wikipedia intro

Introduction to Wikipedia & Wikipedia assignment

Highly popular

Wide variety of uses

Wide variety of uses

The encyclopedia that anyone can edit

The encyclopedia that anyone can edit

Who is editing now?

http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/

Wikipedia Assignment

Write a new Wikipedia article or substantially improve an existing one on a topic relevant to the course

Goals of Wikipedia assignment

• Become an “expert” in some topic relevant to the course

• Provide common ground for class– Getting involved in a online community new to most

– Example of problems & solutions in contribution, regulation, socialization, organization & start-up

• Provide a public good– Return some of what you’ve learned back to the world by

improving Wikipedia

History

• Founded in Jan 15, 2001 as a feeder to Nupedia, an expert-authored, peer-reviewed, free encyclopedia

• Co-founders– Jimmy Wales – Larry Sanger

• Heavily subsidized by bomis.com (1996), Wales’ search portal, ad and porn company

Jimmy Wales

Larry Sanger

Growth• English version

– ~4M articles in English language Wikipedia

– 151,934 unique editors– Average 435 words/article (vs.

650 in Britannica)– Doubling number of & editors

articles every 40 weeks– Slower growth starting in 2007

• All versions– 250 languages– 11 language versions > 100K

articles– 282,875 unique editors

• Spin-offs– Wiktionary, wikibooks,

wikiversity, wikinews, wikispecies, wikiquote, wikisource

Article growth per month

Misalignment in Wikipedia: Iron Man

16

10,189 words

Major source of information on most psychological concepts

Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology were impoverished or out of date

A Stub

Virtually no content

350 words

No references

Assignment

• Substantially improve a Wikipedia article relevant to the course or write a new one, if one doesn’t exist.– Goal is “Good Article” status

Original

1 article combing bio

and theory

Sections: 7

Words: 831

Images: 0

References: 5

External links: 7

New

2 pages with bio

separated from theory

Sections: 27

Words: 5,669

Images: 1

References: 35

External links: 18

Editing

Portions of poor quality

Revisions: History of the articleMar 17, 2010 Jan 24, 2011

Article discussion pages: Where coordination gets done

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carnegie_Mellon_University#Rankings

Principles and policies

What Wikipedia is not

Creating a user account

Via APS/Wikipedia Initiativehttp://hciresearch4.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/~apswi/stage/site/index.php

Register for class: CarCMU 05-32039-000-rob

7. Link your real name to username at

Create a user page & sandbox

To create a subpage (e.g., sandbox): [[user:Charlottesweb28/Sandbox]]Or practice in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox

Start your user page by copying someone elses

Editing your user page

Provides a dashboard & tools for working on assignment

Read the Wikipedia Tutorial• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial