Wikipedia joint workshop

This is an outline of an event that Wikimedia UK trainers can run with other organisations to both improve Wikipedia and promote use of a resource. The resource might be a research portal or journal, a digital media archive, a document repository or anything else that people could use to improve a particular area of Wikipedia or Wikimedia. The normal audience would be people interested in the specific subject matter.

This would normally be delivered by a group of Wikimedia trainers and a presenters, normally run for a full day and normally hosted by the partner organisation.

Objective: to promote awareness of a partner organisation's resources that are relevant to Wikipedia and to train and encourage complete beginners to improve Wikipedia articles in the relevant subject area.

This page is for people looking to deliver this workshop. If you are interested in being trained yourself, see training.

Prerequisites

Same as Basic_Wikipedia_training#Prerequisites

Structure

Please adapt this to the requirements of your specific event!

• Welcome and housekeeping.
• Presentation(s) from the host organisation
  • Explain the resource that is being made available, and demonstrate it online if relevant.
  • Allow time for questions to make sure the audience understand the resource.
• Presentation from Wikimedia UK trainers
  • Explain Wikipedia's mission and some of its key features.
  • Look at Wikipedia's coverage of the relevant topic area
  • Leave ample time for questions and perspectives from the audience.
• Break for lunch
• First steps in editing
  • At this stage, users edit only in their user page and in their or other users' talk pages, not in article space.
  • Go through the basics of editing, formatting and sending a Talk page message, as outlined in Basic Wikipedia training#Learning_goals
  • To practice creating wikilinks, they should link to relevant Wikiprojects or other editor resources. As an example of an external link, they should create a link to the resource, or to specific useful sources, in their user space. This ensures their user pages will have relevant and handy links when they return after the event.
  • Ideally a trainer should be collecting attendees' usernames and welcoming them on-wiki.
  • If the point of the day is to add images rather than text, then go through basic steps of Basic Commons training instead.
• Evaluating articles in the target subject area
  • Use the relevant Wikiproject, Featured Article or Good Article index or category system to find articles.
  • This is a chance to explain the basics of quality and review processes on Wikipedia.
  • Have people look at different articles and report to their reactions about quality to the group. Is the article what they would expect, surprisingly good or surprisingly bad? Then get them to look at the article's Talk page and quality assessment.
  • If they have concrete suggestions for improving an article, get them to post a new topic on the relevant Talk page.
• Improving articles
  • Only in this final session do users actually edit target articles.
  • Explain how to add citations using the Cite button.
  • Focus on the addition of reasonable amounts of clearly sourced text. Since these are new accounts, don't encourage them to make large structural changes straight away, but if they suggest such changes, get them to propose them in Talk.
  • Remind them that the skills they have learned can be used across all of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects.

Trainer resources

See Basic Wikipedia training#Trainer resources

Assessment

• By both circulating the room and monitoring users on-wiki, trainers should be able to monitor users' progress and ensure that they are going through the relevant steps.
• If there is time, get people at the end of the day to tell the rest of the group what improvement they made to Wikipedia.
• If users do not make edits in article space, but practice in user space, read articles and think about how they can be improved, then that is a reasonable goal for the day. Encourage attendees to write down, or tell the rest of the group, what they intend to do when they next edit Wikipedia.