The Mardigian Library in partnership with the Association for Women in Mathematics, the Society of Women Engineers, and the campus Commission for Women will be hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon event in honor of International Women's Day. We will focus on training new editors and making incremental improvements to existing pages around the topic of women's contributions in STEM fields. Due to restrictions on how many new accounts can be created in one day from the same IP address, it is important the you go to Wikipedia.org and create an account before you arrive. Do bring your own laptop if you wish, but we will have Chromebooks to lend if you don't bring your own.
This event will be held inside the Mardigian Library on:
February 21, 2024
5-8pm
Training starts at 5pm.
(If you will be arriving after 5:15 please watch the training video ahead of time so you will be ready to join in as soon as you arrive.)
Even if you can only commit to a small amount of time and don't have time to prepare ahead of time we would still love to have you. So if you are considering coming by, please do and we will make the best possible use of your time!
1. Go to Wikipedia.org and click "create account" in the upper right corner to create your account (use whatever email address you want to depending on if you want to still be able to edit in Wikipedia after graduation.)
Do NOT use your name as your username! Read these guidelines before picking a name.
3. Download the training handouts from the box below.
4. Watch the training presentation in the box below.
5. Set up your user page.
6. Pick the page you are going to edit.
7. Read the "talk page" for your subject - find what edits are needed.
8. Find the resources you need to make your edits.
9. Start editing!
10. Use the tracking widget below to watch your impact climb!!
Create Your account on Wikipedia BEFORE attending the event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CreateAccount
Training videos and slides
Yes these slides and videos do have the wrong date for this event but I have reviewed them (on 1/9/2024) and they are still completely accurate and up-to-date!
Tutorial video on all the aspects of a wikipedia account, showing how to go all the way from creating an account to publishing a new page. How to Edit Wikipedia - a 2018 tutorial
Link to training modules:
Wikipedia Guide on Getting Started as a contributor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Getting_started
Wikipedia content policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Core_content_policies
Wikipedia contributor guidelines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_guidelines
We are going to use VisualEditor for this event. However, you may wish to gain experience with the source editor as well if you will be editing more extensively.
Training information from other edit-a-thons you may be interested in https://libguides.wpi.edu/WPI_Wikipedia_Editing_Community/training
Training on setting up an edit-a-thon for your own group - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/training/editathons
How to use, set up, and interact with User pages.
Creating a new page where one does not already exist:
Handouts for editing specific types of articles
Wikimarkup coding cheatsheets in various languages
