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University of Edinburgh edit-a-thon

About the event

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An introduction to Wikipedia

Have you ever wondered why the information in Wikipedia is extensive for some topics and scarce for others? Particularly in different language Wikipedias? On Thursday 9 February 2017, the University's Information Services team will run a Wikipedia translate-a-thon for the Edinburgh University Translation Society. Full Wikipedia editing training will be given in the firsts session on 9th February before students decide on the article they would like to translate. Thereafter the following week's session 5pm to 6.30pm on Thursday 16th February will focus purely on beginning to translate the chosen article(s) using Wikipedia's new Content Translation tool.

We will provide training on how to edit and participate in an open knowledge community. Participants will be supported to translate articles.

(Video) Introduction to the Content Translation tool (1 minute).

We Can Edit

How do I prepare?

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Further reading

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The main policies and guidelines can be found at the following pages:

Programme - Thursday 9th February 2017

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  • 5:00pm - 5:15pm: Housekeeping and Welcome
  • 5:15pm – 5:45 pm: Introduction to Wikipedia
  • 5:45pm – 6:30pm: How to edit Wikipedia using the new Visual Editor.

Thereafter, attendees will be invited to search for an article to translate from one language Wikipedia to another. Students should have their chosen article selected for Thursday 16th February 5pm.

Programme - Thursday 16th February 2017

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  • 5:00pm - 5:15pm: Housekeeping and Welcome
  • 5:15pm – 5:45 pm: Introduction to Content Translation
  • 5:45pm – 6:30pm: Getting started with the Translation (practical)

Trainers

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Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh

Class List

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Please put your Wikipedia username in the space below:

The assignment

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15 steps to translation success

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  1. The first step is to Create an account.
  2. In the first session we will run through Wikipedia's main policies and guidelines and how to create a userpage using Wikipedia's new Visual Editor interface.
  3. Next the Content Translation tool must be enabled. This can be done in the Beta menu (top right corner of your screen). Once in the Beta menu, make sure the Content Translation option is ticked and then click Save (bottom left corner of your screen).
  4. Now you need to select an article or articles to translate. The tools below (categories, portals, Gapfinder, Not in the other language) will help you decide. Importantly, it should be a high quality article (check the references being used) of suitable importance & subject matter.
  5. Once you have decided on the article to translate (and it has been approved by your course tutor) add the article title to the table below along with the languages being translated from and to.
  6. Go to the Content Translation tool in the Contributions menu.
  7. Click Start a new translation.
  8. Input the languages you are translating from and to.
  9. Input the source article title.
  10. Click Start translation.
  11. The article will then be translated by you paragraph by paragraph. Check and double-check the paragraphs being translated that they make sense in the target language and that the formatting copies across correctly. Important: Save your work as you go by copying completed paragraphs into a Word or Google document entitled: 'YOUR NAME - New translated article - New article title'.
  12. Consult the Content Translation Guide, FAQ and screencast to help you with any issues.
  13. Once you are satisfied with your translation then click Publish translation to complete your translation. Make sure the newly published article has enough categories and links to other pages (and that other pages link to it).
  14. Congratulations you have created your first page(s) and the assignment.

One final step

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Finally, Wikipedia articles each have a sidebar listing its counterparts in other languages, so the last thing you should do is to make sure this includes links to and from the new translated material. A guide on this can be found at Help:Interlanguage links but the Content Translation should add this automatically.

Choosing an article

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  1. Please make sure the chosen article is sufficiently challenging. The article in question will need to be run past myself to avoid issues that arose last semester because some of the original source articles did not have enough citations or references so consequently the target article did not either.
  2. Please aim to select an article from the Featured Articles quality criteria (the highest quality standard on Wikipedia) or the Good Article quality criteria (the 2nd highest). There is a wider pool to choose from on English Wikipedia because it is the largest Wikipedia but you’ll notice that if you click on the Featured article link, there are links on the left hand side of pages to the ‘Featured Articles’ page in each of the other language Wikipedias. You will find the same if you click on the ‘Good Article’ links. There will be a lot less featured and good articles in other language Wikipedias but as long as the article has achieved good article status or featured article status, regardless of the language then it should be of the required standard to translate for our purposes. Therefore please take extra time to choose your source article(s) so that they are the right length, right level of linguistic challenge and have enough citations so that they will have no such problems in the target Wikipedia.
  3. You can view Pages needing translation into English and do category searches for articles in a subject you are interested in e.g. Category:Articles needing translation from foreign-language Wikipedias. You can also view the Portal directory to search portals in the same way.
  4. Tool: Gapfinder - This tool has been developed to help editors find missing content in any language for which there is a Wikipedia edition. GapFinder helps you discover articles that exist in one language but are missing in another. Start by selecting a source language and a target language. GapFinder will find trending articles in the source that are missing in the target. If you are interested in a particular topic area, provide a seed article in the source language, and GapFinder will find related articles missing in the target. Click on a card to take a closer look at a missing article to see if you would like to create it from scratch or translate it.
  5. Tool: "Not in the other language" - This tool looks for Wikidata items that have a page in one language but not in the other (using Wikipedia categories to filter the results).
  6. Check the word count of the source article. You can use this tool Search tool to look up the article & its word count but this includes references in its count so is not accurate enough for our purposes. Hence you should copy the article's main text (not including notes, references, bibliographies etc.) into a Word document so you can get a more accurate indication of the main body of the article's wordcount.

Assignment details

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Articles to be settled on by Thursday 16th February 2017.

Class list
# Wiki Username Chosen article(s) Language translating from Language Translating to Newly translated article (to be added after it has been published)
1. Stinglehammer Barack Obama English Arabic باراك أوباما
2. Kaylagaze L'Album de Bilbo le Hobbit French English
3. Annazhigareva History of saffron English Russian
4. Bluish.butterfly Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars English Mandarin
5. Moonie1919 Wife selling (English custom) English Bahasa Melayu
6. Sophieg15 United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda English ?
7. Eliseaud Black American Sign Language English French
8.
9.
10.
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14.
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Content Translation

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Screencast video tutorial to using the Content Translation tool
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Once you've learned the basics of editing using Wikipedia’s Visual Editor, I hope that you'll stay logged in and edit or create more articles. I've added some booklets and some links below that you may find useful. As a first step you may like to check out what What Wikipedia is not along with its 5 guiding principles: The 5 pillars.

  • Please sign your messages on talk pages with four tildes (~~~~). This will automatically insert your "signature" (your username and a date stamp). The or button, on the tool bar above Wikipedia's text editing window, also does this.
  • If you would like to play around with your new Wiki skills without changing the mainspace, the Sandbox is for you.

Sources

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Suggested sources:

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General
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  • DiscoverEd to find books, ebooks, journals, ejournals and more.
News sources
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Theses databases
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Outcomes - New pages created

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Resources

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Join us for the event!

Video guides to editing Wikipedia

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Tutorials on Wikipedia editing

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One page handouts

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Participants - Sign Up Here!

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Prior to the event:

  1. RSVP: ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk
  2. Do you have a Wikipedia User Name?
    No? Create a Wikipedia account
    Yes? Go to Step #2
  3. Sign up! Add your Wikipedia User Name to this section by clicking the blue button below (follow instructions). Your name will be added to the bottom of this page
Don't worry! If you haven't edited Wikipedia before and don't have a Wikipedia User Name yet, we will help you on the day of the event! And remember to have fun!
To sign up for this event: Log in or create an account.