UCNISS/Sport Wiki Academy/Using Wikimedia Foundation projects

Wikimedia Foundation hosts a number of wikis that address specific needs and communities on the internet. Some of these projects can be useful to sport organizations.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia logo

Comprehensive and unbiased information on any sport code, sport organisations, and of course notable sport figures and celebrities. Wikipedia is the first or second site that shows up on Google when people search for it.

When contributing to Wikipedia, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Wikipedia is not a place to advertise your sport federation/team/athlete. All content that you upload and create should be neutral. If you appear to be advertising, you may get banned and any links you add may get blacklisted. (see WP:FAQ/Organizations on Wikipedia)
2. Be aware of conflicts of interest. When you are editing, cite as many sources that are not you as possible, use talk pages to explain your edits, write as neutrally as possible. (see WP:COI and WP:FAQO on Wikipedia)
3. You do not have control over the content on Wikipedia. People may revert your changes. They may add information that is unfavorable to your organization or about you. (see WP:FAQO on Wikipedia)
4. When editing, remember to be as neutral as possible and that anything you include should be verifiable. (see WP:FAQO on Wikipedia)

WikiProjects

Another way to learn about how articles are categorized, assessed and improved is by joining a WikiProject. These reside not in the Wikipedia main namespace where the articles are but "behind the scenes" in Wikipedia's project space. Many WikiProjects comprise active special interest groups who collaborate on whole sets of related articles. A pioneering WikiProject, Wikipedia:WikiProject The Beatles helped pave the way for the assessment and improvement process that has become standard in producing featured articles.

For Sports in general Wikipedia:WikiProject Sports is a good place to start. To drill down to specific topics for specific locales browse the WikiProject Sports Directory. Find your the subject area that relates to your organization, sign up, get involved. Learn to use the assessment system for article quality as it will help increase the number of editors to your articles and improve the chances of the article being featured.

Shortcut: Australian sports

See also Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team

Commons

Wikimedia Commons logo

Multi media libraries such as images, video, audio and documents can be uploaded here. All content uploaded needs to be licensed. Licenses that are acceptable include the GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Attribution and Attribution/ShareAlike licenses, other free content and free software licenses, and the public domain.. Media on this project easily integrates with work on the articles on Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource and Wikinews. This multimedia content is available across all language projects for those wikis.

If you are a sport organization and you have a license to allow for uploading of your content, it can be very helpful in terms of providing link traffic from citations for where the image came from, providing readers with high quality images that better show off your organization, and help instill good will amongst the fan community by demonstrating a willingness to be open and share.

Wikinews

Wikinews [1] sometimes has news articles on sporting current affairs and breaking news. While all articles can be publicly access, the 'front page' has a tough editorial checkpoint managed by Wikinews volunteers. Despite this, if you can follow the style guidelines [2] to write an article, your sport organization may value the additional visibility by having your news reported there as Wikinews gets syndicated on Google News.

Wikiversity

Wikiversity is for research, teaching and learning documents, projects and activities. It can be used by academic programs and institutes of sport to share ongoing research, to develop coursework for students, staff, volunteers and athletes.

Wikibooks

Wikibooks [3] allows contributors to create "free, open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts." [4] It does not allow for original research. Wikibooks may be useful for organizations wishing to write the history of their club, league, federation or sport. It may also be useful for sport related academic programs that want to have staff or students work towards developing course material at a low cost.

Wiktionary

Wiktionary is an online dictionary. While this may not be useful for most sport organizations, it may be very useful for less well known sports that have their own vocabulary. You can create an entry about one of these words, provide an example of that usage with a quote that links back to your site, and link back to an article about the word on Wikipedia. You can even create a glossary for sports with their own vocabulary.

Wikisource

Wikisource is a great place to host primary source documents and make them available to researchers like historians, sport historians, sociologist, sport sociologists. The type of materials that can be uploaded to Wikisource include "published texts; including novels, non-fiction works, letters, speeches, constitutional and historical documents, laws and a range of other documents." [5] Examples of some of the content related to sport on Wikisources can be found at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:Sports.