Wikipedia:Meetup/AfroCROWD/ NSF REU ILLC

Welcome to the National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Wikipedia Translate-a-thon with AfroCROWD!

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The National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (NSF REU) is hosting a virtual Wikipedia editing workshop series and Translatathon with AfroCROWD. At this first event, students, professors, and faculty will translate Wikipedia articles among any languages which attendees understand.

New York City has a large immigrant population and great diversity of speakers of various languages. We are pleased to take advantage of this wealth of diversity for our first virtual translate-a-thon.

Today's goals

By the end of this event we want you to

Get your Wikipedia username and account
Add at least one sentence or other contribution to Wikipedia
Enjoy yourself

Let's Get started

Please sign up for your own Wikipedia user account: go to here to create your accounts (please don't avoid your real name, and please choose a name and password you will remember)
Please sign up for the event on the Dashboard here this allows us to keep track of edits in this project during the course.
Do you have a list of books or references assigned? Please let us know if you need help with citations.

List of articles to be improved

Editing list provided by course professors

Useful / Advanced support

AfroCROWD Tutorials:

Find more, useful information by clicking "Show" to the right

click "show" to the right

How to find the list of articles in which a Wikipedia article already exists

Suppose that one has a Wikipedia article in one language, and wants to see the other languages in which that Wikipedia article exists. Here is the process:

Go to any Wikipedia article in any language
In almost all cases, if the article exists in another language, the name of that language will be on the left side of the screen
1. Click the name of the language to see the translation of the article in that language
2. Ask for assistance if you go further than this, because a person with experience will be able to quickly confirm what any new user finds
On the left side of the screen there is a menu. Look for "Wikidata item" or a translation of that phrase
1. If there is no statement "Wikidata item", then go to Wikidata and search for the article's name in any language
2. If there is still no result, that article has not been translated. Start a translation!
3. After publishing a translation create a Wikidata item for the concept. List the original article there and your translation so that they will be interconnected. Ask for assistance with this if Wikidata looks confusing.
If you find a Wikidata item for a concept, then the Wikidata item will list all language Wikipedia articles covering that concept.
Use the Wikidata item to get the link to other languages for that item

How to find articles that need translation

These are the most common methods:

1. Use Wikipedia Gap Finder (you can customize your search): http://recommend.wmflabs.org/#Recommend

2. Using the English Wikipedia, find an article that interests you. Then, look to the left of the page, in the gray bar beneath the Wikipedia globe. At the tail end of that list of links, you'll see "Languages," and links to all of the languages that also have that article. Languages are spelled in that language's alphabet or phonemes. For example, you won't see "Japanese" or "French," you'll see "日本語" and "Français".

Is the language you're studying listed? If so, click the language to see the same article in that language. You can compare the two articles to get a sense of what one has that the other does not. If not, that means there's no corresponding article in that language.

3. Head to the Wikipedia in the language you are studying. In the search bar, type: WP:GA (this will also work with Wikipedias using non-Roman alphabets). You'll be taken to a list of "Good Articles" on that language's Wikipedia, the best articles it has to offer. (You may need to find the page that lists them, if it's separate). Find a Good Article on your target language's Wikipedia. Check the bar on the side to see if there is a corresponding article in English. If there isn't, great! You can translate the article into English, and contribute it to the English Wikipedia.

Sometimes, the article exists, but is very short. That's OK, too. However, if both languages have well-developed pages on the topic, you will want to find another article. It can be very challenging to add content to an already-developed article.

Try the tool

You can access the tool from Special:ContentTranslation from Wikipedia in any language. Accessing it for the first time will also enable the tool for that wiki.

Content translation is available [[<tvar|beta>Special:MyLanguage/Beta Features</>|as a beta feature]] in all Wikipedias for logged-in users. Once it is enabled, you will see additional entry points to easily start a translation from your "contributions" page or from the list of languages of Wikipedia articles when they are missing in your language.