A few helpful hints for editing your museum on Wikipedia
Posted on | juni 15, 2010 | Reageren uitgeschakeld
Source: Digging Digitally
As a follow-up to the previous post about the British Museum’s collaboration with Wikipedia, I’d like to publish a text that was distributed originally on the private agade mailing list. It is written by A.J. Cave.
While is a good idea to read Wikipedia’s tutorials, policies and guidelines, sorting through volumes of information can be intimating for newcomers. So here are a few helpful hints:
1. No matter what you do, you can’t break Wikipedia. Wikipedia has robust version controls, so you cannot accidentally do permanent harm if you make a mistake in your editing. All mistakes can be quickly and easily reversed or fixed by any other editor.
2. Start small. The best way to break in and feel comfortable is do minor edits first.
3. While to edit an article, you can remain anonymous, to create a new article you have to register with a valid email userid and a password. If you are concerned about privacy and anonymity, you may prefer to create a user name for yourself in order to hide your IP address.
4. Before starting a major edit, announce your intentions on the “Discussion” page of the article.
5. Wikipedians are expected to be civil and neutral, respecting all points of view, and only add verifiable and factual information with cited external sources rather than personal views and opinions.
6. An ideal Wikipedia article aims to be well-researched, well-written, balanced, and neutral with verifiable information, suited for an encyclopedia. However, many Wikipedia articles start as a “stub”. A stub is an article containing only a few sentences of text which is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a topic, but not so short as to provide no useful information, and it should be capable of expansion.
7. Wikipedia articles are always work in progress and vary in quality and maturity. However, given that anyone can edit any article, it is possible for biased, outdated, or incorrect information to be posted.
8. Wikipedia does not allow original research and there is no elaborate system of scholarly peer review.
9. All articles are susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information – particularly articles on popular and controversial topics. But they eventually get cleaned up, either via consensus among Wikipedians or through intervention by the editors using Wikipedia’s conflict resolution systems. A lock on an article’s page means the article is temporarily protected from editing by everyone and restricted to a few editors.
10. There are no content guarantees, so always check the History page to see if the article has been vandalized.
11. For those who teach, if you think your students have changed a Wikipedia article to match their research papers, just have them printout the History of a Wikipedia article and hand over!
Read more: Digging Digitally
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