Writing for Wikipedia

At the beginning of June 2008 Wikipedia was the 7th most visited site on the World Wide Web and in it's English version alone had more than 2,400,000 articles. This activity gets students adding to that number by writing an article for Wikipedia.

Until recently it was very difficult to get your written work published. With the advent of the Web, and more recently, with websites that allow user-generated content it is very easy to publish your own work.

Time to stop and think for a while. Why might it be motivating for learners to publish their work to the web? What kind of articles would your learners have the knowledge to write about?

The following stages describe how to get students publishing to Wikipedia. This idea would run over a series of lessons or even an entire course. It is best to see this as a project rather than something that could be done in one lesson. Some time may be needed to allow students to familiarise themselves with Wikipedia.
By the end of this project students will have published an article about their home city on Wikipedia. Students will need to create an account with Wikipedia to post an article. See the useful links section at the bottom of this page for instructions from Wikipedia on how to create articles and guidance for writing articles.
There are two phases to this idea.

Phase 1
In phases 1 students decide on their topic, write the article and upload it to Wikipedia.
Here is a suggested list of stages:

1. Explain the assignment to the students - that they are going to produce an encyclopedia entry for their hometown on one of the following topics:

• local transportation
• a building (a theatre, mall, landmark etc)
• a local festival
• a suburb or district

2. Students work in small groups and chose a topic and check that no such article exists on Wikipedia. Finding something that has not been written about before could be difficult or easy depending on where the students come from.
3. Students, in their groups, start brainstorming the content of the article.
4. Students write a first draft which is then reviewed by the teacher but not for grammar nor structure. Instead the teacher should give advice on the content.
5. Students work together to produce a version they are happy with.
6. Students post to Wikipedia.

Phase 2

• Phase 2 takes part over the coming lessons and involved tracking the changes that the Wikipedia community have made to the article posted.
• Wikipedia has a Talk feature and students should use this to discuss changes that have been made with the other contributors.
• If possible, it would be a good idea to edit any poor language once the article has been posted on Wikipedia. If this has been possible, ask students to note what language has been changed.

Useful links (all links will open in a new window or tab depending on your browser settings)

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_PageGetting started - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents/Getting_started
Writing an article - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article