Wikipedia:School and university projects/WSU SLIS Library Leaders/

Introduction

Specific introduction for students is in the next section.

The introductory course in Library and Information Science (LIS6010) at Wayne State University asks students to write a Wikipedia entry on an important leader in librarianship from the 20th Century.

Each semester there will be approximately 15-25 students. Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, either expand a stub or create an article about a library leader.

Supervisors: I, User:Scoutcalvert, will take care of introducing students to Wiki and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines.

Start date: The project began in September 2008 and continued through 2011.

Status: Some library leaders were added in fall 2008, and summer and fall 2009. Some will be added during the fall of 2010 and winter of 2011. Please direct any comments to my user talk page or to the project talk page.

The following notable library figures have been added or developed in the context of this class:

Introduction for students

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has over three million editors (Wikipedians) as of 2007, 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'. :)

Wikipedia:Tutorial is the best place to start your adventure with this wiki. Please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the 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 (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to complete the assignment (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have completed it).

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to Wayne State University>. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our class is the first one at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—-and of yourselves.

You should expect that the professor, 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.

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 Scout's talk page. You are welcome to send us emails, or drop by to see us during our office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

Important note: make sure you are logged into your account before making any edits. If you are not logged in, we cannot verify who has done the edits, thus we will be unable to recognize your work and grade you on it. In other words, if you do any edits while not logged in, we will not count those edits toward your grade in this course.

You may want to start with this tutorial, which will take you through the basics of editing Wikipedia.

Create a userpage for yourself. Look at the top right corner, you will see your nickname in red. Click on it; write some text (about yourself, about the course, etc.), save the page. Repeat until you are satisfied. Upload an image and add it to your page.

Once you have created your article, you should make sure it fulfills several important criteria.

It is important that an article is not orphaned - i.e. it should be linked from several other articles. To learn more about this, take one of the existing orphaned articles and link them into appropriate places. See Wikipedia:Orphaned articles for more details on this.
It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
It is likely the article you have created is a stub. In that case, make sure you assign it to the appropriate stub category.
It is extremely important that the article has references. Please see Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:References. You can use Wikipedia:External links as references for this exercise, but bear in mind that for your Working Paper you will be required to use academic books/journals as references as well.
If the article is long enough, it should have an introductory paragraph. See Wikipedia:Lead for details on what such a paragraph should look like.

To complete this exercise, you should create a new article and make sure it fits the above criteria.

There are many other 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:

You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools and seek creative comments on your article. If you manage to make your article a Wikipedia:Featured Article, you may receive additional points. However, please refrain from voting for each other's articles during this process (note also that anonymous and new user votes are commonly disregarded during FA voting process to prevent any abuses. In addition, please note that any attempt to cheat on Wikipedia will be regarded as seriously as academic plagiarism.