Education/Countries/Bulgaria/WWT/Annotation

Annotation

In the recent years in Bulgaria, there has been rising the popularity of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia and its impact as an Internet, media and social phenomenon. More and more university lecturers have adopted the educational practice to encourage their students to contribute to the creation and improvement of encyclopedic articles in the Bulgarian version of Wikipedia. The present elective lecture course titled “Wikipedia and Wiki Technologies”, however, is the first one exclusively dedicated to Wikipedia that is to be lectured in Bulgaria, and one of the few similar courses existing around the world. The course aims to develop in the students profound understanding of the philosophy and technology of wikis, and particularly of Wikipedia as the most popular representative of this Web 2.0 technology, as well as introduce the current related trends and problems and present the opportunities of applying this technology in other contexts, native to the students.

Competences

Students who successfully complete the training on this elective course:

1. should know:
   • The fundamental principles and policies of Wikipedia;
   • The main rules of editing and organizing Wikipedia content;
   • The specifics of freely licensed content, free and open source software and the most popular free licenses used in the Internet;
   • The criteria of notability of the subjects of Wikipedia articles;
   • The criteria for textual and multimedia encyclopedic content.
2. should be able:
   • To evaluate critically their sources of information;
   • To effectively use Wikipedia as a source of information in the other lecture courses and professional field;
   • To express themselves, following the specifics of the encyclopedic style;
   • To make the most of the functionalities of wiki software;
   • To create, edit and format wiki content, using text, tables, multimedia, templates, etc.;
   • To install, configure and administer wiki websites.

Literature

• Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds.), Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2011
• The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis, Greg Myers, Continuum, 2010
• Sams Teach Yourself Wikipedia in 10 Minutes, Michael Miller, Sams, 2009
• The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih, Hyperion, 2009
• The World and Wikipedia: How We are Editing Reality, Andrew Dalby, Siduri Books, 2009
• Wikipedia: a new community of practice?, Dan O'Sullivan, Ashgate, 2009
• Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, John Broughton, O'Reilly Media, 2008
• MediaWiki: Wikipedia and Beyond, Daniel J. Barrett, O’Reilly Media, 2008
• How Wikipedia works: and how you can be a part of it, Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates, 2008
• Wikis for dummies, Dan Woods, Peter Thoeny, Wiley Pub., 2007