Slides I use to introduce students to an assignment in which they improve Wikipedia articles relevant to their course instead of writing a term paper

1. Introduction to Wikipedia &
Wikipedia assignment

2. Highly popular

3. Wide variety of uses

4. Wide variety of uses

6. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit

7. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit

8. Who is editing now?
http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/

9. Interactions don’t always go smoothly

10. Wiki

11. Wikis applied to many domain

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

13. 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

14. History
• Founded in Jan 15, 2001 as a feeder
to Nupedia, an expert-authored, peer-
reviewed, free encyclopedia
• Co-founders
– Jimmy Wales
– Larry Sanger
Jimmy Wales
• Heavily subsidized by bomis.com
(1996), Wales’ search portal, ad and
porn company
Larry Sanger

15. 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 Article growth per month
– 250 languages
– 11 language versions > 100K
articles
– 282,875 unique editors
• Spin-offs
– Wiktionary, wikibooks,
wikiversity, wikinews,
wikispecies, wikiquote,
wikisource

16. Misalignment in Wikipedia: Iron Man
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17. Major source of information on most psychological
concepts

18. Yet many Wikipedia articles on psychology were
impoverished or out of date
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19. 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

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22. Undergrads can do amazing work
Greta Munger, Davidson College, an honor seminar course
Greta Munger, Davidson College, an honor seminar course

24. Editing

25. Portions of poor quality

26. Revisions: History of the article
Mar 17, 2010 Jan 24, 2011

27. Article discussion pages: Where
coordination gets done
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Carnegie_Mellon_University#Rankings

28. Principles and policies

29. What Wikipedia is not

30. Creating a user account

31. Via APS/Wikipedia Initiative
http://hciresearch4.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/~apswi/stage/site/index.php
Register for class: CarCMU 05-32039-000-rob

32. 7. Link your real name to username at

33. 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

34. Start your user page by copying
someone elses

35. Editing your user page

36. Provides a dashboard & tools for
working on assignment

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