Wikipedia as a tool for information and education
African Studies Centre, Leiden, November 8, 2013 (later updated)
- Encyclopedia that anyone can edit
- Wiki = editable website, pedia = encyclopedia
- Non-commercial, depends on donations
- Neutral point of view (NPOV)
- Community with democratic rules, election of moderators, discussions about articles
- Supervision and quality control is performed by the community. Disputes can be settled by an internal court with chosen membership for each Wikipedia, for instance the w:en:Arbitration Committee (English Wikipedia).
- Authority of contributors is established through the quality of their contributions
- Be kind
- Text, images, sound, video or other digital files are contributed under a free licence, meaning that
- Authors of works have to be acknowledged by a subsequent user of works on Wikipedia
- The same licence has to hold for use of your work by others
- License Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0
- Offer your expertise to society
- Reach thousands of readers. Wikipedia is a good channel for information as it is widely used. Through Wikipedia you can correct, e.g., widespread misunderstandings
- Your (corrections to) Wikipedia articles can supplement your lectures for students
- It’s cool and modern, the pleasure and ease of collaborating on beautiful webpages
- Outreach, if you contribute substantially to Wikipedia articles you can mention them on your academic publication list
- Learn to work with the free Wikimedia software. (You can install your own private Wikipedia-style website at your institute etc. to exclusively collaborate with your coworkers and students.)
- We can use Page view statistics (Consultations in French) on the articles' History page (or the counter Example for article Ghana on English language Wikipedia) to monitor the number of page views
- Article Ghana October 2013
- Article Djibouti October 2013
- Article Côte d'Ivoire October 2013
- Register as a user under a (nick)name. If you like, you can provide your email address. No, you will not be spammed!
- You get a user page, a try-out page (Sandbox) and a discussion page. There fellow-Wikipedians can contact you and discuss articles etcetera with you.
- Try the editor in your Sandbox
- Click Edit-button
- Try a change
- Click Preview
- Fill in an explanation of your correction/addition
- Save
- Mark-up: easy subdivisions using = signs – see w:en:Wikipedia:Cheatsheet (copy provided)
- Start, e.g., with small corrections
- Learn by imitation if you find a Wikipedia page you like: click Edit – inspect code of a page – leave page without changing it
- See previous contributions to an article: click on “View history” button near the upper right of an article page
- Discussions about the contents of an article can be found pressing the “Talk” button near the upper left of an article page
Thank you! It is worthwhile to follow these steps:
- Preparation 1: please have a look on Wikimedia Commons and do a search there. Check whether your photograph can contribute something lacking there.
- Preparation 2: give your photo or other digital file an appropriate distinguishing and descriptive filename. In general please do NOT keep the technical name your camera etcetera has given.
- Preparation 3: determine the category on Wikimedia Commons your file would fit into
- If none exists, think of a new category to create
- Go on the internet to en.wikipedia.org (homepage)
- Click in left menu column on Tools – Upload file
- Follow the guidelines
- Fill in the data forms and supply the category name – might be a new one, but check first
- Your file appears in the chosen category on Wikimedia Commons
Example. Beware of plagiarism!
|