Wikipedia:School and university projects/University of Leeds/Cultures of Performance (Rachel Hann)

Introduction

Specific introduction for students is in the next section.

This wikipage is a working paper developed by students on Cultures of Performance 1103, School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. The seminar group lead by User:Rachel Hann have been invited to create a wiki that documents and discusses the material covered in the module.

Supervisors: User:Rachel Hann

Students:

Start date: The project will begin in January 2009.

Introduction for students

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 User_talk:Rachel Hann.

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 University of Leeds. We are guests here and we should all behave accordingly. Please make sure you read Wikipedia:Wikiquette. Our Cultures of Performance course is the first with one at our School to use Wikipedia in this manner, 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, TAs, 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 Piotr's talk page>. You are welcome to send us emails, or drop by to see us during our office hours, and ask about Wikipedia how-to; but please try to find the answer first on the Help:Contents.

Working paper

A list of short, stub <your field, ex. sociology>-related articles selected by course leader and/or the TAs 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 TA 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 additon, please note that any attempt to cheat on Wikipedia will be regarded as seriously as academic plagiarism.

• <ex.List of all sociology-stubs?. We will chose the most appopriate stubs for our 'Societies' course and list them below for your convenience.

Make sure you mark the exercise as 'done' on the Completed assignments page.