expected to write a comprehensive article in just one draft. Articles typically start small and then mature through extensive collaboration, often following a pattern like this:

  • Most successful articles start small and consist of a summary of the topic (overview), a statement that tells why the topic is noteworthy ("the first...", "the biggest...", "the capital of...", etc.), and a source outside Wikipedia confirming the existence and importance of the topic (a credible publication or website). This basic article is called a "stub". If any of the three items are missing the community may assume the topic is not important and delete the article.
  • As other users add text and images to an article, it matures from a topical overview to a more detailed article that captures various perspectives such as historical (for example "in 1923, new factors..."), or global (for example "in Europe, this was viewed as..."). More active contributors might nominate their article for a Wikipedia peer review process. The Wikipedia peer review process involves close scrutiny of the article's quality from a broad group of Wikipedians. The process is applied to articles that have undergone extensive work. The review process involves addressing comments, questions and suggestions from the peer reviewers. Based on the feedback, the writers plan their article improvement strategy using the article's Discussion page.
  • Finally, an article reaches a level where it is so well-written, sourced, and comprehensive, that only experts can add much value to it. These articles might be designated as good articles. A few articles could be recognized by the community as being of the highest quality. These are designated as featured articles. Featured articles are displayed on the Wikipedia main page. It takes time and effort to write articles at this level. Collaborating to create a featured article is gratifying and also enhances your status in the Wikipedia community. Just as all other articles, a featured article continues to be edited.

What makes a quality article?

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A quality Wikipedia article is the result of a well defined structure, encyclopedic content, and an active community:

Structure: Providing a clear article structure helps readers find information and assists editors in keeping all aspects of a topic well organized. One way to learn about structure is to study featured articles, Wikipedia's finest articles. You can access all featured articles by going to the Wikipedia main page. At the bottom of Today's featured article, click More featured articles... then scroll down to Contents and select the subject that interests you.

Most quality articles have the following structure:

  • Lead section that summarizes the key points covered in the article. Note that the lead section is without a header.
  • The body of the article follows the lead section and includes specific headers and subheaders. A geographic location, for example, might have the following headers: history, geography, climate, economy, civic administration, demographics, and culture.
  • Appendices and footnotes appear after the body of the article. These may include bibliographies, links to other Wikipedia articles, notes and references, relevant publications, and websites.

Content: Many Wikipedians consider content the most important factor in judging an article's quality. To ensure consistent quality, the Wikipedia community created these four guidelines.

  • Provide Sources: Writers are encouraged to provide sources for further information. Every fact should be verifiable by a reliable source.
  • Neutral Point of View: Articles must be written fairly, without bias, and present previously published notable views.
  • No Promotional Content: Promotional material, how-to instructions, resumes, and sales catalogs do not belong in Wikipedia.
  • No Original Research: It is not appropriate to include your own new ideas on a subject (Wikipedia calls this original research), or your personal opinions about a subject.

Community: All contributions to Wikipedia are freely licensed to the public. That means that no editor owns any article. All contributions can and will be heavily edited by many different users. In other words, everybody can join in the decision making process. The community also uses Discussion to agree on the content structure for the article. For times when consensus is hard to reach, check out the various options available at Help > The Wikipedia community. Some writers and editors have years of experience with Wikipedia and their experience can be a valuable resource for resolving conflicts.


Tutorials

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If you are unable to attend the proposed course, or just can't wait to get started on contributing to Wikipedia take a look at the following Tutorials:

Youtube Videos

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Wikipedia’s sister projects

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As Wikipedia grew, sister projects were founded to enhance the content of the encyclopedia. Many of these have taken on a life of their own, though they are all part of the Wikimedia family, and there is constant cooperation between them. Our sister projects include:

Comments, Questions

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If you wish to make a comment, or ask a question, click on the Talk tab at the top of this page.

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