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Course name
Criticism as Praxis
Institution
The College of Idaho
Instructor
Kyle Cheesewright
Wikipedia Expert
Ian (Wiki Ed)
Subject
Communication
Course dates
2022-08-24 00:00:00 UTC – 2022-12-09 23:59:59 UTC
Approximate number of student editors
25


As a broad survey of critical methods in Communication Studies, this course investigates various methods of rhetorical criticism, in conjunction with other critical methodological practices. The Wikipedia assignment serves to explore writing for a generalized audience, as well as contributing to knowledge through collecting and presenting information about student selected topics.

Student Assigned Reviewing
Webb.Zach02 Communication ethics Speech-language pathology, Social comparison theory
TherealHarv Business communication Lipstick feminism, Communication ethics
BrettGyd57 News propaganda Risk communication, Chinatown, Boise
Ellsbells1 Speech Disorders Social media and suicide, News propaganda
LBrew1 Online communication between school and home Speech Disorders, Nonverbal communication
Kylerstrickler Risk communication Online communication between school and home, Geography of media and communication
Dingers99 Social media and suicide American Sports Activism, Environmental communication
Sbucket77 Social comparison theory Business communication, Political economy of communications
Nawahine10 Sport communication careers Speech-language pathology, Social comparison theory
Wolfpack3810 Nonverbal communication Lipstick feminism, Communication ethics
Hannahmcfadden Speech-language pathology Risk communication, Chinatown, Boise
Melanieeeedawson Lipstick feminism Speech Disorders, Social media and suicide
BradenHeath Geography of media and communication News propaganda, Online communication between school and home
BeeEdson224 Political economy of communications Baseball, Geography of media and communication
Cameronsimons24 American Sports Activism Environmental communication, Business communication
Malyce H Chinatown, Boise American Sports Activism, Political economy of communications
CarsonJones06 Environmental Communication User:CarsonJones06/Evaluate an Article, Speech-language pathology, American Sports Activism

Timeline

Week 2

Course meetings
Thursday, 1 September 2022
Assignment - Introduction to the Wikipedia assignment

Welcome to your Wikipedia assignment's course timeline. This page guides you through the steps you'll need to complete for your Wikipedia assignment, with links to training modules and your classmates' work spaces.

Your course has been assigned a Wikipedia Expert. You can reach them through the Get Help button at the top of this page.

Create an account and join this course page, using the enrollment link your instructor sent you. (Because of Wikipedia's technical restraints, you may receive a message that you cannot create an account. To resolve this, please try again off campus or the next day.)

This assignment will ask you to practice good "digital hygene," which means you need to be aware of how you are using technology, and put into practice good habits in managing your digital spaces. For this class, I suggest:

  • Bookmarking the Course Homepage
  • Making sure you are logged into Wikipedia--which bookmarking the homepage is helpful for.
  • Submiting assignments to the proper page:
    • Many pages, when you access them for the first time, will have a banner saying that the page doesn't exist--which is true. It won't exist until YOU publish it.
    • BE BOLD: with the publication button, particularly when using pages in your sandbox. Don't let writing just hang out in an open window until it gets lost. Hit the publish button!!
    • Use the links in the trainings, that direct you the correct page to complete your work. You should be working, primarily, in your sandboxes throughout the majority of the semester. When I ask you to post something on the mainspace, or an article talk page--I will say that.
    • SUBMIT YOUR WORK ON CANVAS. I will grade your work through our integrated Canvas LMS system. While you will create and publish your work on Wikipedia, most of the time, you will submit the LINK to your assignments on Canvas.

Resources:

Milestones

By the end of this week, everyone should have a Wikipedia account. I would prefer you set it up before class--but there will be some time available in class to play around with Wikipedia.

NOTE: For a while, you could not create a Wikipedia account from the College of Idaho's network. You would have to leave campus and use the internet somewhere else, or use a self-provided hotspot. After you have an account, you will be able to edit when logged into your account from the College. It seems that a year of running a Wikipedia assignment may have resulted in IP Ban being reversed for our College--but the availablity of account creation on campus is dependent on the good behavior of your fellow 'Yotes.

Week 3

Course meetings
Tuesday, 6 September 2022   |   Thursday, 8 September 2022
Assignment - Wikipedia Pillars Discussion

As you prepare to embark on your Wikipedia journey, please review the Five Pillars of Wikipedia, as well as this page discussing what it means/who are Wikipedians. As you read these pages, follow some of the links that look interesting, and explore some of the pages. Notably, both of these pages are META Wikipedia pages, meaning that it considered to be on the "backend" of Wikipedia, and as such, is a space for folks to talk about Wikipedia on Wikipedia. In this assignment, I would like you to fall into a Wiki Rabbit Hole!

After some time exploring these pages, write a discussion post (500-1,000 words) that explains how what you have learned aligns or challenges your previous knowledge of Wikipedia. In addition, consider what these pillars might mean for the community--do you think they are satisfactory, or is something missing? Do you agree with these pillars as good general guidelines, or do you think that they should be adjusted? What are your feelings about becoming, for the semester at least, a Wikipedian? How does the audience of this assignment differ from the audience you usually write for? What audiences do you usually write for?

You will submit this assignment to Canvas. If several people have already responded to this assignment, I would like to see that your discussion clearly indicates that you have read the contributions of others that have already been made.

Assignment - Add to an article

For this assignment, you are being asked to do some minor copyediting on an article. Choose any article on Wikipedia you would like, and make some small changes--gramatical, adding a needed citation, shuffling information around to make it flow more smoothly. In short, to BE BOLD, to hit that publish button, and to do it on the mainspace of Wikipedia.

In additon, this assignment includes a training about adding citations to Wikipedia. While adding a citation is a wonderful way to complete this assignment, you can easily complete this assignment without reviewing the adding citations training.

I want to emphasize here: THE TRAININGS ARE IMPORTANT. 

You can easily click through the trainings, without paying much attention, and complete them. You could have a friend do them. But, in the end, dedicating some time to really reading through the trainings, and doing the things they suggest, playing around on Wikipedia a little bit to familarize yourself with the process with PAY HUGE LATER. These trainings take you, step-by-step, through EVERYTHING you will need to be able to do to successfully edit on Wikipedia. The #1 mistake that folks make is not paying enough attention to the trainings at first. Like most education, you will get out of the trainings what you put into them.

If you skip through them quickly, you will "complete them," but you won't KNOW what they TAUGHT. These trainings lay out the skills you will need to complete your work on Wikipedia, and you will understand them better, if you actually DO what they are telling you about.

But don't take my word for it. Check out what my previous COM-250 students had to say about the WikiTrainings and Procrastination:

  • I definitely wish I had known that there is zero room for procrastination in this class.
  • Lastly, DO NOT leave it to the end! Start working on it as soon as possible
  • The first thing that I would recommend to incoming students would be to read all of the wiki assignments twice. It tells you step by step on how to do the assignment and even tells you where to go if you have questions.
  • Some advice I would give to upcoming students would be to make sure you make time. Wikipedia takes up a lot of time if you want to produce good content. Especially if you are an athlete, make sure you create time for wikipedia assignments whether it's doing it before you leave for away games or doing it on the road.
  • This Wikipedia project takes up a lot of time and once you start to procrastinate, you will quickly start to fall behind. One of the things i didn't take serious at first were the weekly modules where i would skip through them until i realized that some of the steps/assignments in the project were explained through those so i began to actually do them and each took about 15 minutes to complete.
  • When it comes to Wikipedia, there are a few things that I wish that I would have done, and if I could have would have led to more success and an easier process for myself. If a future student can do these things, then I believe that success in this project will ensue for them. First, I would advise them to take the wikitraiings seriously and engage with the activities on any page that interests them. This will help them understand the general form of Wikipedia, as well as provide a source of motivation and a jumping off point for the larger project and understanding of Wikipedia to follow.
  • Another big thing is to pay attention to the lessons offered on wiki. Sometimes if I didn't have much time, I'd skip through the lessons quickly which ended up backfiring when it came down to the real assignment. I always had to go back through and go through the lessons again. If you devote good time into learning how to navigate wikipedia it will be much easier and you could even have some fun with it. Ask questions as needed and don't put everything off until the end!
  • Second, I would definitely say that if you aren't good at time management (me), now would be the time to learn how to be better in order to complete all the trainings and in order to have good contributions to your article. I tend to work in periodic chunks or bursts of productivity followed by longer periods of frustrating unproductivity so it's a little harder to stay caught up with things like this where consistent, regular work is required, but if you can find just like 15-30 minutes of time to set aside each day or a few times a week to work on this, chipping away at it and building up your contributions, then you're golden. It doesn't even always have to be a lot of work, but as long as you keep thinking about it in the back of your head and make little edits here and there, maybe while you're waiting for your next class or at lunch, then that effort adds up to some well-developed work. I also like to remind myself that consistent smaller edits are more likely to stay up and be productive than large radical changes to the article sometimes which become easy to notice and scrutinize. So, overall, don't make it a big deal in your head, and don't wait until it becomes one huge assignment. If you make it a regular, casual, everyday thing for that semester then it becomes a lot easier to manage and you become more confident in your contributions, regardless if they stay up or not.
  • Everything takes longer than you think so stay on top of it. Maybe set reminders on your phone or whatever you do to remember commitments or responsibilities. Staying ahead of deadlines will keep your stress down about these assignments because it is a lot to handle, especially on top of all the other work for the class.
  • Also, one thing that I learned to value was the training exercises. They are always available to you at any point and they can really help you if you get stuck at any point during the project.
  • The biggest thing that I can offer is to be on your work and not to let it pile up. If you are constantly keeping up, it is manageable, but if not then best of luck to you.
  • Lastly, get familiar with the tools on wikipedia. Some of them are so useful and I didn't take advantage of them when I really wish I did.
  • The one thing I wish I knew before this class, was that I would need to be on time with my assignment, and don't procrastinate because the Wikipedia work was more than demanding. I also think that if I kept in touch with my Wikipedia training it would have been easy to go through the assignments.
  • First advice I have for future students is to be on top of all the tasks that need to be completed. That includes being aware of the set deadlines and workload that is required. I left a lot of work to do last minute which exhausted me. So don't get addicted to produce quality work under pressure like me.
  • Second advice is to understand Wikipedia. Take a moment to go through it, get lost and find your way out. That way most of the assignments will not be very confusing as you go.
  • The biggest piece of advice that I would give to upcoming students is to set time aside away from the actual assignments to explore Wikipedia. At first, it feels like everything is going very fast and can be quite confusing fairly quickly. It was overwhelming for me at first, but once I spent a couple hours exploring the Wikipedia dashboard and webpage, I started to get the hang of it. I figured out the contributions page, talk page, sandboxes, and how to edit articles. This allowed me to get a full understanding of each and every assignment. Now, I am able to confidently go on Wikipedia and edit an article. This is a new skill that I have developed that I feel is a great tool for me to have in the future. I would also advise upcoming students to enjoy it.
  • One thing I wish I knew at the start of this class was that I can't get away with procrastination as I did before. I think the best way to stay afloat in this class would be to do your Wikipedia trainings, regardless of how easy it may seem. It'll all catch up to you and you may feel a bit overwhelmed. I think it's important to be responsible with your wiki work, especially because it's all done outside of class within your own time. That's probably one of the major strategies that I developed. I'm a pretty messy person but this class taught me to focus a little more on time management and getting things done.
  • One thing I will say is to be responsible. Avoid postponing even the slightest little assignment that is worth 5points because the amount of work it requires won't just take you 5 minutes to complete it; learned the hard way when I had to pull an all-nighter just to find a credible source relating to my topic. Also, complete your trainings even if it seems easy. The sooner it gets done, the lesser the workload and the more time and dedication you can put into your main space and contribute to making Wikipedia more renowned and reliable.
  • While the assignment seems a lot at the beginning, it is important to do each piece as it comes along. Each piece of work builds onto the other, the more assignments that you miss, the more bothersome the assignment seems to become. I think that it is assignment that requires a student to come in motivated to do it. That will help the assignment feel a lot more doable and less easy to push forward.
  • The other tip is to be consistent in finishing the Wikipedia training, this helps in understanding the requirements and makes the assignment easier to work on.
  • The advice I would have to anybody starting up with Wikipedia or to the next students who will have to be doing this project is to not fall behind and to not be intimidated by Wikipedia itself. The reason why I say don't fall behind is that I did so myself due to out-of-school reasons, and this really messed me up with Wikipedia and the assignments that were due within Wikipedia. Having to go all the way back to the beginning and restart was hard and took a lot of work/patience. Even if you keep up a little that is way better for you in the long run than doing nothing at all like myself. To speak on my second piece of advice, I think most if not all of us were intimidated by Wikipedia due to the format of the site and the bad things we have heard about Wikipedia. While doing the training on how to add things, create segments to articles, etc. it is almost like coding in a way. But if you just try and take a step back you will find out it is actually a lot easier than what it may seem to be.
  • Something that I think future students should know is that there are due dates for different assignments related to the Wikipedia editing, however these due dates are limited. If any future student needs to stay on top of their editing, I would advise that they consider dedicating a time for themselves to do editing on Wikipedia, instead of only relying on the due dates that are set on canvas.
  • I think the most important tip that I would give to incoming students is to immerse yourself in Wikipedia. Many of the tools, navigation, and eventual understanding of Wikipedia took quite a lot longer than I had expected. I think that if I had been able to put more of an early emphasis on understanding the framework and the expectations it would have helped me immensely in the long run. I was eventually able to come to understand how to add information to my Wiki page and what was considered useful information. In all, I would urge future students to grasp the information early on and make sure they do not fall behind on any work.
  • My advice is to make sure you know your material. If you don't know what is going on you can always ask for help. I started asking questions more and then I started getting the hang of it. I also would like to say is to stay on top of your work. You don't want to procrastinate it will only get worse. You don't want to start falling behind.
  • I definitely wish I had gotten more in front of this assignment it can get away from you very easily especially once the in class stuff begins to separate and it becomes more of an independent thing.

Week 4

Course meetings
Tuesday, 13 September 2022   |   Thursday, 15 September 2022
Assignment - FlipGrid Conversation
Content Gaps!

Start, first, by reviewing the training above. 

Then, get a little deeper into the context by exploring Women in Red as well as Art + Feminism, both of which are projects explicitly named in the content gap training above. 

It could also be interesting to explore on of the many pages on structural discrimination and wikipedia--like Gender Bias on Wikipedia or Racial Bias on Wikipedia or Geographical Bias on Wikipedia or Ideological Bias on Wikipedia.

Once you feel like you have enough general information, consider and respond to some of the prompts from the training, in a 3-5 minute FlipGrid Video on Canvas.

Assignment - Evaluate Wikipedia

For this assignment, I am asking you to evaluate a page on Wikipedia (Links to an external site.). In order to successfully evaluate a page, you will be asked to think about what makes an effective Wikipedia article, as well as explore issues related to sources and academic honesty/plagiarism. For this assignment, you can choose ANY topic/page that interests you--though I will note that trying to have a topic directly, or tangentially, connected with Communication and/or Criticism can make this assignment feel like it has more value in the long run.

Once you have completed the general evaluation training, I would encourage you to take a look at the Evaluate Wikipedia exercise (Links to an external site.). This exercise slideshow will take you through each step in your evaluation process, though pay particular attention to the links on "Begin your article evaluation" (Links to an external site.) because this page contains the link that will take you to the correct sandbox in which to complete your evaluation (including a useful template). NOTE: When you click on this page, you will receive a notice "Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact title." That is because you haven't created it yet! Just X out of the notification, hit "Publish Page," and say "I'm getting started," and you won't see that notification again :-)

An additional link that might be helpful to you, is the Communication Studies category page (Links to an external site.), as well as the more general Communication category page (Links to an external site.). These pages will allow you to click around, exploring topics that are explicitly grouped around the topic of "Communication," or the study of Communication specifically.

I find it helpful to look at the questions that you will be answering in this assignment, before you look start searching for a page. In addition, I would love you to reactivate your knowledge of what criticism involves:

  • Identification of imperfections (with an ability to explain why x is an imperfection), AND;
  • Identification of possible alternatives (how you can improve the imperfection). 

Your review should not just read as praise for the article, but include focused thought about what one might be able to change in order to improve the article. On any page, if you go to the "Talk Page," at the top there will be a statement about how that page has been ranked in the past. Using that ranking, and the Grades chart found on the Content Assessment page (Links to an external site.), you can have a little guidance regarding the "general" kind of edits pages that have received a similar grade might need.

After completing your article evaluation, mark it as complete on the WikiEd Dashboard, and submit the link to your work in Canvas.

Week 5

Course meetings
Tuesday, 20 September 2022   |   Thursday, 22 September 2022
Assignment - Article Exploration & "Special Rule" Topics (Health and Psychology)

For this assignment, you are going to consider potential articles that you might be interested in focusing on over the rest of the semester. In order to get started, make sure to complete the "Find Potential Articles" training on the Wikipedia Dashboard.

As you start looking for your Communication-related article, you are free to search for something you are interested in specifically--but if you are lost, remember that you can use the Communication Studies category page, as well as the more general Communication category page. These pages will allow you to click around, exploring topics that are explicitly grouped around the topic of "Communication," or the study of Communication specifically. You do not HAVE to choose something from these pages--but they can be a useful jumping off point.

Be sure to use the correct page to keep your notes on the articles you are considering, which can be reached using the link in training, which can be found on the "Discuss your list of potential articles" page. At minimum, you need to:

  • Consider AT LEAST three options--and your choice should reflect some work in their construction (meaning that you have brief evaluations of those pages--does not need to be as comprehensive as the last activity).
  • The pages you are considering should be linked, 
  • As well as AT LEAST 3 seemingly relevant sources, for each potential topic, that you located using The College of Idaho library resources.
    • In particular, articles found through Taylor and Francis Online are more likely to be relevant to the discipline of Communication
    • Be sure that you are paying attention to name of the journal that your research is coming from--this is one easy way to make sure your resources are based in Communication research.
    • Please use Wikipedia's citation system (Links to an external site.), I have included a link to the relevant training--though the most useful part starts on page 5 of the training. You can just type the title of the article, and then use the citation tool to create the citation as a footnote.

Once you have compiled your list of articles, with some sources, post the link to your sandbox in this assignment.

 As you approach this topic, remember that topic selection is an important part of the class, a fact testified to by how many students mention the importance of topic selection. Consider these pieces of advice, offered from previous students in COM-250:

  • I will advise you to wisely choose your articles. Pick an article that is of interest to you so that you feel enthusiastic and excited every time you work on it instead of feeling overwhelmed by how boring it would be.
  •  I would also advise that you choose a topic that you already know something about. That way you can be familiar with it which will speed up the process of research.
  •  I found that finding an article that you actually enjoy is a good strategy in completing this assignment. by having an article that you enjoy reading, the easier it is to make edits that you feel would improve that article.
  • My advice to a future student is to work early on finding articles that you find interesting, shortlist a few of them and look for creative ways to add/edit the sub-topics listed in the articles. Try and use the scholarly articles to add recent data and information to the existing topics.
  • An obstacle that I encountered was picking an article which only had a lead section and no other sections. Although this type of article can benefit a lot from the editing assignment, I would advise future students to be aware that they if they edit a similar article, they will have to decide on the direction that the article should take if there was no clear structure in the article.
  • Even though I still complete the project I felt like I would have had an easier time with it if I put more thought into an article that allowed me to research information that was supported on a more broad-based rather than having to shift through pages of research in order to find an accurate and up-to-date article.
  • My advice would be if you want your journey of Wikipedia assignments to be challenging but valuable, you might want to focus on topics that you feel are underrepresented. Of course it should be something you are passionate about. Focus on topics that have contents gaps and try to be that minority voices. And Don't give up in the middle!
  • I would just read other articles. Something that helped me was sort of link surfing to help get a feel for what a wikipedia page should be. I think there are a lot of different ways to present information on wikipedia, but there is this same basic feel to a lot of the articles. I know the main thing I struggled with was determining what to add and where. By understanding the kind of sections a page has you can get a better idea of what to add. Possibly looking at popular pages or locked pages that get a lot of traffic could be good. You know that the pages have had a lot of editing and people looking over them which I think boils the page down into the necessities and into a more neutral presentation. For smaller pages with less oversight I think personal voice can show up which isn't ideal on wikipedia. The last thing I would say is that on smaller pages I wouldn't worry too much though. What's important is that you are expanding the information that otherwise wouldn't have been there or are upgrading subpar pages. It's wikipedia, it's designed to have a lot of trial and error.
  • This assignment takes up a lot of time and is done throughout the whole semester so make sure to chose a topic that you like. My biggest thing was that I didn't chose something that really interested me so I had a hard time motivating myself to complete the assignments surrounding wiki.
  • One more piece of advice, have fun! Pick a topic that you’re interested in. It is a lot easier to give your full attention to something when you are interested in that topic instead hating every second while working on the project. Picking a topic, you are interested in, will make this assignment feel like less work and you'll have more fun completing it.
  • Like many others have said, I would say, first, make sure you pick the right article for your project and, second, make sure that you're setting a little time aside consistently throughout your week and the course to work on the project. In picking the right article, make sure it's on a topic that interests you for sure so that you stay engaged and invested in the article. But also make sure that it is an article that needs improvement in the first place and make sure its an article that has published research on it. I spent a lot of time trying to find a good article to work on because a lot of the things I was interested in were already well-written, fully developed articles because a lot of other people were interested in them and invested in them too. So, I recommend finding an article where you're contribution can actually make a difference and add to the wealth of knowledge on Wikipedia. It was nice because a lot of the Wiki subcategories have specific pages where they just have charts/lists of articles that need work and they're organized by importance as well. I was honestly surprised how many articles were on things that everybody knows about but just not explained well on Wiki simply because the page doesn't get a lot of traffic. So that might be a resource you could utilize in finding a good article. In doing that, you also might have to find an article that's a bit more specific and contextualized than just general articles on things, if that makes sense. When it is a bit more specific, it makes your possible contributions more manageable because it's easy to see what can be improved and what you specifically can do to improve it. Before picking your article, also do a little preliminary search through some journal databases and make sure that there even is research on the topic and information that you can access and translate to Wiki. If it's too niche or specific, you're gonna have difficulty finding relevant support material and waste a lot of time just researching and reading through tons of articles that seem like they might relate, but ultimately don't.
  • An advice I would give to future students is to ensure that you pick a topic that some what interests you especially if you are someone who sometimes struggles to get motivation to do school work. I say this because this project requires you to do a great amount of research so that you can add meaningful content to whatever page/ topic your are working on. Majority of this work is done outside of class, which means you need to set some time off to do the work. What motivated me to do research was that I was generally interested in my topic.
  • Thirdly, for the main project that we do throughout the term, pick out a topic you are interested in. Communication is a vast subject with a wide scope, out of the many things you like in the world, there will definitely be a Wikipedia article with a topic you like that relates enough to communications. Don't shake your brain if there is nothing coming up, just chill and get inspired out of the blue.

 

Assignment - Final Topic & Bibliography
Start Thinking!!

Start thinking about what final topic you are going to want to choose--as well as doing research for this topic.

You can use work that you are doing toward the final project to complete the assignment due this week--but you are going to need to take some time to do quality research!

Assignment - Add a Citation

Now it's time to get a little more familiar with Wikipedia, and start to work to build bibliographies.

These two activities can be completed in any order you want, though starting with the bibliography excercise might help you to feel like your work is building towards the final project. At the same time, the biblography assignment will not be "due" until next week--so don't feel like you have to have found all of your sources before completing the edit assignment; in fact, you can complete the edit assignment only having found one starting source.

For the edit an article, you are asked to make a contribution to Wikipedia, by adding a source. You are welcome to add your source on any topic, but working towards adding a source to the topic you want to select can be useful, by getting you reading scholarly sources, and helping guide the process of research--which is a large component of this assignment.

NOTE: The Bibliography assignment is included here--but that assignment is not due until next week--make sure to review the additional details for the Bibliography assignment below, as you begin your work on it.

Finally, I want to note, many students have spoken about the importance of the research in this class. As you move into working on the research component of this assignment, you might find these comments from previous students in COM-250 to be helpful:

  • Fourthly, while finding academic articles for the assignment, search for specific terms on the library page. I was stuck for a while when trying to find citable content within the articles I found after searching the title of the Wikipedia article itself. Instead, you should find academic articles titled after the subheadings or key terms within the article, or what you think should be within the article.
  • looking for articles, analyzing articles, or putting multiple articles statements together to add to another article took longer than I expected. One piece of advice I would give is try to learn how to skim and analyze articles fast. I’m a slow reader who sometimes forgets what I just read so that was the major thing I had a problem with. But over time I did create a better way to skim and quick read articles.
  • I'd also make sure to research as much as you can. When I first added to wiki I thought that I had done enough research to add my own ideas but in reality I was only able to add a sentence or two. If I would have done more research to begin with, completing all the assignments would have been much easier and taken up less time.
  • I would advise really being thorough with the sources that you intend to use on the first time that you look for them. Otherwise you'll end up choosing some sources that have a title that fits what you article topic is but the content within it ends up adding nothing to your article and you will just end up where you started looking for an effective source and it will actually cost you way more time because you have to go back and essentially do the same source finding assignment twice. I would also consider the fact that it is not only you who is contributing to this page but people across the world so adding something that people can expand upon and add to is something that may have more of a long term impact than adding to some large already pretty completed work. It is also way easier to add to an article in which you are more familiar with the topic. It is not a good idea to try and become an expert on your topic in a two hour span and then try to write a good meaningful contribution on those ideas that you just learned two hours ago.
  • I would definitely suggest that future students plan out a good amount of time to pick their topic and make sure it’s something they are not just interested in, but hopefully they can find one they are excited about.  There’s a lot of research and reading involved and if it’s not something that you might want to learn about beyond the scope of this project it will be difficult to stay on task.
  • The hardest thing for me was finding sources that would work. I had to scour Taylor and Francis to even find five let alone ten. You have to be creative sometimes when finding these sources, and that means changing your wording or the order of your search. Make sure that when you find articles you can actually take pieces from them to add to your article. Looking back, it was cool to see your own edits on an article that others can view. It makes it all worth it in the end.
  •  One big thing I would advice to a future student in this class is to start looking for scholarly articles because when it's done at the last minute we end up choosing the wrong ones. I for example chose a topic that I wasn't really interested in.
  • it taught me how to go through sources better than I used to. I used to just graze through sources when writing papers, but now I know I have to dig deep into them. Especially when adding information into a platform that people are using to learn.
  • I knew how demanding this Wiki project was going to be but never actually dwelled or stressed on it until I started struggling with finding resources. I will advise you to wisely choose your articles.
  • Every assignment required at least a little bit of research in order to complete it. There are no strategies that I have fully developed yet but one big one that I am starting to figure out is that perfection is bullshit. I am a huge perfectionist which makes it very difficult for me to move one from anything without it being perfect whether it be a whole assignment or just a small aspect of it.
  • Some more advice would be for students to engage actively with the content of Wikipedia editing and doing the readings for class as they hold such valuable gems of knowledge that will be impactful on a students ability to only speak to others about various conversation topics on race, class, gender, and many others. There is a need for students, especially in this liberal arts education that we have cultivated here and this means we ought to be able to speak with each other about the big topics which can only be achieved by gaining knowledge and contributing to these conversations.
  • Try and use the scholarly articles to add recent data and information to the existing topics.
  • My advice would be to start on your assignments sooner than later, especially when you have to find scholarly resources. Looking up articles that are relevant to your wikipedia edits are not always easy to come by. This takes time and effort to read and critically think how a certain article may apply to your topic.
  • Strong sources can create a very believable and strong article, it also just makes everything easier when you are writing. In the end, there are the things that helped me get through wikipedia, my work has only got changed once and hasn't got changed ever since, so i take pride in that because it took me a lot of time and effort to get everything right and the way I wanted.
  • Even though I still complete the project I felt like I would have had an easier time with it if I put more thought into an article that allowed me to research information that was supported on a more broad-based rather than having to shift through pages of research in order to find an accurate and up-to-date article
  • A major bonus skill is that I know how to conduct research and appropriately apply my own findings to a Wikipedia article that probably thousands of people have seen. This scared me in the beginning but it turned out to be pretty cool.

Week 6

Course meetings
Tuesday, 27 September 2022   |   Thursday, 29 September 2022
Practical Considerations

Reach out to your Wikipedia Expert if you have questions using the Get Help button at the top of this page.

Resource: Editing Wikipedia, pages 7–9

Assignment - Bibliography Due

More detailed instructions about how to select your article can be found in the training above.

You are free to select your own article, based on your interests, as they intersect in some sense with "Criticism" or "Communication" and our class. Please make sure that you have "assigned" yourself the correct article. If you have already assigned yourself more than one article, please remove the articles that you haven't selected--this will be important for the Peer Review stage of the assignment.

It is time to begin really getting into library research. You should search the library for resources related to the topic that you have selected. As you research, you place emphasis on Communication journals (preferably using the Taylor and Francis database). Please note that the list of journals offered by the link in the previous sentence is not exhaustive, but you should be prepared to answer the question: "Why is this a communication research source, or what does this offer that a communication based research source couldn't?" with each of your citations.

Some helpful strategies you might want to consider as you research:

  • What are some keywords associated with your topic? Brainstorm a list of terms that you think relate to your subject, and try entering them, in different combinations, into the search engine.
  • Once you find some research--look for "terms of art" or specific words/phrases that the researchers are using to discuss your subject. For example, if you are looking into conversations about police brutality, you might start to discover phrases like "algorithmic racism," "predictive policing," "broken windows," and "qualified immunity." Each of these terms will lead to research that will give you different insights into the topic--though you would be unlikely to know about them until after you have done a little reading about your topic.
  • Review the articles that you find:
    • Look at the journal, the date, the article title. If the journal and the title seem good--and the date is either recent, or shouldn't particularly matter for your research, then look at the abstract.
    • Read the article for structure. Narrow down where you want to look based on headings and subheadings.
    • Explore the sources in the article: remember the BEAM framework--sources that outline Background, Argument, and Method are likely to be the most useful--though in some cases, the sources dealing with the exhibition can also be useful. LOOK UP ARTICLES FROM THE BIBLIOGRAPHY of particular relevant appearing sources. Embed yourself in the conversation, and if a source that you find this way looks like a good addition to make, add it to your bibliography.

For this assignment, you need to have a couple of sentences describing what valuable information can come out of the article that you selected. You do not need to have to thoroughly read through all of the articles at this point; but you should have at least "read the articles for structure," by which I mean, figured out what the headings throughout the article are--and identified some of what you hope to get out of the article.

If your reading of the headings hasn't directed you towards information that you think might be valuable, you can note that--but you should probably just choose to discard that article, and add one that might be useful.

After typing up your description of the source, use the "Citation" tool on Wikipedia to "add" the citation to the page. I DO NOT want you to produce your own citation for the research--you should provide a description of WHY the source will be USEFUL. The citation should be produced by using the Wikipedia citation tool.

For this assignment, you need to submit at least 10 articles that you have briefly reviewed. By the end of the semester, I want you to have worked to add 10 citations to Wikipedia, and this assignment is your first attempt at gathering those sources. As you work to actually add the material to Wikipedia, you may find that an article you have selected is not as useful as you thought it would be. In that case, you will need to conduct additional research in order to find an article that can be added. NOTE: You will never be evaluated based on what "sticks" on Wikipedia. Some of the best learning experiences are epic failures--see my second example in the "Copyedit an Article" assignment from earlier in the semester.

You will submit your link to the bibliography assignment in Canvas. The submission will be evaluated based on: a/ if your sources are scholarly, and appropriately related the feild of "Communication," b/ if your description of the source clearly identifies how that source is likely to be USEFUL in editing Wikipedia, c/ if you have appropriately used the Wikipedia citation tool, and d/ that you have identified AT LEAST 10 unique, scholarly articles to add to Wikipedia.

Week 7

Course meetings
Tuesday, 4 October 2022   |   Thursday, 6 October 2022
Assignment - Rough Drafts of Material

This week is for drafting your first Rough Draft. Instructions for drafting, both as a group, and as an individual, appear above.

Your rough draft should, at a minimum, include how you plan to incorporate several of your citations in the article (I would suggest, a bottom number, of 5 citations). If you don't know how you will include 10 yet, that is OK, as long as you are working toward that goal, and have several sentences based in scholarly research to add to the article.

Preferably, the material that you have will work to articulate different perspectives about the subject, written in a neutral tone, that expands understanding of the subject that you are writing about. Remember, Wikipedia is seeking to represent the RANGE of knowledge about a topic, as it has been articulated by SCHOLARSHIP and RESEARCH. You are not trying to offer offer original insight in this writing, but rather, to fairly summarize the insight of EXPERTS on the TOPIC--particularly across different perspectives. This doesn't mean that for every perspective, you need to include the opposite, but rather, that you offering a RANGE of perspectives. This is an understanding of DIFFERENCE as a COMPLIMENT, rather than difference as opposition.

You should also consider the lead section of the article, and work to make sure that it is up-to-date, and helps guide the reader through the article. If you are not adding content that requires an update to the lead, you can explain why you think the lead is already accurate considering the material that you are adding.

Your rough draft has an "expiration date" next Sunday at Midnight. That means NO LATE WORK past Sunday will be accepted for this assignment--because Peer Reviews require everyone to have their material composed for your classmates to review. I will assign the peer reviews on Monday morning, and you will have the week to complete those reviews.

 

You will submit a link to Rough Draft to me as well--though I will mostly review these links to ensure that there is content in them for your peers to review. In addition, if this is filling you with dread or concern--I always find it useful to re-review Anne Lamott's humorous, true piece of writing about Rough Drafts--or what she calls "Shitty First Drafts."

Week 8

Course meetings
Tuesday, 11 October 2022   |   Thursday, 13 October 2022
Assignment - Peer Reviews

This week is your opportunity to put your critical skills into practice, with a live human test-subject--your classmates!

In this assignment, you will be evaluating your classmates first drafts of the material they are going to add to Wikipedia. Remember, everyone will be at their own unique place in this process; but the training above provides some really excellent advice and suggestions about how to approach the peer review process. Everyone will be completing 2 peer reviews.

From the perspective that when we communicate with each other, we build our world, through idiosyncratic and recursive processes--this review is an opportunity not only for you the provide feedback to your classmates, but also for you to see how different students are approaching this assignment.

Once you have finished your review--go to the User talk page for the student who you reviewed, and post the link to your review of the article there.

Finally, post the links to your peer reviews in the Peer Review assignment on Canvas.

Milestones

Every student has finished reviewing their assigned articles, making sure that every article has been reviewed.

Over and over, the Peer Reviews are identified as the most helpful component of this assignment. For this reason, I am working to be pretty strict about getting these Peer Reviews completed, which requires EVERYONE TO HAVE A ROUGH DRAFT for their peers to review.

For this assignment, I would like your reviews to be complete before break, but I will continue to evaluate reviews submitted through the break. Sunday of the break will be the "experation date" for this assignment.

Week 9

Course meetings
Tuesday, 25 October 2022   |   Thursday, 27 October 2022
Assignment - Respond to your peer review

You probably have some feedback from other students and possibly other Wikipedians. Consider their suggestions, decide whether it makes your work more accurate and complete, and edit your draft to make those changes.

Hopefully, you received your peer reviews before Spring Break, allowing you to work on revisions throughout the week. However, if you didn't receive your reviews until the "expiration date" you will have less time to complete this assignment.

From here on out, I will assign due dates, and the expiration date for the assignment will be when the next revision is due. If you want feedback, to direct your edits, the earlier you submit the work, the more likely that is. If you push your work back to the "expiration date" you will be expected to be able to make your revisions without advice from me or other Wikipedians. This is when the assignment really starts to become, you get what you give. I would highly encourage you to submit your work as early as possible, so that you get feedback to make your editing process as collaborative as possible.

This stage is whatAnne Lamott might call working on the Up-Draft, where you get to make corrections, additions, and the useful changes to your draft that are needed. This is your second draft of the article. I recognize that most of you are probably not used to working on your writing in draft form--but for this assignment, you should be drafting and correcting what you want to place on Wikipedia.

NOTE: If you are editing multiple sections of the article, then it is likely that your writing won't be "coherent" in the sense that every section links to the next--feel free to write in fragments, additions to the sections you want to make additions too.

You will submit a link to this "second draft" in Canvas, and I will be reviewing this iteration more closely--looking for how much you have improved since the first draft, and if you are on track to make a substantive contribution to Wikipedia.

Resources:

 

  • Editing Wikipedia, pages 12 and 14
  • Reach out to your Wikipedia Expert if you have any questions.
Assignment - Begin moving your work to Wikipedia

Now that you've improved your draft based on others' feedback, it's time to move your work live - to the "mainspace."

Based on the the work you have done to respond to your peer reviews, choose some small components to move out onto the Wikipedia mainspace. Move information out based on the quality of the work--a sentence or two from a specific section, based on the material in your bibliography, for example, would work really well for this section.

Remember, it's best to make lots of small edits to Wikipedia. That offers folks the opportunity to review each change you make on its own merits, rather than requiring them to look at EVERYTHING you did, and if there are ANY mistakes have to revert the ENTIRE edit.

For example, every new citation you add should be added as it's OWN change. I like to add my edit sentance by sentance, unless I am adding an entierly new section--and even then, I will often break it up into segments--with the material I am the most confident with first.

After adding some material to wikipedia, submit a link to your edit history to Canvas. If you are not sure where to find your edit history, please reach out to me!

Resource: Editing Wikipedia, page 13

Week 10

Course meetings
Tuesday, 1 November 2022   |   Thursday, 3 November 2022
Assignment - Fractal Improvements + Creative Commons Media

Now's the time to revisit your text and refine your work. You may do more research and find missing information; rewrite the lead section to represent all major points; reorganize the text to communicate the information better; or add images and other media.

This is an opportunity for you to really expand your offerings. I would HIGHLY encourage you to add visual material to your pages--either through finding images on Wikimedia commons, searching Creative Commons, and adding a new image to Wikimedia, or through creating some of your own content (follow along with the contributing images and media files training above). Remember, the editing process is fractal, which means we start small and keep going! Check how many citations you have added--add some more! Make changes to improve the "sum of human knowledge."

Or, if you're in the mood, explore some of the humorous content in MetaWiki community:

If any of your changes from last week were reverted, you should reach out the editor who made the change on their talk pages, and figure out what you can do to make your edit acceptable to the Wikipedia community.

 

Once you have made edits, based on my feedback, or feedback you have received from editors on Wikipedia--let me know what you have been up to in the text entry box in Canvas. And I really would LOVE to see you add some images!

Week 11

Course meetings
Tuesday, 8 November 2022   |   Thursday, 10 November 2022
Assignment - Polish your work

Continue to expand and improve your work, and format your article to match Wikipedia's tone and standards. Remember to contact your Wikipedia Expert at any time if you need further help!

Keep making small edits, either to your main page, or to other articles you find on Wikipedia. You are officially a Wikipedian now, so feel free to expand your work to pages beyond the one you have selected for this class.

If any of your material from your initial bibliography hasn't been added--figure out how to add it, or if you have decided not to use that material, then find a new source to add.

Remember, every student needs to add AT LEAST 10 citations to their Wikipedia page, by the final article.

Week 12

Course meetings
Tuesday, 15 November 2022   |   Thursday, 17 November 2022
Assignment - Screenshot Your Contributions!

It's the final week to develop your article.

You should continue to make edits, to your article, and other articles as the inspiration hits you. Continue to reach out to editors if changes get reverted, and to work to contribute good, meaningful information.

REMEMBER: You will not be graded by what "sticks" on Wikipedia, rather, you will be graded according to your slow, fractal engagement with knowledge production.

For this assignment, please take screenshots of the edits that you have made on Wikipedia. Please use a simple drawing program to indicate what is your work.

This assignment is best by Friday, and will expire on alongside the reflective essay.

  • Read Editing Wikipedia page 15 to review a final check-list before completing your assignment.
  • Don't forget that you can ask for help from your Wikipedia Expert at any time!

Week 13

Course meetings
Tuesday, 22 November 2022
Assignment - Reflective Essay

This essay will ask you to consider your experiences on Wikipedia generally, and, from a first person perspective, discuss what you learned about Wikipedia, it's role in the world, and its utility as a tool that considers itself as a "free online encyclopedia."

This essay is best by this Tuesday; and it will expire the Friday before your in-class presentations.

Some questions to consider:

  • What have you learned from your experience editing Wikipedia?
  • What is Wikipedia, and what purpose does it serve as part of "the public sphere?"
  • What lessons from Wikipedia might we be able to bring into life more generally?
  • What considerations should Wikipedia users bring to using Wikipedia?
  • Do you think editing Wikipedia has made you more capable of "influencing public discourse?" How has it helped, or why hasn't it contributed to your understanding of influncing public discourse?
  • What would be the ideal way to approach Wikipedia, in the classroom, from your perspective?
  • What has the process taught you about the idiosyncratic and recursive process of knowledge production (the vocabulary here draws from the framework of Communication as Constitutive in the first Chapter of Fassett, Warren, and Nainby)?
Milestones

Everyone should have finished all of the work they'll do on Wikipedia, and be ready for grading.

Week 14

Course meetings
Tuesday, 29 November 2022   |   Thursday, 1 December 2022
Assignment - What advice do you have?

For this assignment, you will post to a class discussion the advice that you would offer to future classes about the editing of Wikipedia. 

You can also discuss what lessons you learned, that might have been helpful at the start of class. In particular, detail strategies that you developed to help with Time Management, research, reading, or writing.

You can also consider if you encountered any big obstacles as you worked on this assignemnt--offer advice to future COM-250 students about how they can avoid those obstacles.

Your advice will be archived in Canvas, and on my editor page on Wikipedia. In addition, it will be eligible for inclusion in my future "best practices" collections! I really appreciate that all of you have been willing to join me on this journey through the practice of learning in public!

Week 15

Course meetings
Tuesday, 6 December 2022   |   Thursday, 8 December 2022
Assignment - Wikipedia Class Presentations

This is a 8-10 minute presentation that covers your experiences editing wikipedia.

Ideally, you will discuss how you came to understand wikipedia, how you did research for your revisions, the process of peer review, the final edits that you made, and some suggestions you would have for future students engaging in the Wikipedia assignment.

This presentation should include a visual aid (powerpoint or prezi or similar) that you can use to demonstrate some attention to the organization of your presentation.

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