LEVEL 7
- Dialogue 1
I don't need to welcome you anymore. You're becoming one of the regulars. It's nice to start feeling like you can make a positive contribution to a project, which is what you're learning how to do. This mission you'll do a little more, helping put your new understanding of adding references to use, and getting to know more about Wikipedia. It looks like your skills are needed again. Have fun!
- Action 1 - New messages
Click here to access your talk page.
- Message 1
Oh my gosh, {username} that was so great of you to add references. I get it now, but I just don't know how to do it. Maybe you can explain it to me later. Meanwhile I gathered some more sources on the article's talk page--good, reliable published sources, and wondered if you could add them for me. I know... but you're so good at it! I have to run out, but let me know what you think. --GaiaGirl1988
- Interface 1
Choose a reply
- Uch, I hate lazy people!
- I'll do it today, but just today, and never, ever, ever, never again.
- Sure, glad to help. It's nice to put my new skills to use. I'm just getting comfortable with it but can show you how later. Have a good day!
- Dialogue 2
Good choice. Others on Wikipedia are often just as uninformed as you or more about some issues. Everyone is in a position to help eachother. That said, it's perfectly fine to tell someone you're busy or don't have an interest in a particular task, just try to do it nicely. Let's get back to the Earth article. Use the Search bar to navigate to the page.
- Action 2 - Highlight search
Type your search term (Earth) into the search bar and hit Enter
- Action 3 - Load updated page
- Article 1
The Earth is the third planet from the Sun. It is one of the four terrestrial planets in hour Solar System. This means most of its mass is solid. The other three are Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The Earth is also called the Blue Planet, "Planet Earth", and "Terra".
The Earth is home to millions of species of plants and animals, including humans. Earth is the only planet in the galaxy known to support life. Earth has many places that are suitable for humans to live in, although some areas of the planet can be very dangerous, too.
About 71% of Earth's surface is covered in salt water oceans. Earth is the only place in the Solar System where liquid water is known to exist at present. The other 29% is made of rocky land in the shape of continents and islands. Earth interacts with other objects in the Solar System, particularly the Sun and the Moon. The Earth orbits or goes around the Sun roughly once every 365.25 days. One spin is called a day and one orbit around the Sun is called a year. This is why there are 365 days in a year. Earth has only one moon, known as the Moon.
History
Shape and structure
Earth is a terrestrial planet. This means it is made up of solid rock unlike a gas giant such as Jupiter. It is the largest out of the four terrestrial planets in mass and diameter. The Earth's shape is an oblate spheroid. This means it is basically a sphere but it bulges around the middle. The circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers; the average width of the Earth is about 12,700 kilometers. The highest point on Earth is the peak of Mount Everest at 8,848 meters above sea level. The lowest natural point is the bottom of the Mariana Trench at 10,911 meters below sea level. Because of the bulge at the middle or the equator, the farthest point from the Earth's center is the top of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador.
Inside, the Earth is similar to the other terrestrial planets. It has an outer, solid rock layer called the crust. Everything that lives on Earth is on top of the crust. Below that is a layer of thick, semi-liquid rock called the mantle. Under that is a thin liquid layer called the outer core and then the solid iron inner core. The thickness of the crust changes. On land the average is between 30–50 kilometers thick. Under the oceans in some places it is only 6 kilometers thick.
Tectonic plates
The Earth is the only terrestrial planet with active plate tectonics. Due to plate tectonics the Earth's crust basically floats on the thick liquid rock of the mantle below. The crust is split up into parts called plates. These plates interact as they move about causing earthquakes and creating volcanoes and mountain ranges. The place where plates meet are called plate boundaries. There are three types of plate boundary: constructive, destructive and transform.
Surface
The Earth changes greatly from place to place. Over 70% of the Earth surface is covered by water. The underwater surface has many of the same features as the above sea with volcanoes, mountains and trenches or canyons. The 30% not covered by water is mostly forests, deserts plains, mountains and plateaus. Human civilization has led to increasing urbanisation — the growth of cities. Many things can change the surface of the Earth. Plate tectonics is main cause of change but there are others such as erosion from wind and rain, erosion by the oceans or meteorite impacts. There are three main types of rock that make up the Earth's surface: Igneous rock is made when magma or lava from the mantle reaches the surface and cools. As it gets colder it turns into rock or solidifies. Sedimentary rock is made from sediment, like sand or small bits of other rock, that has been crushed and packed tightly together. Metamorphic rock which is made when either of the other two types are changed by high or low temperatures and pressures.
Atmosphere
A planet's atmosphere is a layer of different gases surrounding it. It is kept there by gravity. The Earth's atmosphere is made of about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and small amounts of other gases. This mixture is often called air. Further up there is a layer of ozone gas called the Ozone layer. Ozone absorbs ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. Ultraviolet radiation is dangerous to people, so without the Ozone layer life would not be possible. The atmosphere also protects the earth from crashes with meteors and small asteroids. This is because they burn up due to all the friction as they fly through it. It also helps to keep Earth warm. Some gases including carbon dioxide and methane act like a blanket around the Earth, they trap heat under them, keeping the Earth warm.
Weather, climate, and water cycle
Hot air rises. As it rises it gets colder again and falls. This is called convection currents. When hot air meets cold air different weather effects happen. Convection currents are the cause of almost all weather on Earth. When it gets hot on the surface water evaporates and becomes steam or water vapour. This hot water vapour rises. As it rises it gets colder. When it gets cold enough it turns back into water again. This causes the clouds and rain. It is called the water cycle.
Orbit and rotation
The Earth takes about 24 hours to complete one day and about 365 days to complete a year. Actually, the Earth take 365.24 days to revolve around the sun. After every four years, an extra day is added, and the year has 366 days. This is a leap year. The Earth is, on average, 150 million kilometers away from the Sun, and moving at a speed of 30 kilometers a second or 108,000 miles an hour. The Moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 250,000 miles. It is tidally locked to Earth, which means it always has the same side facing the Earth. It takes roughly one month to complete one orbit. The Earth is part of the Solar System and orbits the sun along with thousands of small objects and eight planets. The Sun, and therefore the Solar System, are currently traveling through the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy and will be for approximately the next 10,000 years.
- Dialogue 3
It looks like some other editors have been making additions! That's one of the great things about Wikipedia: you're not alone in your work. Often you'll find complete strangers fixing your typos, adding sources to your writing, or helping add pictures and formatting. Hmm... how can we figure out what has changed since we were last here? Aha, the History page. Remember that from the first mission? Almost every Wikipedia page has a record of every change ever made to it, ever. That's one of the reasons Wikipedia can be so open to editors--since all the changes are public, anyone can see what people do and judge whether it is an improvement. To access it, all you do is click the View History tab at the top of any page.
- Action 2 - Highlight View History tab
Click here to access a record of changes to the article
- Action 3 - Load History page
- Dialogue 4
Ok, this should look a little familiar even though it might seem confusing at first. Remember the watchlist? Your watchlist is actually just a little slice of many page's histories which you have chosen to get updates about. The history page works the same way, except it's all the updates to a single article. Here's a quick review:
- (cur | prev) Time Date Editor(talk | contribs) (bytes added or removed) (edit summary)
Each of those pieces tell you something and/or link somewhere useful.
- cur - brings up a comparison of that version and the current version
- prev - brings up a comparison of that version and the previous version
- time and date - tell you when the edit took place
- editor - tells you who made the change and links to their talk page and list of edits or contributions
- bytes added - tells you whether content was added or removed, and how much
- edit summary - where the editor tells you was trying they were trying to do in that edit
So, we want to know what changes in the current version are different from the one we last worked on. To do that, you click prev on the top version (or cur on the one below it--they would be the same comparison). You can compare changes across many edits by using the circle buttons, clicking the right one for the more recent version and the left one for the older version you want to compare it to. Let's do a comparison between the current version and the last one you worked on. A comparison on Wikipedia is also called a 'diff' for difference.
- Action 4 - Highlight cur/prev buttons
Click here to compare the changes made between the current version and the version you edited last
- Action 5 - Load diff
- Dialogue 5
Wow, that's a lot of new content! It's great when other Wikipedia editors work on what you're working on. The name Wikipedia is based on the concept of Wiki, which means quick in Hawaiian. It can make work really fast when many people are able to make changes to the same page. Just remember that this also means people can edit what you write. It takes a little getting used to at first, and can be a good challenge if there are disagreements, but overall this method has worked so well it has produced the entire encyclopedia! Let's see what the editor changed.
- Action 6 - Highlight changes in diff
- Dialogue 6
The changes on the left are from the older, previous version, and the changes on the right are from the newer, current version. The text in red is what has changed.
- Dialogue 7
It looks like editor ProfessorPlanet added these sources a few hours ago. Some editors who work on Wikipedia are experts in their field. Others are just helpful, ordinary folks. On Wikipedia everyone is treated equally and the same rules apply. What is treated differently are good and poor sources, and the content that comes from them. It looks like ProfessorPlanet knows what they are talking about, and they might really be a professor, but we still need to back up the information with a good source. Let's check the article talk page to see if they left a note about their changes.
- Action 7 - Highlight article Discussion link
Click here to go to the article talk page
- Action 8 - Load talk page
- Message 1
I wrote the textbook on planet Earth which I use in my college course. I want to add some of that content to this article. I've left a list of the sources I used for each section below:
- Shape and structure
- "Origin of the Moon and Earth". Reisch, Maggy. Nature.com: Volume 10:2, p.19-27. http://www.nature.com/102/Reisch/Earth. Retrieved 2009-07-28.
- Tectonic plates
- "Shifting Sands". Roberts, Paul. Harvard University Press. http://www.harvard.edu/roberts/shifting. Retrieved 2009-07-28.
- Surface
- Toshiro Tanimoto. "Crustal of the Earth". American Geophysical Union. Retrieved 2009-08-02.
- "The Crust". Alphonz, Edgar. Oregon State University. http://www.osu.edu/Alphonz/Crust. Retrieved 2009-07-03.
- Atmosphere
- "NASA - Earth's atmosphere". NASA Student Guides. http://www.nasa.gov/student/atmosphere. Retrieved 2009-08-06.
- Weather, climate, and water cycle
- "What causes weather?". NASA Student Guides. http://www.nasa.gov/student/weather. Retrieved 2009-08-06
- Orbit and rotation
- "Earth's in the Milky Way". NASA Student Guides. http://www.nasa.gov/student/milkyway. Retrieved 2009-08-06.
- Dialogue 8
Oh good, he didn't just write from his own personal knowledge. Even experts cannot be used as sources unless they use a reliable, published source they have written like a book, magazine, academic journal, or respected website. It looks like we're going to be adding some more references! There are actually two ways to add references to an article. The first one you learned used the Cite button on the editing toolbar. That way uses citation templates to help you fill out the fields with information about the source. Sometimes, like with ProfessorPlanet's sources, the references are already formatted properly. In that case we can use the Reference button. On the editing toolbar it looks like a book with a red string bookmark. When you click it, it will add reference tags <ref>...</ref>. These tell the system that in between the ref tags will be a reference. The reference will appear on the bottom of the page in the References section when "reflist" is added with {{}} marks around it. Since ProfessorPlanet's sources are ready to go, you can simply use the Reference button when your cursor is in the right places and add those references between the ref tags.
- Interface 1
Using the edit toolbar and the Reference button, add these references at the end of the sentence in the last paragraph of each section.
- Copy the reference
- Click the edit page link
- Find the section you want to source
- Place the cursor at the end of the sentence or sentences you are sourcing, after the period.
- Click the reference icon on the toolbar (red book)
- Paste or type the reference between the ref tags
- If there's more than one reference for a section, place them immediately after eachother.
- Edit summary, Show Preview, and Save
- To make the references automatically show up, add: ==References==
to the bottom of the article
- Dialogue 9
Nice work. You're a real pro at this.
- Action 9 - You have new message
- Dialogue 10
Hey, it looks like you have a new message! Check it out...
- Action 10 - Click here to check your talk page
- Action 11 - Load talk page
- Message 2
You have been granted the Barnstar of References, for your exemplary work adding published, reliable sources to Wikipedia articles! Keep up the good work.
- Dialogue 11
How about that, it's nice to be noticed for good work. Now that you've developed some skills, lets see what else is happening in this great, big place.
- Action 12 - Break or continue?