Assignment: Wokka, Wokka, Wikipedia Entry (15% or 150 points total)
Timeline:
9/21-Draft Work Schedule Memos (20 points)
10/4 9AM
-Group Research Reports Due to the Wiki (20)
10/5 -Class Generated Instructions for Individual Portion Due (10)
10/16-First Submission of Individual Entry due to the Wiki for Workshopping (40)
10/23-Instructor Comments Distributed
10/30-Published Versions due to Wikipedia and your class homepage (50)
11/30-Reflective Revisits Due to the appropriate part of the Teacher Folder (10)
Now, this wouldn’t be a great writing course if you didn’t have the chance to show off a bit of your own research. And wouldn’t it be great to get yourself published? Well, that’s exactly what you’re about to do in this assignment. This project has both collaborative and individual components, but will ultimately result in each of you publishing a Wikipedia entry.
This assignment has three parts
- a collaborative information-gathering stage.
- a collaborative creation of instructions for the individual assignment,
- a process of individual research, writing, and idea development.
Before you can go about writing an entry, you’ll work in threes to figure out what Wikipedia is, how does it work, what are the genre constraints of a remediated encyclopedia, and what are the qualities of good entries. You’ll want to cite examples and consider issues of both content and form (style/technical decisions).
Each group will draft an initial work contract in memo form. It will include your names and a breakdown of who is doing what by when. This document is also known as a work schedule.You will submit a final report to the class wiki. It should summarize your findings and detail the qualities of a good entry. You will also submit a final memo detailing the research process to me. This final report should include a bibliography of the materials you consulted (note that a bibliography is different from a works cited page in that you can include all the materials you looked at, even if you don’t end up quoting from them in the report itself). You’ll also need to include specific instructions on how to add, link, and format the article. Once you have completed this part, the class will work as a whole to write a specific assignment instruction sheet for the individual component of the assignment. The class will write directions that not only describe how to add materials to Wikipedia, but also give advice for how to write a good article. The directions should also include a technical component—how to add, link, and format the article. The criteria should come from the research you did for the group research report, and we will work as a class to generate this document.
Once the class has agreed on the instructions, you will research and prepare your own entry to be submitted once to the class wiki, revised, and then published on Wikipedia. After publication, you will be expected to go back, revisit your entry and reflect on the process of public comment—describe and evaluate the changes made.
At the end of the semester, each person will revisit his or her entry and write a brief report describing and evaluating the changes that have been made to the entry since its initial posting.