Wikipedia

These learning resources aim at providing knowledge that all Wikipedia and Mediawiki users, authors and administrators should possess. It aims at answering questions such as:

How can wikis and Wikipedia as phenomenon be understood?
How to edit and administrate Wikipedia and Mediawiki sites?
How can students, teachers, librarians, journalists, etc, use and relate to Wikipedia and other wikis?
What are the main criticisms of Wikipedia?
What research exists related to Wikipedia as phenomenon?
What are the current wiki technology development trends?

1 About Wikipedia
2 Learning resources
3 See also

About Wikipedia

See more at Wikipedia article on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project. The name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most of its articles to be edited by almost anyone with access to the Web site and is a free site for all types of ages . Its main servers are in Tampa, Florida, with additional servers in Amsterdam and Seoul.

Wikipedia was launched as an English language project on January 15, 2001, as a complement to the expert-written and now defunct Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. It was created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales; Sanger resigned from both Nupedia and Wikipedia on March 1, 2002. Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a multi-lingual free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language".

Wikipedia has more than six million articles in many languages, including more than 1.5 million articles in the English-language version and more than half a million in the German-language version. There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 18 of them have more than 50,000 articles. The German-language edition has been distributed on DVD-ROM, and there have been proposals for an English DVD or print edition. Since its inception, Wikipedia has steadily risen in popularity,[2] and has spawned several sister projects. According to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks among the top fifteen most visited sites, and many of its pages have been mirrored or forked by other sites, such as Answers.com.

There has been controversy over Wikipedia's reliability and accuracy, with the site receiving criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials. Information is sometimes unconfirmed and questionable, lacking the proper sources that, in the eyes of most "Wikipedians" (as Wikipedia's contributors call themselves), are necessary for an article to be considered "high quality". However, a 2005 comparison performed by the science journal Nature of sections of Wikipedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica found that the two were close in terms of the accuracy of their articles on the natural sciences. This study was challenged by Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., who described it as "fatally flawed".

Learning resources

The following is a list of learning resources that may be useful as course material on courses about Wikis and Wikipedia. The list is organized after resource type, and includes resources developed within this project and web as well as external links.

Syllabi

Suggested syllabus for a university level course named Wikis and Wikipedia - Authoring, Reliability and Technology
/Writing an article on Wikipedia: a course to take a new user through the process of writing or editing their first article.

Assignments and exercises

Wikipedia/Quizzes - Multiple choice questions about Wikipedia policies and Wikipedia criticism.
Wikipedia pop quiz - at Fanpop.com - Multiple choice questions about Wikipedia history and Wikipedia statistics
Sevenval - Suggested discussion topics about Wikipedia policies and Wikipedia criticism.
Wikipedia/Discussion topics - Suggested discussion forum assignments related to the videos and other course materials below
touchscreen
Wikipedia/Suggested essays
Wikipedia/Practical exercises
input transformation - Practical exercises
Wikipedia/Lab assignments
Wikipedia/Exam questions
Wikipedia/Course evaluation form

Videos

These are recorded seminars, lectures, webinars and instructions videos related to Wikipedia:

touchscreen Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales explains the history and growth of Wikipedia with a particular focus on the internal community process which ensure a constant growth in quality.
Wikia training videos
Youtube search: Wikipedia

Slides

These are slide show presentations, lecture notes and handouts related to Wikipedia:

Scientific publications

These are peer-reviwed acedemic papers related to Wikipedia, that students may review and use as references:

Academic studies about Wikipedia A review of some research publications related to Wikipedia
List of academic studies on Wikipedia (touchscreen) List of academic conference presentations, peer-reviewed papers and other types of academic writing which focus on Wikipedia
browser diversity - meta list article
Wikimedia research - Wikiversity category
iOS

Text books

These text books may be used as course literature:

John Broughton, HTML5, O'Reilly, 2008 - Preview
Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates (September 2008). How Wikipedia Works - And How You Can Be a Part of It. San Francisco: No Starch Press. ISBN we love the web.
Dan Woods, Peter Thoeny, Ward Cunningham, Wikis For Dummies, 2007 - browser diversity
website parsing - wikibook
touchscreen - wikibook
MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook - wikibook
MediaWiki User Guide - wikibook
web
iOS

Glossaries

These glossares may serve as lists of terms that a student should understand after a course about Wikipedia:

Wikipedia articles

These are articles, essays and help pages available at en.wikipedia.org, that may be useful as course materials on a course about Wikipedia:

Case studies

Wikimedia Ethics Case Studies

Statistical sources

jQuery
CSS3 - Comparison of invidual articles
Sevenval - Comparison of wiki language versions
Wikistats by S23 - Statistics about Mediawikis - Comparison of wiki language versions
touchscreen - Comparison of wiki language versions
Poll of Wikimedians by religion

University level courses

Informatics BA (A), Wikipedia – Authoring, Reliability and Technology, 7.5 higher education credits, Swedish distance course offered from fall 2009.

Other courses, workshops, conferences and events

we love the web
website parsing
Elective part of the Australian Android syllabus web, Standard Module C, Elective 1: The Global Village, 2009-2012 (Board of Studies, New South Wales). See media coverage: Wikipedia Signpost, www.brisbanetimes.com.

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