Talk:Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Wikipedia training 2012

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Handout - Google Books tools

Google Books can be used conveniently for referencing.

URL shortening

Typical long URLs like

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PMaszIALuVYC&pg=PA59&dq=Charlestonia+Jenkins&hl=en&sa=X&ei=916KUNDyMoGs0QX-nICACg&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Charlestonia%20Jenkins&f=false

contain the search term and can be shortened to

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PMaszIALuVYC&pg=PA59

showing the essentials only (Google key is PMas and page number is 59). Usually page numbers are prefixed by PA but there are other possibilities such as PR and PT.

Citation tool

URLs (long or short) can be copied into the tool at

Reftag.appspot.com

for a Wikipedia footnote like

<ref name="Wynn2007">{{cite book|author=Neil A. Wynn|title=Cross the Water Blues: African American Music in Europe|url=http://books.google.com/books?id=PMaszIALuVYC&pg=PA59|accessdate=26 October 2012|year=2007|publisher=Univ. Press of Mississippi|isbn=978-1-57806-960-6|pages=59–}}</ref>

This uses .  and names the reference so it can be reused as <ref name="Wynn2007"/>. Edit “pages=59–“ to “page=59” to refer to a single page.

Handout - Wikimedia and So On

A Short Guide to Wiki Jargon

Wikimedia is the short name of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit based in San Francisco. It also stands for the “Wikimedia movement”, the global network of volunteers who work on the various Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia is just one those projects, if by far the most prominent.

The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia in the technical sense of hosting it on servers. It does not, however, control it in the editorial sense. The English Wikipedia is just one of about 900 wiki sites hosted by the Foundation, and these sites are in general run each by its own volunteer community.

The software powering Wikipedia and many other wiki sites is called MediaWiki. A wiki is any example of a website that allows people to collaborate on a database of web pages: abbreviating Wikipedia to “Wiki” misses the point that wiki refers really to a type of online technology, not to this particular example.

You can’t tell from the title of a website whether or not it is run by the Wikimedia Foundation: Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikiversity are, for example, while WikiHow and WikiLeaks are not. In brief, Wiki is not a brand name, because there were wikis before Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia movement now has a complicated international structure, with over 30 chapters or local branches serving particular countries, and a number of offices round the world. Wikimedia UK has had an office and staff in Leonard Street, London, since 2011. It is a registered charity, and promotes free educational content.

Websites

Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org Wikimedia UK http://uk.wikimedia.org


Post event feedback

I have asked Evelyn if she can pass onto me the feedback from the participants, and also if she has any comments that we would put here. In general she was really pleased with the event though. Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) 10:49, 17 December 2012 (UTC)