10 STEPS TO MAKING YOUR VERY OWN CONTRIBUTION TO WIKIPEDIA.

1. Chose your topic carefully. Ask yourself ‘Does the world need information on this topic, or do I just think it’s funny?’ If your topic isn’t up to scratch, someone’s just going to delete your page and all your hard work will be for nothing!

As Wikipedia gets bigger, it gets harder and harder to find something that isn’t already on it. But all is not lost – follow these links and explore your options. As you come across something that you might be interested in, copy the URL onto your wikispaces page. That doesn’t mean you *have* to do that topic – you’ll be creating a shortlist of topics that you can choose from. • Wikipedia:Requested articles • Wikipedia:Most wanted articles • Wikipedia:Requests for expansion • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Australia

2. Check Wikipedia again Make sure that a page on your topic doesn’t already exist, or that you are able to contribute something new and worthwhile to this topic.

3. Write a proposal What do you want to do?

Why do you want to do it (eg, there’s no page/something needs improvement)

Who’s going to do it? (on your own? In a group?)

Is there more than one person who wants to do your topic? Can you break the topic up and do different parts? You don’t want to have three or four groups all making the same information on the same page!

4. Organise your ideas. Get your article’s headings written down, and decide who is doing what.** Make a note of who in the group is responsible for what. It would be a good idea to have all your work uploaded to GoogleDocs, to make sure that everyone in your group has access to it.

Double check with the class to make sure no one else is doing the same areas as you.

** It’s helpful to have a look at some other Wikipedia articles which are related to your topic – they can give you an idea of what you can put on your page.

5. Research – and do it thoroughly! A good Wikipedia article will come from lots of resources and present a balanced view. Don’t just hit one or two website for all your information. Think about where else you can go – newspapers/sites, books, interviews...?

6. Keep track of your sources and remember to cite them. You’ll notice a lot of places on Wikipedia where it says [citation needed]. This is saying that there might not be a good reason to believe/trust what is being written.

It’s a lot easier to keep track of where you get all your information from as you go, rather than having to go hunting later to do your citations.

For example: ‘Lara Secondary College first opened in January 2003. The College is the result of years of campaigning by a number of community members who had the vision to see a clear need for a secondary educational setting in the centre of a growing town.’ 1

1 http://www.larasc.vic.edu.au/about_overview.html. Friday 22 May, 2009

If you reference a news source, you cite it like this:

Geelong Advertiser. www.geelongadvertiser.com.au. October 12, 2007. http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2007/10/12/7775_news.html. Retrieved on 2008-08-10.

If you just rip your information off from a website without citing the source, you run the risk of having your page deleted by the editors.

7. Write up your information! It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t look like a Wikipedia page yet – you’ll get a chance to play with that later. This step is about getting your information written down in the way you’d be happy to publish.

8. Get it approved Run it past Bu Hall and get yourself a login.

Don’t share this login with anyone – if someone vandalises a page or does something else stupid with your login, you are going to be held responsible! You will find your login/account will be deleted if you abuse it, so play nice.

9. Start building Once you get your article approved, you can log into Wikipedia and start having a look at how to build pages. What you see at the end is not what it looks like when you put it in! There’s wiki code behind what you see. For example this:

Belmont High School is an Australian public secondary school located in Belmont, Victoria, a suburb in the city of Geelong. It is one of the largest public schools in Geelong. The school was established in 1955[2] and as of 2009, it has an enrolment of over 1200 students from grades 7 to 12. [3]

Really looks like this:

'''Belmont High School''' is an [[Australia]]n [[public]] [[secondary school]] located in [[Belmont, Victoria]], a [[suburb]] in the city of [[Geelong]]. It is one of the largest [[public school]]s in [[Geelong]]. The [[school]] was established in 1955<ref name="vic">[http://www.study.vic.gov.au/school_details.aspx?ID=7585 [[Victorian]] [[Government]] [[Schools]] : Belmont High School]</ref> and as of 2009, it has an enrolment of over 1200 students from [[Educational stages|grades]] 7 to 12. <ref>http://www.bhs.vic.edu.au/pdf/Annual_Report_2007.pdf</ref>

Don’t stress about the code – it’s not as bad as it looks!

Go and have a play in the Sandbox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox ) and experiment with putting you information in, to see what it looks like. You can’t break the Sandbox and it’s a really good place to learn your stuff.

10. Build away! Bring all your work together and build your page! Don’t forget to save regularly.

Good luck!