Hi! There are instructions on uploading images to Wikimedia Commons here, as well as in this training module. However before uploading anything, it's important to make sure that the image has been released under a license that would allow for its upload and use on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, such as the public domain and a Creative Commons license like CC-BY and CC-BY-SA. I have a little table on licenses on this page.

When it comes to infoboxes, we have information on that here.

Wikipedia should have Visual Editor automatically enabled, however you may find yourself in source mode at some point and want to switch back to Visual Editor mode. There are two ways to go about this.

The first and most immediate way to switch modes would be to click on the pen icon on the top right corner of the edit screen.

Clicking this will produce a drop down menu that gives you the option to switch between modes.

The second way to change modes would be to enable both it and edit source via your preferences screen, following these instructions:

1. Make sure you are logged into your Wikipedia account.
2. Click on "preferences".

3. Click on the "editing" tab.

4. MAKE SURE "Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta" is not checked.

5. On the "Editing Mode" drop-down, you can select your editing mode as shown below. If you would prefer to have Visual Editor whenever possible, select that. You may also choose to select "Show me both editor tabs" so that when you load a Wikipedia article, you should see both the "edit" and "edit source" options.
6. Click "save."

Absolutely! I would definitely check with your instructor, but most are fine with students changing the topic. With finding articles, your Wikipedia Expert is an invaluable resource. The following link can be helpful as well:

• How do I find an article for my project? How do I pick a topic? How do I choose an article?

Activity Tab

To see recent activity from any of your students, you can visit the Activity tab of the course. This will provide a list of recent edits made on Wikipedia by any students in the course. Click the "+/-" link to see a summary of the edit in the form of a 'diff' - the differences between revisions.

Students tab

To see recent contributions from an individual student go to the Students tab and click on the row of the student you are interested in. (You can click anywhere except on one of the underlined links, which takes you to Wikipedia.) Clicking the row shows you recent edits that the student has made, and you can click the '+/-' link to see the details. This will also show you date and time stamps of when each student has completed each training.

Alternatively, for any student, you can click on the underlined link of their username to see their full Contribution history on Wikipedia, where you can browse every edit they have made and see individual diffs if you wish.

Articles tab

The Articles tab of your course includes an "Articles edited" section - this is any article on Wikipedia that your students have touched during the assignment, whether it was assigned to them or not.

The far right column includes links to two "assessment tools" - The "Current Version with Authorship Highlighting" button will show you the current version of the article with a color coded highlight of what exactly the student(s) contributed.

In the example below we can see that the username listed contributed the sections and text highlighted in purple.

The "Show Cumulative Changes" button (denoted by the +/-) will open up a "differences between revisions" view. This is copied from the "diffs" on-wiki. The right hand column shows that students have added and the left hand column shows what students have removed from the article.

Related questions

• How do I view my students' work?
• How do you grade student work?

As of December 2016, there are several ways to view your students' work: on Wikipedia, from the Students tab, and from the Articles tab of your course page.

Students tab of your course page

From the Students tab of your course page use the arrow on the far right column ^ to drop down an individual student row. From there, you'll be able to see a date and time stamp of your students' progress through the trainings, and a summary of their 10 most recent edits on Wikipedia (below the "User Contributions" section header). For each edit if you click "show" you will be able to see an edit summary of that specific edit.

Content highlighted in GREEN is content added. Content highlighted in RED is content removed. In the example above, the edits were mostly copyedits: helping change the capitalization of "Regulations", the possessive in "plaintiffs" and the section title. (Unlike the Wikipedia page of contributions, this view filters out automatic edits that were made by the dashboard on the student's behalf.)

Here's another example of what that might look like for a specific edit:

Content left BLANK has not been changed.

Viewing student work on Wikipedia

Starting from the Students tab, if you click the username of a student (or the 'View full contribution history on Wikipedia' link when you've zoomed in on an individual student) you'll be taken to a list of every edit that student has made, with the date/time, page title, how much content was added or removed, and edit summary that the student left with the edit.

Viewing cumulative changes from the Articles tab

The Articles tab of your course includes an "Articles edited" section - this is any article on Wikipedia that your students have touched during the assignment, whether it was assigned to them or not.

The far right column includes links to two "assessment tools" - The "Current Version with Authorship Highlighting" button will show you the current version of the article with a color coded highlight of what exactly the student(s) contributed. In the example below we can see that the username listed contributed the sections and text highlighted in purple.

The "Show Cumulative Changes" button (denoted by the +/-) will open up a "differences between revisions" view. This is copied from the "diffs" on-wiki. The right hand column shows that students have added and the left hand column shows what students have removed from the article.

Hope this helps!

-Wiki Education team

Related questions

• How do I track student work?
• How do you grade student work?

On the Home tab of your course page each student has a "My Articles" block. This is where they should sign up for the topic they choose to work on, where they can sign up for peer review, and where they can access checklists for help completing their work.

The "Assign myself an article" button is where students should assign themselves their topics once they have picked the Wikipedia article they want to update.

The "Review an article" button is where students can sign up for peer review.

Once the students have articles assigned for each of those blocks, they will also be able to see links to the checklists for completing their draft and their peer review.

You can view your final article checklist on page 15 of the Editing Wikipedia brochure.

There is also a "Ready for Mainspace" checklist which you can access on the Home tab of your course page under your My Articles section.

And a "Peer Review Checklist" which you can also access from the Home tab of your course page under your My Articles section.

For students, there is a "My Articles" section of the overview where they can assign themselves an article to write or review. (1st screenshot below)

Students can also assign themselves articles from the Articles tab by either using the "Find articles" search or, if the instructor has set it up, selecting an article from the available articles list.

My Articles (overview)

Articles tab

To help visualize:

When on the Students tab of your course page select the "Assign Articles" button.

Once there, you can manually assign Wikipedia articles for your students to edit/contribute to or for them to peer review using this button.

When you're finished, select "done" !

Hope this helps! -The Wiki Ed team

First, make sure you're on the Articles tab of your course page, on the available articles portion.

When you've made a list of articles to assign, you'll want to share them so students can see them. Here's how to create your "Available Articles" list.

1. Click 'Add an available article'
2. Enter the title (or paste the url) of the article you want to be available
3. Repeat for each article.
4. Select "add articles"

Related questions

• How do students assign themselves "available articles"?
• How do students assign articles to themselves?
• How do I find articles for my students to work on?

For information generally about finding and assigning articles for your students to access from the Articles tab, see our "Finding Articles" training here.

For information about re-assigning or unselecting a topic, see our reply here.

Student view

Students can assign themselves articles from the "available articles" list by choosing "select" next to the topic of their choice, which can be found via the "Available Articles" portion of the Articles tab of their course page.

Once an article is selected, it is automatically removed from the list of "available articles" and is assigned to the student on the Students tab and in the "assigned articles" portion of the Articles tab (see above and below for examples of how the article moves).

Instructor view

The instructor view of this page is different, as instructors are able to add or remove topics to the list of "available articles". You can read more about how to add articles to this list here. You can read more about manually assigning topics to your students from the Students tab here.

For more information about how to populate the "available articles" list, see our answer here.

Related questions

• How can I unassign an article?
• How do I reassign an article?

Students

If you are a student, the easiest way is to go to your course page and find the "My Articles" section.

To remove the old one, click the plus/minus button, and then click the minus button next to the title of the article you want to remove.

To add the new one, add the title of the new assignment you want to add to the input field and click Assign.

---

Instructors

Go to the "Students" tab, then click "Assign Articles" - this will open up a pop up view within the Students tab.

From the new view, you can click the plus/minus button next to each student to update the article they've been assigned or peer reviewed. You can remove an article using the (-) button or add a new article by entering the article title in the box and clicking "assign" - when you're done, be sure to click DONE in order to save your work!

Good luck! -Wiki Ed Team

Wikipedia has an article on vandalism, which lists some notable examples of page vandalism. I don't know if there is a current page of the most vandalized pages, but this page has some past information about the most vandalized pages. This page goes to a page on Wikipedia for an internal project where they study vandalism on the site. It's only semi-active so I'm not sure how up to date this will be either.

If you're curious, this page has an essay on why someone may choose to vandalize Wikipedia.

Hopefully this should answer your question!

Good question! The colors signify that these are different ratings.

The gray S means that the page is a stub, the short beginning of an article that can be about a couple of sentences to maybe a couple of paragraphs long. These definitely need expansion and are often the easiest to expand.

The blue S means that something is a start class article. These articles are preliminary articles with room for improvement. They're more fleshed out than the stub articles but can still be pretty easily expanded and improved. These articles may have sections but will be more bare bones.

Hi! You should contact Helaine with any questions like this - her email is helaine (@) wikiedu.org.

Hi! I'll contact you on Wikipedia!

Please get in touch directly with the student program manager directly for questions like this. You can contact them via hblumenthal (at) wikiedu.org or through contact (at) wikiedu.org.

Unfortunately we can't remove it from the Dashboard logs, sorry! Just please be more cautious in the future - I don't think that it's a bad thing to edit beyond the assignment, just remember that others will be able to see what you edit.

Hi! I'll contact you over this!

Adding a citation or reference

Start by clicking "Edit" in your Sandbox or on the live article. Then click "Cite."

This will bring up a dialog box where you can drop in a URL link, book ISBN, or DOI, then hit "generate" to create a citation. You can also add a citation manually by hitting the "manual" tab of the dialog box, which will bring up the options to manually create a book, journal, newspaper, or website citation.

Clicking any of these will bring up a new box with specific fields to enter, such as title, page number, issue number (for journals), and so on. Whichever way you choose to enter the citation, be it manual or automatic, after completing the citation make sure that you select "insert" to insert it into the article or draft.

Once you've made your citation you can review it. If it looks correct, click "Save Changes" and add an edit summary and your citation should be live!

Adding a references section

References will typically show up at the bottom of your article by default as long as you've added in-line citations, however to get them to show up like they do in live articles you need to add a section title called "References" with the main Heading format. Directly under this section you need to add a references template - there are a few different templates you can use, such as {{reflist}} or <references/>. If you are adding this template via VisualEditor you will produce this template by going to the insert tab and selecting the option to add a template, then writing "reflist". Once added, the template should look like this prior to saving the page:

Editing a source

To edit a source to add missing information, you must be in edit mode. Clicking on the source will bring up the citation, along with an edit button:

Click on the edit button. This will bring up several fields. If the field you want is present, fill it out with the necessary information.

If you don't see the field that you are looking for, scroll down the pop up box until you get to the end. You'll see an option to add more information. Clicking on this will bring up a search field where you can look for the desired field. Once you see the field you want, click on it - this will bring it up as a field you can fill out.

Once you have added the desired information, click on the "apply changes" button on the top right side of the citation box. This will add your changes to the citation.

You can read more about adding section headers here. You can learn more about templates here.

I need help adding citations and references. How do I add a references section? How do I add an in-article citation? I can't figure it out using the Visual Editor. How do I edit a source?

Hi! Your students can enroll in Dashboard by following the directions here. Please let us know us if you have any questions or if the students are trying these directions but aren't able to log in.

I want to create a new page in my userspace/sandbox. How do I do that?

My class has a lot of students and Wikipedia has told us that only six new accounts can be created each day per IP address. How can I get around this? I've heard that there is a way to create multiple accounts at once without going through this.

Per Wikipedia, close paraphrasing is the superficial modification of material from another source. In other words, it refers to a situation like this one:

Source: The poem Little Miss Muffett first appeared in print in 1805, in a book titled Songs for the Nursery. Like many such rhymes, its origins are unclear.

Close paraphrasing: Little Miss Muffett first appeared in published form in 1805, in a tome named Songs for the Nursery. Akin to other old rhymes, its origins are uncertain.

For the example I only changed only a few superficial things, such as the first few words of the source sentence were removed and I used some synonyms for the words "print" and "book". This is an example of what not to do with source material.

A better way to rephrase this would be something along the lines of "The authorship and creation date of the poem Little Miss Muffett is unclear, a common issue with many nursery rhymes, however the earliest known publication of the poem dates to the 1805 book Songs for the Nursery. Re-writing it this way does sacrifice a little brevity, however it's different enough from the source material to where it wouldn't be considered plagiarism.

Re-writing content isn't always easy or in some cases, really possible without close paraphrasing. WP:LIMITED gives a number of examples of this. The basic gist of this is that it's OK to do this when you are dealing with simple factual statements such as "John was born in X on 1/2/2017" or technical terms. To a degree lists can also fall under this criteria as well.

You can also review our training module on plagiarism copyright violation for information on this as well!

Related questions

• How do I report plagiarism?