Education/EduWiki Campaign/Lesson Plans/Content
Lesson Plan: Content Creation on Wikipedia
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Estimated time length
120 minutes
Learning objectives
- Foundational copy editing skills
- The knowledge of how a large online community works
- How to collaborate with others worldwide in an online community
- How to use the visual editor to make edits to Wikipedia articles
Step-by-step process
We strongly recommend teaching this lesson in conjunction with the Citations (References & Resources) assignment, since citations are critical to content creation on Wikipedia.
- Show students how to use VisualEditor (Useful tip: if the visual editor doesn't show up, adding “ve” after the ampersand (&) in the URL will activate VisualEditor). For help on how to use the VisualEditor, refer to the VisualEditor user guide.
- If your students would first like to experiment with using VisualEditor without actually editing a page, here is a page where they can test it out.
- Explain where the edit button is and how to begin editing.
- Explain how to save edits and check or interpret edit history.
- Explain how talk pages work.
- Explain the importance of edit summaries.
- Have them create a Sandbox and practice editing in their Sandbox.
- Split your students into small groups and have them do some pre-work by finding articles that could be expanded or improved. They can start by looking for articles about topics that interest them.
- If relevant or possible within the timeframe, have students explain to the rest of the class what changes they would like to make and why they think the article should be improved.
- Challenge students to create a new section in an existing article, including citations.
Resources and tools
- Wiki markup quick reference (most common markup tips)
- Wiki markup cheat sheet
- Help: Talk pages
- Talk page etiquette (additional resource)
- How to create a sandbox page