Wikipedia:School and university projects/Instructions for teachers and lecturers

Is Wikipedia right for your course?

You should consider whether Wikipedia is appropriate for your course. You will be introducing a lot of newbies to Wikipedia.

Intellectual property and the Creative Commons

Anything contributed to Wikipedia must be free content — it must be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (CC-BY-SA). See Wikipedia:Copyrights for the full details. If you require your students to contribute to Wikipedia, their work will be covered by this policy. You must consider whether this is appropriate, and whether enforcement is appropriate.

If this is a problem, an alternative might be to have students create a Wikipedia-style text for marking, but not actually submit it to Wikipedia.

Instructions for you

1. Familiarise yourself with Wikipedia
2. Create a project page

Familiarise yourself

Please take time to familiarise yourself with Wikipedia.

Start at The five pillars of Wikipedia. If you only read one page about how Wikipedia works, this should be it.

You may want to explore the tutorial (and/or have your students do the same).

You can obtain two free copies of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly Media/Pogue Press, January 2008), which covers basic and intermediate-level editing on Wikipedia, by making a request to its author, John Broughton.

Other major Wikipedia concepts:

• What Wikipedia is not
• Article content
  • Neutral point of view
  • No original research
  • Verifiability
• Conduct
  • Etiquette
  • Assume good faith
  • Be bold in updating pages
  • Editing policy - Perfection is not required

Create a project page

Please create a project subpage at Wikipedia:School and university projects/Your project name in advance of the course. Alert people by adding it to Wikipedia:School and university projects, and possibly at the Wikipedia:Village Pump — people will be willing to help you and your students.