On this page, we have collected a lot of materials that you can use when you are teaching Wikipedia in the classroom. There is also a main bookshelf where you can find materials about various aspects of Wikipedia that you may find useful. Please refer to "The Syllabus" for tips on when and how to teach these various topics during the semester.
This video shows some of Wikipedia's contributors, explaining their user names.
This video focuses on the motivations and passion of Wikipedians, and ends with a comment by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about what makes the project special.
This video is a direct invitation by Wikipedians to "click that [edit] button and see what happens".
In this video, Wikipedians talk about the joy of being part of a global community of editors.
Wikipedia Vision – an animated map that highlights live edits from users around the world as they happen, demonstrating the global nature of the project.
Wikistream – a visualization showing a stream of edits to the most popular Wikipedia projects.
Listen to Wikipedia - a musical representation of real-time edits to Wikipedia
Live feed of all edits – a feed that outputs every new change to English Wikipedia, demonstrating the pace of Wikipedia's evolution: 1–2 edits per second. Requires an IRC client to view.
Manypedia - a tool for comparing a specific Wikipedia page from a language edition Wikipedia (for example, English) with its equivalent page on another language edition Wikipedia (for example, Arabic), exploiting automatic translation and additional statistics about both pages such as number of edits and editors.
WikiTrip - a tool for visualizing the animated evolution in time of two kinds of information about the Wikipedians who edited the selected page: their location in the world and their gender.
This 17-page guide covers creating a user account, editing basics, communication, and how articles evolve and are evaluated, and includes a quick reference to help you to remember frequently used wiki markup.
This editorial focuses on how to contribute effectively as an expert, and is great for setting expectations before students begin editing.
This brochure helps you understand the basic concepts of free licenses, as well as terms like "CC-by-SA" and "public domain".
This reference guide covers specific steps you can take to get the most out of Wikipedia, as well as a look at how its quality system works.
These printable PDF documents are designed to be handed out to students, either as part of a packet at the beginning of a Wikipedia assignment, or throughout the term at appropriate points.
Wiki markup quick reference – This one-page quick reference (included in the Welcome to Wikipedia brochure) helps you to remember the most frequently used wiki markup codes.
References – This handout explains why references are important, what the expectations for sourcing on Wikipedia are, where to place references, and the basics of adding "ref" tags.
Reference formatting – This handout explains in more detail how to create footnotes for citing sources, and how to cite the same source multiple times.
How to get help – explains the recommended way to get help and feedback for classes supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors: by posting on their course talk page and notifying their mentor. It also includes a glossary of additional help resources students might use.
Plagiarism – explains what plagiarism is on Wikipedia—including "close paraphrasing"—in addition to why and how to avoid it.
These simple exercises are intended to familiarize students with the basics of Wikipedia before they begin a major Wikipedia writing assignment.
Create a username and userpage – A short assignment asking students to create user accounts and edit their userpages, as well as read a few key Wikipedia policies.
Basic editing tasks – A short assignment asking students to create userpages, improve the clarity of a sentence in an article, upload an image, add a reference to an article, and select a mentor.
Sourcing assessment – asks students to assess the sources in a new Wikipedia article. It can be adapted to require participation on the talk page of the article.
Copyediting – asks students to copyedit a new article.
Encyclopedia comparison – asks students to compare and contrast a Wikipedia article on an author with another encyclopedia's entry. It can easily be adapted for any discipline with relevant tertiary sources. It requires no knowledge of wikicode.
