Introduction

As a part of LTI: Language Technology and the Internet, now taught at Palacký University (based on HG2052 Language, Technology and the Internet (née HG252)) at Nanyang Technological University students are assigned the task of creating or improving a Wikipedia article on a topic relevant to the course (i.e. something to do with Language, Technology and the Internet). This assignment was inspired in part by the WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem.

Each student will have a separate Wikipedia account, and each group will propose a topic, write, edit, and maintain a page about it. The aim is for all articles to reach the level of good articles, although not necessarily within the time-span of the class.

Supervisors: I, Francis Bond will take care of introducing students to Wikipedia and ensuring they and the project are working within the bounds of Wikipedia guidelines. Two Czech speaking research assistants will also help.

Important dates: The project will begin in October, 2023, and the pages will be assessed on their state as of Friday, November 24, 2023. I will keep watching the pages created past that date.

Status: We are about to start for 2023. See the end of this page for a list of topics and links from this and previous years.

Introduction for students

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It had over three million editors (Wikipedians) as of 2007. 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 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 even contact me.

Before making any major edits, you should create an account (Wikipedia:Why create an account?). You definitely need to have an account before attempting to work on your assignment (otherwise we will be unable to confirm if you have done the work).

Remember that Wikipedia is not a project limited only to your university. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Please try to think what impression you want other Wikipedians to have of our university — and of yourselves. Other editors may challenge your edits if they consider them not to be improvements, so be careful not to make careless errors and make sure to cite information adequately. If other people are actively editing the page then you should discuss major changes first on the talk page.

You should expect that the course instructor, 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 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 this page's discussion page or Francis Bond's talk page. You are welcome to send email, or drop by during our office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Exercises for students

After you familiarise 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 Assignment, 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 2023 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 me know what their Wikipedia account nickname is by linking their Wikipedia account next to their name on the 2023 page In the same manner, make sure you link the article you are working in during the exercises on that page.

Exercise 0

You may want to start with this tutorial, which will take you through the basics of editing Wikipedia. If you would like to read it in a language other than English, you can change it using the languages menu.

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 1

First, try expanding and improving 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 linguistics. The following pages may be useful to you at that stage:

Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types - this page contains an extensive list of stub articles, sorted by categories
Wikipedia:Requests for expansion - this page contains a list of articles that other users would like to see expanded, sorted by categories
Special:Shortpages - this page lists all Wikipedia articles deemed too short and thus in need of expansion.

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

Wikipedia:How to edit a page

To complete this exercise, it is enough to expand any one article with a single meaningful sentence. Of course, if you feel you can do more, feel free to do so. If you manage to expand (in a meaningful way) a stub article that it no longer qualifies as a stub, then you may receive some additional points. Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the 2023 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:

Assignment

Your assignment is to create or improve a Wikipedia article on a topic relevant to the course (i.e. something to do with Language, Technology and the Internet). Some possibilities are the articles that are currently linguistics stubs. In past years, we have had some pages criticized as being not notable enough. It is best to choose a subject that is clearly notable: one that has already been discussed in multiple reliable sources.

You should aim to make your article a good article.

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.
It is important that an article belongs to a category. See Wikipedia:Category for more details.
It is imperative that the article have references. Please see Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:References.
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.

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. For your page, you should find references for every important fact in the article. Please try to 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.

Timetable

2023-10-20 Create Wikipedia account and user page (Exercise 0): link your user page to the 2023 page
'2023-10-210 Form groups and discuss topics: add your group and proposed topic to the 2023 page
2023-10-27 Improve some page (Exercise 1): list the page on the 2023 page
2023-11-08 Internal presentation --- show your page to the class --- decide whether to submit for GAN
2023-12-01 23:59 CET (GMT+1) This version will be assessed (although people are encouraged to keep watching the pages).

Pages Created/Enhanced in this course

2024

See here for the details.

2023

See here for the details.

2021

See here for the details.

2020

See here for the details.

2019

See here for the details.

2014

See here for the details.

2012

See here for the details.

2010

See here for the details.