Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/Hanyang University/British Literature (Spring 2017)/Course description
This page has information on planning and resources for the online writing assignment taught by Ken Eckert for the Hanyang University British Literature and Shakespeare courses..
The goal of this assignment is for several groups of students to choose an underdeveloped or missing article on Wikipedia, related to the course topic, and improve it during the duration of the course (3.5 months).
Introduction for students
editWikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has many millions (!) of editors (Wikipedians), many of whom are students like you. The vast majority of them are volunteers who find editing this site to be an enjoyable experience, even a hobby. Therefore I hope you will enjoy this exercise and the course! After all, there are not many exercises that tell you to do something that over a million people think is 'fun' :)
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Wikipedia:Tutorial is the best place to start your adventure with this wiki. Please familiarize yourself with instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing or Help:Contents and if you cannot find what you are looking for, ask the friendly people at Wikipedia:Help desk - or just contact me. Before making any major edits, it is recommended that you create an account (video tutorial). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to do any wiki-related coursework (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise). After you create an account, if you know your group already, add your name to the relevant section of this page. Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to our university. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university — and of yourselves. You should expect that the course lecturer, other students, your friends, and even (or especially) other Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) will leave you various messages on your talk pages. When working on the exercises below, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages as often as you check your email (I strongly recommend you read 'as often' as 'at least daily'). Whenever you have a new message and are logged to Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message, 'You have new messages', on every Wikipedia page you access. To make this message disappear, you should click on it and read the message. Note that it is customary to leave new messages at the bottom of the talk/discussion pages, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk pages. If you want to leave somebody a message, make sure you are editing their talk page, not their user page. Remember to sign your talk and discussion messages (you may want to watch this tutorial on using talk pages). Some other useful tips: whenever you are done with an edit and want to save a page, fill out the edit summary box and view a preview of the page after your edit to make sure it looks as you actually want it to look. Only then click the "Save Page" button. You may find the page history tool and watchlist tools to be very useful when you want to check what changes by other editors have been made to the article(s) you are working on. Please direct any questions to my talk page. You are welcome to send emails, or drop by to see me during our office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents. |
Assignment
editNow that you are familiar with the Wikipedia environment, it is time to jump into your assignment.
Project overview:
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Project details: During lecture, you are assigned to a group and given a group number. This is your Wikipedia assignment group, and it is composed of the two or three people you work with for the duration of the semester. You are given time during lecture to meet with your group and discuss options and schedules. You and your group will choose a an article on English Wikipedia and then create or expand it. Once you have chosen your article , you will write up a one page proposal, outlining important information about it, what points you will cover in your article, and a short list of resources. Your group then need to make an appointment to meet with me in my office and discuss your proposal. The deadlines for this assignment are listed in a following section. Once you have gotten my approval, you are going to work together to create an interesting, in depth article about your chosen subject. Make sure you familiarize yourself with encyclopedia-type writing before you begin. Writing for Wikipedia is different from writing an essay, although not that far from writing a descriptive scientific paper or a memo. Please glance at the following guidelines to get a handle on how you should write your article BEFORE you start writing:
Wikipedia maintains a high standard of writing, and has taken great pains to improve these standards. You need to follow them as closely as possible, since deviating from these standards will invite article deletion. Regarding the length of the article, quality of sources used, and such, see the articles your student colleagues in the past have written during the some past courses of mine: here, here or here. Your article can include images, but remember that not all pictures on the web are free for the taking. Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia's Copyright Policy to ensure you are not doing anything wrong (copyright violation, in the real, world, means what plagiarism in academia). Remember that any violation will be caught and dealt with by the plethora of editors on the site (and you do not want your group article to suddenly sprout a copyvio template like one of my 2009 groups did...). Your article must include at least one academic book or journal source per group member. However, keep in mind that this is a minimum requirement. You should also include a list of external links giving the reader more information on your subject, and link to your page from other Wikipedia pages, so your page is not an orphan. To answer that question you may be asking: yes, you can go on someone else's article and link to your own. That's the beauty of a wiki! You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools (see tips section below) and seek helpful comments on your article. In other words, if you can get other Wikipedia editors to help you, I am totally fine with that. Once you begin writing your article, you are required to respond to any comments on your paper and act accordingly (make proper changes, defend your choices, etc). These comments will give you substantial feedback on your work, and allow you to make your final product better. (Besides, I'm going to spend the semester reading your work and commenting on it--if you listen to my feedback, you'll end up with a much better grade. It's like I'm pre-grading it for you!) Finally, you will read and evaluate/comment on your classmates' articles. Please make your comments constructive and useful. You will not get credit for such comments as "good article!" or "I liked it!" Suggest something that can be realistically improved, compare their article to yours and see if your group has learned any tricks that can help them. Also refrain from any abusive or inappropriate language. Remember, you are the face of our University for the semester--make us proud. At the end of the semester, you will turn into me the following items in a print-out version:
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Important tips
editIf you want to read my various suggestions and recommendations that will make this assignment easier, read this section (optional).
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Wikipedia:FAQ/Editing will give you all the information you need to edit pages and start your own. Read it! Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Tutorial are very useful, too.
I suggest doing some practice edits on various pages, just to get a feel for how things work. You can start by adding material to your user page, but try to edit real articles, too. If you add some constructive content to sociology-related articles, you may be eligible for extra credit. If you are drawing a blank as to what you should edit for practice, there are many places you may want to check if you want to improve your Wikipedia-editing skills by editing Wikipedia. Feel free to check the following pages:
Whenever you edit, make sure that you are signed in (if in the top right corner of the screen you see "log in" button, you are not signed in!). If you are not signed in, course instructor (Piotr Konieczny) will not be able to verify that you were the person who made the edit and give you points for it. In other words, if you do any work while not logged in, we will not count that work toward your grade in this course. When creating a new account, think about the nickname you want to use here. Consider:
Whenever editing a talk page, add four tildes ~~~~ to the end of all comments you make on talk pages. This will let people know who is talking. You can also just press the signature button (you may want to watch this tutorial on using talk pages).
You can chose to create an entirely new article related to the topic of the course, if the topic you'd like to write about is missing. You can also expand an existing Wikipedia article related to our topic, if there is ample room for expansion (rule of thumb: if the article has only a few sentences, it is a good choice for expansion, if it has a few long sections, probably not). Most articles assessed as a "stub" qualify for this assignment. There are hundreds of sociology and Korea-related articles to chose from: here. If you are drawing blank on what article you could create or expand, here's an example of an article that should be created or expanded, related o the topic of sociology and Korea: aging in South Korea, art in South Korea, clothing in South Korea, family in South Korea, missing entries for festivals in South Korea, gender stratification in South Korea, globalization in South Korea, homosexuality in South Korea (just a redirect), household debt in South Korea, income inequality in South Korea, judiciary of South Korea, Korean folklore (needs expansion), national symbols of South Korea, political scandals in South Korea, race and ethnicity in South Korea, refugees in South Korea, social class in South Korea, sociology in South Korea, taxation in South Korea , theatre of South Korea. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Compare Category:South Korean society to ko:분류:한국의 사회 for some additional ideas - what is missing from English Wikipedia that you could add from the Korean one. I have identified some potential candidates as examples, but my Korean is too poor to be 100% sure they are fine, so make sure to talk to me before choosing them as a topic: ko:대한민국의_셧다운_제도, ko:대한민국의_불온서적, ko:돌발영상, ko:보도_지침, ko:1980년 언론 통폐합. There seem to be a lot of interesting topics in ko:분류:대한민국의_시민사회운동. Some but not all articles from Category:South Korea stubs and Category:Korea stubs may be good topics for expansion. If you want, you can also work on topics related to North Korea.
As soon as possible, your group should agree on a topic and get in touch (by email) with the course instructor (Piotr Konieczny) so he can verify it is a good topic. You may want to select one or more subjects and list them in the order of preference, in case your first choice is rejected, to save time.
We are not doing any original research. You will not be collecting data, analyzing it, or writing about your experiences. We will not be witting an essay with personal opinions or judgments. Instead, we will be writing an encyclopedic article, summarizing an existing, verifiable state of knowledge from a sociology related area. See Wikipedia in brief for a short list of what an encyclopedic article we will be writing here is.
The simplest way to understand the style you are supposed to follow is to examine articles that have passed GA or FA. You can see Wikipedia Good Articles from the section "Social science and society" here. Good sociology related ones include for example three articles your colleagues have worked in the past: American family structure, Reborn doll, and Stay-at-home dad The technical details are explained in the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, but I find just looking at already-written articles much more helpful then studying the collection of the rules. If you want to learn how to write nicely, check this guide:
At the top of this page you will find a "how to" for nomination. There is also a dedicated guide for nominating good articles. If you can nominate it sooner than the deadline, the better for you - every day gives you more time to read comments by the reviewers and address them. Remember: you may get max score (25%) even if you don't address all the comments of the reviewer in time (particularly if he posts them very late); but addressing them and passing through the GA process guarantees you the max score (25%) for this assignment. The assignment does not with the nomination, you will likely have to fix various issues pointed out by the reviewer. If the reviewer posts useful comments, you should do your best to address them; of course this mean you may disagree with him if you think you know better (reviewers are not perfect). Useful links:
Wikipedia is a project with millions of editors, who collaborate on all articles. We don't own the articles we work on. Don't be surprised if you receive comments from editors who are not part of the course, or if they do edit your article. All editors are here to help; don't hesitate to get extra help - Wikipedia has ton of places you can do so.
It is likely that over the course of the project, you will receive messages from editors outside our course, and that they will make edits to your article. Be polite in replying, and don't hesitate to ask them to explain something.
A. Don't work on a draft in Microsoft Word. Work on a draft in the article on Wikipedia. This way your colleagues (and instructor) will be aware of what you are doing the instant you do so, and can comment on it sooner. B. Don't exchange comments by email. Exchange comments by using article's talk pages, for the same reasons as above (unless you are certain that your discussion have to stay private). If you like to receive email notifications, you can monitor the article's talk pages (and your own userpage talk page) by subscribing to that page RSS feed (see Wikipedia:Syndication). Remember: gaining experience with wiki software may be more important to your future career than detailed knowledge of globalization. Three years ago, Technorati's chief technologist states that in five years "knowledge of wikis will be a required job skill". Do the math.
Plagiarism is not only against university's and course policies, it is also against Wikipedia policies (see WP:PLAGIARISM). And attributing somebody doesn't mean cut and paste jobs are allowed (WP:COPYVIO). Violations of plagiarism/copyvio policies will result in lower grade and other sanctions (per university's policy). Please note that the course instructor is not the only person checking constantly for plagiarism and copyright violations; the Good Article reviewer will do so as well, and Wikipedia has a specialized group of volunteers specializing in checking new contributions for those very problems (you don't want your work to appear here or here!). In particular, note that extensive quoting is not allowed, and changing just a few words is still a copyvio (it doesn't matter if you attribute the source). Bottom line, you are expected to read, digest information, and summarize it in your own words (but with a source). For more info see: this plagiarism handout, Wikipedia:Copy-paste, Wikipedia:Quotations, Wikipedia:Close paraphrasing, a guide from Purdue University.
Google Scholar and Google Books are much better than Google. Try to avoid "random webpages", or even worse, blogs. See Wikipedia:Reliable sources.
You can always ask the course instructor (me) for help. You should not hesitate to ask your fellow students from other groups for help, for example if you see they have mastered some editing trick you have yet to learn. Wikipedia Volunteers are often active in this chat help channel. We are here to collaborate, not compete. If you can lobby and get help/assistance/advice from other editors to improve your work (for example by using Wikipedia:New contributors' help page, Wikipedia:Help desk, Wikipedia:Peer review, Wikipedia:Village pump, or Wikipedia:Reference desk), I am perfectly fine with it. Be bold and show initiative, it usually helps. See also "how to get help" handout.
This is not the first time I am running this assignment for my students. Based on my past experiences, here are common mistakes that tend to lower your grade:
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