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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Swatjester (talk | contribs) at 04:56, 26 July 2010 (→Wikipedia, what is it?: some proposed additions.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Introduction to Wikipedia for the Smithsonian Modified from the original "Introduction to Wikipedia" by User:DGG, July 7, 2009 version, at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:DGG/NYPL as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DG/PTS

For a guide to Wikipedia, check out Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual


Reading and using Wikipedia

Wikipedia, what is it?

This will be a discussion with some basic answers and statistics (15-20 minutes)'

  1. When you hear Wikipedia what do you think?
    1. What is it:
      1. A Free and Open encyclopedia
        1. What do we mean by free?
      2. Not censored
      3. of contributers?
      4. of articles?
  2. Who edits Wikipedia? What do they do?
    1. Everyday people, mostly college educated, many with graduate degrees. Mostly with highly focused approaches to certain topic areas.
    2. They collaborate and Be Bold, everything is made using these two simple principles. All content is made when someone decides it ought to be made or when someone convinces others it ought to be made.
      1. Remember that being bold means there's very little you can do to mess something up permanently. Feel free to take risks.
  3. How thorough is Wikipedia?
    1. As thorough as the editors and their knowledge base allows them to be. Everyone writes on something that they can make themselves experts upon.
      1. What this means:
      2. Wikipedia favors popular material that is easier to understand in full depth, such as fiction, high profile contemporary people and current events. Also Wikipedia favours the Geopolitical north
      3. Wikipedia lacks coverage in: history, humanities, complex mathematical subjects, non-Geopolitical North topics
  4. What controls quality on Wikipedia?
    1. There are a series of consensus built policies on Wikipedia including
      1. WikiProjects
      2. Article Reviews
      3. 1.0 Assessment
      4. Policies which determine inclusion of material, including WP:Notability, WP:Verifiability and WP:RS
    2. Content quality control comes from having lots of other editors to look at and improve your content.
    3. Also there are practices used to prevent the addition of vandalism and arbitrary additions
      1. Recent changes
      2. Watchlists
      3. New Page feed
      4. Login to start pages
      5. Edit filters
      6. Patrolled pages for Biography of Living people (forthcoming)
      7. Deletion
  5. What problems does Wikipedia have?
  • What are the problems?:
  • Accuracy; updating; stability; edit wars/WP:OWNership
  • Fairness; WP:COI
  • Poorly covered areas : History, Traditional Humanities fields
  • Uneven depth in even fairly well covered areas
  • Spam

10-15 minutes, mostly driven by presenter

  • Searching
  • Wikipedia Search box
  • Google and other search engines
  • Evaluating articles
  • Sourcing (Wikipedia:Verifiability; WP:RS); External links (WP:EL)
  • Article history (sometimes an old version contains useful information that has been dropped)
  • Talk page - Wikiprojects rate their own articles; discussion of article improvement
  • Examples:
need Smithsonian related examples
  • Other parts of the system than articles
  • Commons: Pictures and media Files
  • Wikitionary; WikiSource (& related projects elsewhere, such as Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive)
  • other language Wikipedias
  • Discussing an article; Wikiquette; Consensus
  • Correcting/expanding an article; WP:CITE; WP:MOS
  • Writing a new article WP:FIRST

Getting started

30-40 minutes with some click through and Users working with hands on edits

  1. [an account]; usernames
  2. Finding an article; disambiguation pages; finding stubs
    1. Need SI related links
  3. Copy editing (common typo: "occured" instead of "occurred"); grammar changes: WP:MOS; click "minor" edits?; edit summary; Category:Wikify
  1. Content editing: Category:Stub-Class Smithsonian Institution-related articles
A. Look over article before editing - The information may already be there
B. Look at recent discussions on Talk page
C. Get research information and bibliographic reference to source; WP:V; WP:RS; WP:NOR.
D. Edit this page tab; Editing sections; use Summary style writing
E. Formatting your citation; WP:CITE; Reflist
F. Provide an edit summary; describe purpose of change on Talk page (sign with four tildes: ~~~~ );
G. Show preview; when satisfied, save page. SELECT ALL and copy before saving in case of software problem
H. Wikify; pipes; Wikipedia:Tutorial; Wikipedia:Cheatsheet
I. History tab - see record of previous edits
J. Categories; External links; See also
K. Assessment - Stub; GA; FA - Look to Featured articles for good examples; Wikipedia:Article development
L. Examples


  1. Wikipedia:Starting an article
A. Wikipedia:Naming conventions; Make sure that article does not already exist under different name (Use search)
B. WP:Notability; WP:COI; WP:NOT
C. Redirects
D. Searching and bluelinking your article's name in existing articles
E. Wikipedia:Layout

What is Conflict of Interest?

5-10 minutes

  1. You are an employee of the Smithsonian

Getting Help

Other internal sources

Follow-up

  • If you need help, contact the Smithsonian Institution project at WP:GLAM/SI
  • The teachers of the class can be contacted at User talk:Sadads ...... (Add more)
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