Lecture 24: Online Class

Photo by Jessica Laccetti.

Today is your opportunity to work on your Wikipedia assignment! Take this time to add to your stub. Remember, you need to write 300-600 words AND, since this assignment is also part of your e-portfolio, you need to follow those guidelines.

As a reminder, the Wikipedia assignment is here and the e-portfolio assignment is here and the rubric is here.

Lecture 23: Wikis & Writing

IMPORTANT: Online class on Wednesday so you can work on your Wikipedia assignment!!

Note: As discussed in class, after choosing your stub article, check the revision history to make sure no one is currently (as of today) working on the stub. Then, add an edit (perhaps a quotation or reference) so that anyone can see that the stub article is now being worked on. Also, if you wish, you can add a comment on today's blog post noting (with a link) which stub article you are working on.

Although Wikipedia does use a WYSIWYG editor, you might want to use Wiki MarkUp. You can find out more about Wiki MarkUp Language (in order to add bulleted lists or bold and italicise your work), look here and here.

Read about our Wikipedia assignment here. But here is a short summary:

In this assignment, each student will update one "stub," or incomplete article in Wikipedia, to a complete encyclopedic article. Ideally, we would like your article to qualify for "Good Article" status. For reference, less than 1% of the articles on Wikipedia achieve this status, so this is no small feat!
Here a few caveats to keep in mind for this assignment:

• You will need to learn some basic wiki code. The code is not difficult, and there is a graphical editor with buttons to insert links and the like.
• Others can (and will) alter your contribution. In most cases, other users will add to and occasionally correct your work. But your work could be vandalized or deleted. You can always change the page back to what it was before, but such "revert wars" are frowned upon.
• The entire Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means you do not own the articles you work on.
• There is no standard length for a Wikipedia article. For the purposes of this assignment, a reasonable article will contain 300-600 words, which correspond to 1.5-3 pages of standard double-space text.

Part 1: Select a stub (needs to be done BEFORE your lab)

• Read the Wikipedia Getting Started page.
• Create an account .
• Find a "stub" that you would like to complete to a full article. Here is a list of stubs. Particular stub categories that may be of interest include Endocrine, nutritional and metabolic disease
•  stubs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Endocrine,_nutritional_and_metabolic_disease_stubs) and the Alberta Research Council stub (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Research_Council) . Here are tips for picking a good stub.

Lecture 23 Wikis & Writing

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Labs Module 10

Remember all, those of you in the Thursday lab will need to try to join Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday's lab next week because the university is closed on Thursday so no lab will be running then!!!

Please e-mail your TA for any further help on locations and/or times of labs.

You can also see this blog post about the labs and locations.