How to write a Wikipedia article
One of the course requirements is a term paper. It could be either a Wikipedia article or a chapter of a textbook for this course. This text should help you to fulfill the goal.
There will be topics offered for the registration using ISIS in certain date and time that will be announced in advance. The length of an article should be roughly about 14000 characters and the text must meet the requirements and parameters of scholar article, particularly the references and the rules for writing Wikipedia articles (that usually correspond).
How-to
The following principles may be helpful:
- You definitely should read Wikipedia manual. It is quite comprehensive, but you find it really helpful to read at least about the basic concepts.
- You should indeed explore the field you are going to write your article about. Make a thorough research of literature, scholar articles, etc. Stick to rules of academic papers. The relevance of resources matters and you are expected to provide the citations to every single fact you mention (see citation rules).
- Wikipedia is a tertiary resource, therefore it should contain only information that was already published somewhere else. There is no space for your opinions, impressions, etc.
- Wikipedia (as well as the entire WWW) is hypertext. It means that the article should be interlinked with others, particularly the other language versions (left sidebar) and with other articles of the same language version, both those already existing and those that could appear in future (red links). Each term in your article should be a link to the respective article on Wikipedia at its first occurence. Also relevant external links Wikipedia are desirable. Do not also forget to link your article from various relevant boxes, disambiguation pages, etc.
- Sometimes somebody will edit your article. If you article is good, he may help to correct your syntax or links, etc. If the article is not so good, you can find infoboxes with error description or your article could be rewritten radically or even deleted if it breaches Wikipedia rules. You should always count with it and work on your text in advance in order to avoid a surprising deletion just before the evaluation of your course work.
- Get inspiration from the best or at least good articles.
- It is very desirable to enclose relevant figures, infoboxes, tables and other visual components. Take care of copyright especially in case of images.
- The quality of your work is a crucial parameter for assessment. It is a lot of work to find resources, write a good text and keep in mind great many formal requirements. Allow enough time.
How to submit
A key aspect of this assignment is that you do not submit the text using ISIS or similar school tools, but directly into Wikipedia, so it is expected that your work will be pre-evaluated by the community. Please, write your Wikipedia login name into your discussion page (on this website) in order to identify your work.
