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Introduction for students

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Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It has over three million editors (Wikipedians) as of 2007, many of whom are students like you. The vast majority of them are volunteers who find editing this site to be an enjoyable experience, even a hobby. Therefore I hope you will enjoy this exercise and the course! After all, there are not many exercises that tell you to do something that over a million people think is 'fun'. :)

Wikipedia:Tutorial is the best place to start your adventure with this wiki. Please familiarize yourself with Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students and if you have any questions, check the Help:Contents and if you cannot find what you are looking for, ask the friendly people at Wikipedia:Help desk - or just <ex. contact me.>

Before making any major edits, it is recommended that you create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to work on any of the exercises in the next section (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have completed the exercise). After you create an account, please find your name in the relevant row of the Completed assignments page and add a link to your user page in the 'Student Wikipedia userpage' column in the row with your name.

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to the SUNY New Paltz. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our Organizational Communication I is one of the first at our university to use Wikipedia to such an extent, so please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university—and of yourselves.

You should expect that the course leader, other students, your friends, and even (or especially) other Wikipedia editors (not affiliated with our course) will leave you various messages on your talk pages. When working on the exercises below, you should log in to Wikipedia and check your messages as often as you check your email (I strongly recommend you read 'as often' as 'at least daily'). Whenever you have a new message and are logged to Wikipedia, you will see a large orange message, 'You have new messages', on every Wikipedia page you access. To make this message disappear, you should click on it and read the message. Note that it is customary to leave new messages at the bottom of the talk/discussion pages, and to reply to somebody's messages on their talk pages. If you want to leave somebody a message, make sure you are editing their talk page, not their user page. Remember to sign your talk and discussion messages.

Some other useful tips: whenever you are done with an edit and want to save a page, fill out the edit summary box and view a preview of the page after your edit to make sure it looks as you actually want it to look. Only then click the "Save Page" button. You may find the page history tool and watchlist tools to be very useful when you want to check what changes by other editors have been made to the article(s) you are working on.

Please direct any questions to <ex. this page discussion page or User_talk:JasonSWrench>. You are welcome to send me emails, or drop by to during my office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

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After you familiarize yourself with how Wikipedia works, it is time to put those lessons into practice. This is important; not only will it give you experience in wiki technology before you begin your Working Paper, but the successful completion of the below exercises in itself will impact your quiz/participation score. After you finish doing an exercise, please leave the information at the <Completed assignments page>.

Important note: make sure you are logged into your account before making any edits. If you are not logged in, we cannot verify who has done the edits, thus we will be unable to recognize your work and grade you on it. In other words, if you do any edits while not logged in, we will not count those edits toward your grade in this course.

As mentioned in the introduction section above, each student should let their Teaching Assistant know what their Wikipedia account nickname is by linking their Wikipedia account next to their name on the <Completed assignments page>. In the same manner, make sure you link the article you are working in during the exercises on that page.

Exercise 1

You may want to start with this tutorial, which will take you through the basics of editing Wikipedia.

Create a userpage for yourself. Look at the top right corner, you will see your nickname in red. Click on it; write some text (about yourself, about the course, etc.), save the page. Repeat until you are satisfied. Upload an image and add it to your page.

Exercise 2

First, you will expand and improve an existing article. Wikipedia covers nearly every aspect of our life and culture, so you should be able to find something connected to your hobbies and interests, but for this exercise you should preferably find a subject related to Organizational Communication. The list of possible topics on the syllabus is a helpful source for picking your topic. Once you have picked a topic, please make sure that you have listed that topic on the <Completed assignments page> to ensure that only one student is working on a given topic. Topics will be chosen on a first-come, first-serve basis, so make sure you list your topic on the <Completed assignments page> as soon as you have made your decision. The following pages may be useful to you at that stage:

Make sure you have read the guides mentioned in the introduction section and familiarize yourself with how wiki works before attempting to do this exercise. You may want to refresh your memory by rereading this page:

To complete this exercise, it is NOT enough to expand any one article with a single meaningful sentence. You should expand the article by adding meaningful information related to Organizational Communication. Your addition should be the equivalent of 2 to 3 pages of double-spaced content you would normally write in a paper. This process should include at least THREE new sources utilized within the article that are from major communication journals or specifically address organizational communication issues. These sources should be found using the Sojourner Truth Library’s databases. For videos on using the library’s databases, please go to My YouTube Site.

When you have completed your revision, please make sure that you link the content back to the Wikipedia content site on Organizational Communication and placed a link on the <Completed assignments page>.

Exercise 3

After you are familiar with how to expand an existing article, you will create one new articles that can be linked to the Organizational Communication wiki. The list of possible topics on the syllabus is a helpful source for picking your topic. Once you have picked a topic, please make sure that you have listed that topic on the <Completed assignments page> to ensure that only one student is working on a given topic. Topics will be chosen on a first-come, first-serve basis, so make sure you list your topic on the <Completed assignments page> as soon as you have made your decision. The following pages may be useful to you at that stage: As in the previous exercise, there are several pages that will help you find a subject for your article:

However, before you create the new article, make sure it has the appropriate name - if you haven't so far, you may want to read Wikipedia:Naming conventions. And if you are unsure how to create a new article, you will want to read Wikipedia:Starting a new page.

Now that you have created your article, you should make sure it fulfills several important criteria:

  1. It is important that an article is not orphaned - i.e. it should be linked from several other articles. To learn more about this, take one of the existing orphaned articles and link them into appropriate places. See Wikipedia:Orphaned articles for more details on this.
  2. It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
  3. It is likely the article you have created is a stub. In that case, make sure you assign it to the appropriate stub category.
  4. It is extremely important that the article has references. Please see Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:References. You can use Wikipedia:External links as references for this exercise, but bear in mind that for your Working Paper you will be required to use academic books/journals as references as well.
  5. If the article is long enough, it should have an introductory paragraph. See Wikipedia:Lead for details on what such a paragraph should look like.

To complete this exercise, you should create one new articles and make sure it fits the above criteria. Your new article should contain a minimum of TEN academic sources and resemble other articles commonly found in Wikipedia. This exercise may be completed in a group of no more than three people. For each additional person you add to a project, you must increase the number of peer-reviewed, academic sources by 5, so a group of 2 would have 15 sources and a group of 3 would have 20 sources. Your addition should be the equivalent of 4 to 6 pages of double-spaced content you would normally write in a paper. These sources should be found using the Sojourner Truth Library’s databases. For videos on using the library’s databases, please go to My YouTube Site.

When you have completed your revision, please make sure that you link the content back to the Wikipedia content site on Organizational Communication and placed a link on the <Completed assignments page>.

There are many other places you may want to check if you want to improve your Wikipedia-editing skills by editing Wikipedia. Feel free to check the following pages:

It is vitally important to be able to distinguish between primary sources and secondary sources, as well as to be able to properly cite your sources. Please use academic, primary sources (like academic journals) instead of non-academic, secondary sources (like newspapers or non-academic websites). See also Wikipedia:Reliable sources for information on what sources are preferred.

Some examples of well-referenced articles: Katyn massacre, Welding, Section summary of the USA PATRIOT Act, Title II, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Battle of Austerlitz, Military history of France, Monopoly (game), Astrophysics Data System, Mercury (planet), Søren Kierkegaard, Eric A. Havelock.

Working paper

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A list of short, stub organizational communication-related articles selected by course leader will be available here before work on the Working Paper will begin. Each group of students should chose one article and work on it. Make sure you report your choice on the <Completed assignments page> and cross out the article from the list below (you can cross out the articles by using <s></s> tags before and after the word to achieve the following effect). Note that this means that the groups which decide early on their articles will have a wider choice and the groups which wait until the end will have few articles to chose from. If instead of expanding an existing stub you would like to create a new article from scratch, this is possible, however make sure you consult the subject of this article with your professor and receive their approval before stating the project.

You are welcome to use Wikipedia:Peer Review and related tools and seek creative comments on your article. If you manage to make your article a Wikipedia:Featured Article, you may receive additional points. However, please refrain from voting for each other's articles during this process (note also that anonymous and new user votes are commonly disregarded during FA voting process to prevent any abuses. In addition, please note that any attempt to cheat on Wikipedia will be regarded as seriously as academic plagiarism.

Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page. This assignment is due by

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