Optional Culminating Activity: Fixing False Facts
Wikipedia strives to be an encyclopedia of neutral, reliable, fact-checked information. You can help improve Wikipedia by writing accurate, verified articles or providing citations for claims made in existing Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia provides instruction on how to write and edit articles. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to edit Wikipedia in under an hour, and, it’s fun!
Wikipedia: The Wikipedia Adventure
Learn to edit Wikipedia in under an hour! Come on a journey full of real skills, tips, helpers, rewards, and support.
Exercise
(This exercise has been adapted from John T. Oliver’s One-Shot Wikipedia: an edit sprint toward information literacy)
Now that you’ve learned the basics, try the following exercise to practise your skills and help build the Wikipedia knowledge base.
This exercise may be performed individually or in teams of two or three.
- Find an entry on Wikipedia that needs improvement. One way to do this is perform a search Google search as follows:
- type relevant topic keywords and in quotes type “needs additional citations”, in addition type site:en.wikipedia.org
- your search string should look something like this: robots “needs additional citations” site.en.wikipedia.org
- This search will retrieve articles in English Wikipedia, on your topic that have been identified as needing more verification.
- Select a Wikipedia article from the result list.
- Read through the selected entry and identify a sentence or paragraph in Wikipedia that contains an unsubstantiated claim.
- Find a source that provides evidence to back up that claim.. (Tip: using library resources is a good place to start.)
- Verify that your source meets the CRAAP test.
- Add that source of information as a citation to the (previously) unsubstantiated claim.