This assignment is due on Wednesday, October 27, 2010
 
1. Add a link to your Wikipedia user page and the article you are editing on the class Wikipedia page under the “Class user pages” section.

• The class Wikipedia page is here: http://bit.ly/b9oYwg
• Here is an example:*{{User|PursuitOfPublicHealth}} - [[Suicide prevention]] which is displayed as PursuitOfPublicHealth (talk · contribs) - Suicide prevention

2. Edit the Wikipedia page you’ve chosen with the additions you’ve prepared.

• Examine your contribution for verifiability and neutrality.
• Make sure you’ve added citations. You can read about how to that here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources but two key markup details:
  • <ref name=”name”>details of the citation</ref>
  • The citations will appear at the end of the article if you type {{reflist}}.
• If you are starting a new page, make sure you create a link on an existing page to your page — so that someone can find your new page.

3. Add to the Talk page of the Wikipedia page some discussion of your edits — explain to the community why you have made the edits.  User talk pages function much in the same way that emails do: When you have something that you want a specific person to read, you post it on the user’s talk page. This space is most often used for asking/responding to questions, and occasionally for awarding barnstars.

Much as an article page serves to inform its readers, an article talk page serves to inform its editors. As such, the usefulness of an article talk page is directly proportional to how much activity is going on with the article. [[Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services]], for example, has received a mere 7 edits since its creation in 2007, the most recent of which was more than 3 months ago. It can be safely assumed in such a case that any messages posted to the article talk page will never be seen. It is no coincidence that this article’s talk page does not yet exist.

Other than checking the article’s history, there is a handy tool to determine if the talk page is useful: http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/watcher/ By typing in the name of an article, it is possible to determine how many users have listed that article on their talk page.

So, if an article does seem to be receiving a good amount of activity, the question still remains: when should students post messages on the talk page? This question is best answered by the use of common sense.

• If an edit is trivial, such as fixing a typo or changing a word order, then there’s really no reason to make note of it on a talk page.
• If an edit is constructive, such as adding a referenced paragraph, then there’s still no reason to make note of it, unless the edit is reverted. It’s much better to discuss a revert then to simply try to add the material again.
• If an edit is likely to be perceived as controversial, such as adding material which makes negative claims about a living person or changing the structure of the entire article, then it would be a good idea to discuss it on the talk page beforehand.

The other case to consider is when the student simply isn’t sure how to make an edit correctly, as is often the case when working with an unfamiliar piece of markup (images, tables, etc.), or the student doesn’t intend to “wikify” an addition (links, formatting, etc.). In these situations, students may be nervous that their material will be deleted simply because it is “unfinished.” In order to prevent this and welcome the contributions of others, there are several handy banners that can be used to inform other users about what’s going on and what needs to be done:

• “Under construction” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Under_construction
• “In use” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Major_edit
• “Wikify” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikify
• “Copy edit” - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Copyedit

4. Add the Wikipedia page you have edited to your “watch list” so that you can be notified when edits are made. You can confirm that a page has been added to your watchlist by checking to see if the star icon next to the “View History” tab is highlighted.

5. Use our Wikipedia ambassadors — they are there for you. Email and chat are the best ways to reach them:

• Michael Chen - michaelchen -at- college.harvard.edu
• Ryan Malloy - crypticc62 -at- yahoo.com
• Dick Clark - crotalus -at- gmail.com