User:Leejohnson898/Initial Contribution to Sandbox for Workshop

Assignment: Writing Your Entry for Peer Workshop

Due Date: Monday, October 17, 2011

As mentioned in an earlier assignment, the sandbox is a place where you can start and edit your article until you are ready to release it on Wikipedia. In this assignment, you will use the sandbox to create a first draft of your article for the Peer Workshop in class on Monday, October 17. Instructions will differ depending on whether or not you are contributing to a new entry or revising an existing one.

Instructions:

If Revising an Existing Entry

1) If you are contributing to an existing entry, you will need to copy the existing article into your sandbox to begin editing. Before editing, save the pre-existing article as a PDF along with your final entry. You are required to submit the original article, without your edits, on Friday, December 2nd.

2) To begin, go to the Wikipedia article you intend to edit

3) Next, click on the “Edit” tab in the top-right corner of the article page and copy everything located within the editing text box

4) After copying the article contents go to your user page sandbox, click “Edit,” paste the material from the original article’s editing text box, and click “Save page”

5) At this point your user page sandbox should look identical to the existing entry, except for the title. With the contents of the existing article now contained within your sandbox, you can make edits to the page and add content as you see fit.

6) Finally, note that Wikipedia takes its version history of pages very seriously. The history section of any article is meant to track all changes to that page and provide old versions chronicling the page's development. In pasting the article into your sandbox for editing purposes, you are potentially missing any changes made to that page in between the time that you begin editing and the time that you move your changes to the live wikipedia article. In order to avoid discontinuity between version histories, make sure to check the article you are editing regularly for new edits added by users. You will be expected to either include the edits made by other users or provide a rationale for their exclusion in the discussion section.

If Contributing to a New Entry

1) Access your sandbox by clicking on the link created in your user page during one of the previous assignments

2) From here, begin editing creating your new article by typing in the text box, making sure to save changes frequently

Technical Details for New Entries and Revisions to Existing Entries

• Plan your article to include a number of short sections. Headings allow a reader to jump around and find the information they want easily. (When you include a heading, a table of contents will be automatically generated when you later post to Wikipedia.) Wikipedia allows the creation of article headings with relative ease. (Refer to the Wikipedia Editing Cheatsheet)

• Include links in your article. The links to related pages is one of the greatest assets of Wikipedia articles. Once you upload to Wikipedia, a link will appear blue and take you to the correct page. A link to a page that doesn’t exist will appear red.)

• Include citations for your research. When something in your article needs to be cited just type . Anything between the will be read as a citation. It will not appear at that point in the article, but will appear at the bottom of the article as a citation instead. (For more information refer to Wikipedia:Citing sources)