Wikipedia service-learning courses/101

Creating content in Wikimedia projects (articles, textbooks, learning projects) involves writing wiki hypertext.

Therefore, it is a good manner to get aquainted with the rules and to develop your skills.

Wiki Editing

Wikipedias Wikipedia:Tutorial gives an nice overview.

Skim through the following pages. You will probably coming back to these pages when writing content.

• Help:Editing and its subpages.
• Wikipedia:Edit summary legend

Concept questions

• Why is it good to give ft <fulltext of your changes> in the summary field?

Assignment

Congratulations! You have an overview of the basics of creating wiki content. So you can start to create your first page.

If you do not have done so already, please create an account, log in, and come back to this page.

A click on the following link lets you create a subpage named My first page on your user page (you create it by clicking then on "Start the … page"). Open this new page in a new browser window, so that you can read this learning project and edit your new page at the same time. On this new page, create content about anything you like. You could describe how you found out about Wikiversity and what you expect to learn here. Use headings, lists and other formattings. Link back to this article.

Style of Articles

There is a wealth of information, especially in Wikipedia. Do not be afraid. Do not spent too much time with reading. Try to pick up the most important things at the beginning and the end of the pages and try to remember what else is there. So you can come back to it, when you are actually writing and policies are covered in more detail in a later course (Wikipedia_service-learning_courses/110#Policies)

• Wikiversitie's Manual of Style
• Wikipedias's Five Pillars
  • How to copy-edit wikipedia articles
  • Wikipedia's Manual of Style
• Wikibook's Manual of Style

Concept questions

• What are the common things in style between the Wikimedia projects? You may extend the content of the following page.
  • Wikipedia_service-learning_courses/Styles in common in wikimedia projects
• List also some differences. Why do these differences make sense? You may extend the content of the following page.
  • Wikipedia_service-learning_courses/Differences in styles in wikimedia projects

English Language

For improving your English you can explore the Department of English as a second language

You can post questions about English grammar and usage at Wikipedia's language and grammar desk.

The following sections introduce you to several more advanced concepts that you should been aware of.

Images

How do I link to images?

• Help:Images

How are floating images positioned with the text?

• Specifying placement

How do I upload an image?

• Create the link to the (not yet uploaded) image with specifying the intended image name.
  • e.g. [[Image:Tk_train.jpg|right]]
• The link appears in red, the same as an non-existent page
• When you click on this link, you are guided to upload the image.

More details of preparing images and using Wikimedia Commons are delt with in a later course.

Assignment

1. Edit your My first page to display the Wikiversity logo (Wikiversity-logo.svg), scaled to 200 pixels.
2. Add a new picture, that you upload to Wikiversity. Experiment with different positionings of text and the image.

Tables

How can I create tables in wiki syntax?

• Help:Tables

Assignment

1. Take notice of tables and their formatting when you are browsing mediawiki pages. Inspect the source code (via edit page) to learn how others have formatted tables.
2. Edit your My first page to include a simple table. You make take some time to experiment with different formattings.

Namespaces

• What is an namespace?
  • Help:Namespace (read first section)
• What namespace are common to Wikimedia projects?
  • Namespace
• What special namespaces are there in different projects?
  • Wikiversity:Namespaces
  • Wikipedia:Namespaces
  • Wikibooks:Namespaces

Subpages

What is a subpage?

• Subpages explained on Meta

Do you have an example?

• yes: Link/a/b.

Where are subpages used most often?

• on userpages: w:Wikipedia:Subpages#How_to_create_user_subpages
• on portals
• on archives of user talk pages.

Interlanguage and interwiki links

How can I link to pages the same wikimedia project in another language?

• Help:Interlanguage links
• basic syntax:

  [[language code:Title]]

• example:

  [[de:Plankton]]

How can I link to other wikimedia projects?

• InterWikimedia links
• example: [[wikipedia:InterWikimedia links]]: w:InterWikimedia links

What are the prefixes and shortcuts for the Wikimedia sister projects?

• Shortcuts and Templates

How can I avoid that the prefix is displayed in the link?

• This is called the pipe trick: add a pipe "|" at the end of the link
• example: [[wikibooks:Main Page|]]: Main Page

How can someone running an own Mediawiki setup the prefixes?

• Setup in Mediawiki

Assignment

1. Edit your My first page to add some links to articles in the Wikimedia sister projects
2. Edit your My first page to add some links to articles of wikiversity in another language.

Final assignment

• create your first wikipedia article
  • w:Wikipedia:Your_first_article

Where to go from here

• check out the other courses from the Wikipedia service-learning courses
• Wikipedia#Learning resources, a list of learning resources on Wikipedia