Group items tagged

So, you want to know how to edit Wikipedia? There's a course for you. We are delighted to announce a new round of our free online course, "Writing Wikipedia Articles: The Basics & Beyond" (#WIKISOO). The course runs from 25 February - 8 April 2014, and is now open for enrollment. As many of you know already, WIKISOO teaches the nuts and bolts of Wikipedia. We focus on building and improving articles related to Open Education. Enrollment is open to all. We'd especially like to invite past students to re-register: your knowledge and experience will be valuable to your fellow students, and it's also a great opportunity to deepen your learning about Wikipedia and OER. WIKISOO students learn about the values and culture that have driven hundreds of thousands of volunteers to build Wikipedia. Through your work in the course, you will join an effort that has generated millions of free articles in hundreds of languages since 2001. The course covers the technical skills needed to edit articles, and also offers practical insights into the site's collaborative norms and social dynamics. You will graduate with a sophisticated understanding of how to use Wikipedia both as a reader and as an active participant. Sign up is free.

A study from this past January shows that 53 per cent of online Americans use Wikipedia. In order to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia and other sources like it, we need to teach students how to collaboratively edit.

* Upload Word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML, text, Wikipedia articles and knols. * Use previous human translations and machine translation to 'pretranslate' your uploaded documents. * Use our simple WYSIWYG editor to improve the pretranslation. * Invite others (by email) to edit or view your translations. * Edit documents online with whomever you choose. * Download documents to your desktop in their native formats --- Word, OpenOffice, RTF or HTML. * Publish your Wikipedia and knol translations back to Wikipedia or Knol.

"...an English edition of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, written in primarily Basic English and Special English. The site's stated aim is to provide an encyclopedia for "people with different needs, such as students, children, adults with learning difficulties and people who are trying to learn English". As of August 25, 2010, the site contains over 64,000 content pages, and has more than 141,000 registered users."

Public domain image resources is a copy of the master wikipedia page at Meta, which lists a number of sources of public domain images on the Web. The presence of a resource on this list does not guarantee that all or any of the images in it are in the public domain. You are still responsible for checking the copyright status of images before you submit them to Wikipedia.

This wikipedia tutorial was produced by a group of librarians and present it from an academic standpoint. Good stuff!

Ten Word Wiki, a Twitter style version of Wikipedia that only describes stuff in under ten words but they also add a pinch of humor to all their definitions.

To help students understand the limits of Wikipedia's reliability and credibility, we present these 10 reasons you cannot completely trust information in Wikipedia:

The following kinds of downloads are available: Database backup dumps A complete copy of all Wikimedia wikis, in the form of wikitext source and metadata embedded in XML. A number of raw database tables in SQL form are also available. These snapshots are provided at the very least monthly and usually twice a month. Static HTML dumps A copy of all pages from all Wikipedia wikis, in HTML form. These are currently not running. DVD distributions Available for some Wikipedia editions. Image tarballs There are currently no image dumps available

This is a very comprehensive list. One area where Wikipedia excels (if academics will continue to contribute) is in comprehensive lists of open education resources. This list includes whether it is subscription or free and what type of database it is.

The demise of Britannica is being pontificated but I agree that it wasn't Wikipedia that killed it. I don't totally agree with this author in that the PC killed Britannica because it became our information portal through the Internet.

How the tide turns. Just take away wikipedia and blackout google and this is what happens. This was the topic of conversation at school yesterday. Major websites may have just realized the power of those eyeballs on their site. "Three co-sponsors of the SOPA and PIPA antipiracy bills have publicly withdrawn their support as Wikipedia and thousands of other websites blacked out their pages Wednesday to protest the legislation. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) withdrew as a co-sponsor of the Protect IP Act in the Senate, while Reps. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) and Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) said they were pulling their names from the companion House bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Opponents of the legislation, led by large Internet companies, say its broad definitions could lead to censorship of online content and force some websites to shut down.

Encyclopedia Britannica now free for bloggers. yet another reason to blog!

Encyclopedia Britannica is now free for bloggers from an article on 4/18/08 -- yet another reason for our students to blog. (I have students blogging publicly under pseudonyms.) This is fascinating, but also interesting to see how Britannica is playing catch up to Wikipedia in the market it once owned. I wonder, which would be more authoriative to you, a wikipedia quote updated daily, or Brittanica updated less often that doesn't display the authors of its content?

So, is Wikipedia headed out? Some scientists have found that: "The number of articles added per month flattened out at 60,000 in 2006 and has since declined by around a third. They also found that the number of edits made every month and the number of active editors both stopped growing the following year, flattening out at around 5.5 million and 750,000 respectively." I have to wonder if their changes in who can edit has caused this shift. People still look at it (I do) to kick off research.

Horizontal scrollbar is down below. Use at your own risk; Greek mythology is ambiguous. Click a name for its Wikipedia article. Download the PowerPoint version. Other Greek Gods trees: from Edith Hamilton's Mythology * by Jimmy Joe * on Wikipedia

A Wikirace is a race by as many people as you wish, using wikilinks to travel from one Wikipedia page to another. The first person to reach the destination page, or the person that reaches the destination using the fewest number of links, wins the race. Waypoints may also be added.

Less than 15% of wikipedia editors are women. This isn't surprising to many of us. I used to be a pretty active editor on several topics myself but the constant arguments were not something I had time for. I have two teenagers for that.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," is an open wiki project aimed at creating an enormous, free, and reliable encyclopedia. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, feels that we can achieve this crucial improvement over Wikipedia through measures such as adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names. We already have over 11,208 articles and hundreds of contributors.

A mash-up of wikipedia, videos and photos

When I saw Jeremy Davis recently, he told me of an educator who uses cell phones in the classroom. In fact, this teacher requires that the cell phone be out and ON the desk. In plain site. Not hidden in a pocket or backpack. So if the student is using it, the teacher KNOWS. And if the student is using it when they shouldn't… Well, that's when there are consequences.