From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
|
Wikipedia as a tool for information and education
Africa Studies Center, Leiden, November 8, 2013
- Encyclopedia that everyone can edit
- Wiki = editable website, pedia = encyclopedia
Basic rules
- Non-commercial, depends on donations
- Neutral point of view (NPOV)
- Community with democratic rules, election of moderators, discussions about articles
- Authority of contributors is established through the quality of their contributions
- Be kind
- Text, images, sound and video is contributed under free licence, meaning that
Why contribute
- Offer your expertise
- Wikipedia is a good channel for information
- Your (corrections to) Wikipedia articles can supplement your lectures for students
- Wikipedia is widely used, so through Wikipedia you can correct, e.g., widespread misunderstandings
- It’s cool and modern
- Outreach, if contribute substantially to Wikipedia articles you can mention them on your academic publication list
Ideal for education, many readers
- We can use the counter http://stats.grok.se/ to monitor the number of page views
- Article Ghana October 2013
- Article Djibouti October 2013
- Article Côte d'Ivoire October 2013
Tutorial
Contribute
- 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
- 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
Upload your photographs of encyclopedic value you want to share
- Preparation: give your photo file an appropriate distinguishing name
- Preparation: determine the category on Wikimedia Commons your photo would fit in
- If none exists, think of a new photo category to create automatically
- 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 photo appears in the chosen category
Citing Wikipedia
|
