Wikipedia:School and university projects/ITESM Campus Toluca/Syllabus

This will be an abbreviated syllabus for reference to both students and mentors in regards to Wikipedia-related assignments. You will also be able to see how Wikipedia fits in with the overall course.

The semester begins on Aug 6 and end in mid-Nov. The semester is divided into 4 periods/partials. The syllabus is separated by such below

Academic English

Weekly Schedule (Subject to change)

Week 1 (1/28-2/1): Presentation of the Course / Introduction to the Wikipedia Community
Week 2 (2/5-2/8): Wikiprojects and Contact with Wikipedians
Week 3(2/11-2/15): Wikipedia First Article
Week 4(2/18-2/22): Cultural Analysis and Writing (sentence) / Cultural Analysis of Movie
Week 5(2/25-2/29): Cultural Analysis and Writing (paragraph)
Week 6 (3/3-3/7): Wikipedia Policies – Cultural Analysis
Week 7(3/17-3/21): Student Reports on projects (draft portfolios due)
Week 8 (3/24-3/38): Student Reports on projects
Week 9 (3/31-4/4): Class analysis and revision of 2 Wikipedia articles
Week 10 (4/7-4/11): Professional Articles
Week 11(4/14-4-18): Student presentation of Wikipedia article topics
Week 12 (4/21-4-25): Student presentation of Wikipedia article topics
Week 13 (4/28-5/2): 5 paragraph essay (persuasion) / Final reflective essay
Week 14 (5/5-5/7): Finishing Portfolio

Portfolio Projects

I would like your portfolios to be divided into 4 major sections:

I. Annotated readings (to be read/annotated at home in preparation for classroom discussion II. Handouts (information given as reference such as sentence and paragraph structures) III. Wikipedia Projects

a. Userpage

i. Biography

ii. Userboxes

b. Collection of Wikipedia pages (like Category:Mexico), terminology (like “stub”) and codes (like {{reflist}}) (in English and Spanish)

c. Contact with Wikipedians (on your talk page and/or the discussion pages associated with your WikiProjects and articles (on these pages, highlight your conversations))

d. Project pages highlighting your contributions

i. WikiProject Mexico

ii. WikiProject related to your field

e. Town page (using “cheat sheet”)

f. Annotated Wikipedia policies

i. Neutral Point of View

ii. Verifiability

g. “small” contributions

i. Revise 2 articles

ii. Translate article for Spanish Wikipedia

h. 3 new or extended articles

i. Related to Mexico

ii. Related to your field

iii. Your choice

IV. Other Projects

a. Cultural Analysis of 1 movie (from list)

b. 2 Reflections on 2 different professional journal articles in your field.

V. Reflective essay on your experience in the course

Advanced B (Fall 2007

Partial 1 (Aug 6 - Aug 31)

Major Assignments

• Writing Assignment (summary and analysis of readings for the period)
• Individual Project (chatting with non-Spanish speakers)
• Lab Assignments

(There are no assignments directly related with Wikipedia for this period but if students want to chat with anyone on the mentors list (I require voice chat for this assignment.) that would be great.)

Partial 2 (Sept 3 - Sept 28)

Major Assignments

• Writing Assignment (Business Letters)
• Networking Assignment (Directly Related with Wikipedia)

Checklist for things to do in Wikipedia This part of this assignment is actually the beginning to doing your final project – writing an acceptable article for Wikipedia. The process outlined in this checklist is to guide you to becoming members of Wikipedia as well as a very basic orientation. You will need to get at least one Wikipedian (other than fellow classmates) to respond to your discussion page.
1) Enter Wikipedia’s Main Page and create an account for yourself (link at upper-right hand corner). For each group, there is a group page. On that page, put information about the members of your group and your general interests.
2) Go to my user page at User:Thelmadatter and read it. Also, go to my talk page at User talk:Thelmadatter to see communications I have had with other Wikipedians, namely Richardsusr to see how networking really helps! Go to the articles Self access language learning centers and Machaca. These are examples of an article and a stub (respectively) that I have created. You may use these as templates for your own work.
3) Go to User talk:Thelmadatter and give me the direction for your user page and give me some feedback on what you read on my user page and my discussion page (~100 words total).
4) On Wikipedia:WikiProject Mexico, go to the articles section and look at the suggestions listed for contributions. Then on your user page, write the topics that interest you. In the third partial, you will need to revise an article, create a stub and translate an English page into Spanish for the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia.
5) On Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mexico, contribute something (intelligent!) to one of the ongoing discussions.
6) Clicking on the names of the people on the Mentors page for this Project, invite as many as possible to view your userpage, esp. the topics you are interested in writing about. You need to have at least ONE Wikipedian to answer you back, but as there are many on the mentor list, invite several. I need to see that you have started a conversation with at least one mentor!
7) For each of the 6 steps above, note when each step was completed and provide links to the finished product.
8) Place the log, essay and completed checklist in the Digital Drop Box by the due date.

Partial 3 (Oct 1 - Nov 2)

Major Assignments

• Lab Assignments (Work with Wikipedia)
• Individual Assignment (Chat - What do foreigners know or don't know about Mexico?)

Wikipedia "Small" Contributions
1) Modify an existing article about Mexico (or your country). To do this, you will find an article that needs changes in its information, either because something is inaccurate or it is incomplete. The changes can be small… 2 or 3 sentences, but they must be cited from a Spanish-language source. Make the changes and add the citation(s). a. Find an article that needs editing improvement - not in its English so much as for its content. Use articles that have been identified as needed “cleanup” or other issues in the Wikipedia:Cleanup page or Wikipedia:WikiProject Mexico pages or you can find an appropriate article with the help of your mentor(s). The idea is to find an article that needs significant improvement. Addition of citation(s) is a crucial element! Print and write the proposed changes. This proposal must be approved by me before you can go any further!
2) Write a “stub.” Find a subject in which nothing is written in English and print the results page showing that it does not exist. This will NOT be the topic that you will translate a page for into Spanish. Write a short stub (finding out what a stub is) for the topic. At least one citation necessary, but having two or more will give you extra credit. Print the stub after you upload it.
3) Translate a page from the English language version of Wikipedia into Spanish for the Spanish-language version. To do this, find a topic (any topic at all) that has an article written for it in English but not in Spanish. Translate the article, which needs to have a min of 150 words in English, into Spanish and upload into Spanish Wikipedia. To prove your work, print the negative results page in Spanish Wikipedia, the original English article from English Wikipedia and your translation uploaded into Spanish Wikipedia.
4) Write a self-evaluation/reflective essay (5-paragraphs, including introduction and conclusion) discussing the following questions: 1) What challenges did you face in doing the 3 contributions to Wikipedia? 2) How did interaction with other Wikipedians (mentors and anyone else in Wikipedia) help you to overcome the challenges you faced? And 3) Did doing a translation from English to Spanish help you to learn anything about English? Why or why not? (one body paragraph per question) Mentors - you are welcome to help them with this aspect of this assignment if you wish, just be aware that the writing style is a bit different than that of Wikipedia. Its the 5-paragraphy essay style you probably learned in school.)

Partial 4 (Nov 5 - Nov 16)

Final Project

Final draft length -- 1000-1250 words Taking what you have learned about writing, cultural differences and how to contribute to Wikipedia, your final assignment is to write a complete article from scratch (zero) for Wikipedia. It can be an expansion of the stub you wrote in the third partial but it MUST be something that you can research and write about before the fourth partial is over. Keep in mind the conventions for a Wikipedia article including headings and links where appropriate. Also, remember to follow WikiProject Mexico's guidelines for translation of certain terms. Be sure you cite ALL the sources you use in your article! Keep in mind what a foreign audience, who has never been to Mexico would need to know, without repeating paragraphs of information when a link would do. As you cannot write an article in one session... I will require that you hand in a portfolio along with uploading the final article onto Wikipedia. Your portfolio (written on paper will include) Sources for your article almost have to be in Spanish and must be authoritative sources (newspapers/periodicals, gov't sources, academic sources etc) 1 -- Your idea for an article (approved by me) 2 -- copies of all of your sources, highlighting the information you used in your article. 3 -- a sample of work done by each member of the group with their names on the work. For example, if you divide your article in 3 or 4 sections (1 per person), each person should hand in one section. 4 -- One draft of the complete article which I commented on. 5 -- Final Draft as submitted onto Wikipedia along with URL to get to same.