Improving Wikipedia training
This is a first draft: not yet the product of consensus
This is a syllabus for a training session that can be given in a half day or an evening, or extended to a full day. It would normally be given by one trainer/presenter at the front of the room and a number of helpers depending on audience size. For specifics on how to deliver this training, see the resources below.
Objective: To give novice Wikipedia contributors the understanding and confidence to make bold and substantial contributions
Prerequisites
Learning goals
- Core
- Optional
Trainer resources
Optional activities
Wikipedia policies and guidelines
This is an problem-based activity done online. Hand out slips of paper with the following terms:
| Civility | Verifiability | Consensus | Notability |
| Neutrality | Sock puppetry | Edit warring | Assume Good Faith |
| No Original Research | Copyright violations | Offensive material | Biographies of living persons |
Everyone in the room has just a few minutes to research the term, either individually or in pairs depending on how many there are. Searching for "Wikipedia:[term]" will normally find the relevant page. There will usually be an "in a nutshell" sentence at the top. At this stage, the reader only needs to read and understand the "nutshell" or the introductory paragraph, not the whole page.
At the end of this each person or group feeds back to the room:
- In a few sentences, what does term mean and what is the relevant Wikipedia policy or guideline?
- What would Wikipedia be like if users did not obey this principle?
Appropriate tone
This can be done as a paper exercise, with the text below as a handout. Learners can suggest improvements out loud for the trainer to implement on the presentation screen
Apart from being completely made up, the following paragraph has several flaws from the perspective of Wikipedia. There is original research, puffery, speculation about the future and other things that don't belong in an encyclopedia. With some bold deletions and minor changes, can it be given a neutral, factual tone?
Heinrich Dusselflan (1957- ) is the professor of nasal studies at the University of Baden Wursen, Germany, with a uniquely stellar research profile including more than one thousand papers in academic journals. In 2002 he received the national medal for services to mucus but, astonishingly, has never been nominated for a Nobel Prize. In youth, Dusselflan was a keen student of military history, being diverted by a typographical error into a four-year course of nasal studies at Utrecht before returning to Germany for obvious reasons. Any scholar of Dusselflan's work should start with his three-volume Gesundheit, published in 1991 to summarise the theory he had developed over the previous decade. This research identified three new kinds of itching and its significance will never be equalled. A Google search indicates that Dusselflan shares his full name with only one other person, who by comparison is not particularly important.
In Wikipedia, words and phrases are linked to other articles, creating a web of knowledge. This "wikilinking" is not applied to common dictionary words, otherwise almost all of the article would be links. Which words or phrases would you expect to be wikilinked in your improved paragraph?
Now do it for real:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT:STYLE (articles with various problems of style or tone)
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT:PROMO (articles with a promotional tone)