Create a Customized eBook with Wikipedia entries

Wikipedia fans will love this handy tool:  watch the tutorial to learn how to create
an e-publication using a variety of articles on related topics.

Wikipedia Tutorial: A Guide for Students

The New and Improved Wikipedia

Wikipedia has made some recent changes that will make editing easier.


The following is from an interview with Jimmy Wales from the Yale Daily News in early October, 2009. This question helps answer why making editing easier so important:

Q What is Wikipedia doing to try to get a more diverse group of contributors?

" We’re very global; there are people all over the world editing Wikipedia, mostly in their own home language. But there’s a certain geek culture that transcends national cultures; there’s a homogeneity in that. The main thing we’re doing is the useability project. We have a $950,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation that’s specifically targeted at finding the points in the software that are off-putting to people that aren’t computer geeks. There are lots of people that are geeks, but not computer geeks. I always give the example of a stay-at-home mom with a master’s degree. So, this is a very educated person, someone who is already on the Internet and sharing information, but probably not participating in Wikipedia, because she’s not a computer geek."

Here’s what’s new according to the Wikimedia Blog:

• Look and feel:  essential functions easier to find.
• Navigation:  tabs at the top of each page more clearly define whether you’re reading or editing a page. There’s also a collapsible navigation for the left sidebar that hides items that aren’t used often, but allows them to continue to be easily accessible.
  
• Editing improvements: formatting pages is simpler and more intuitive and creating tables is easier; new find and replace feature to simplify page editing.
• Link wizard: An easy-to-use tool allows you to add links to other pages on Wikipedia, or to pages on external sites.
• Search improvements: Search suggestions are now improved to get you to the page you are looking for more quickly.
• Pediapress book creator: Create a book by selecting Wikipedia articles and adding them to the Book Creator.  Your articles will be turned into a PDF (or OpenDocument) file so you can easily take Wikipedia wherever you go. [this could be a cool way to place pages on our pathfinders]
  
• Updated Puzzle globe and wordmark: The well-known Wikipedia globe and wordmark have been enhanced and improved. We’ve introduced Linux Libertine, an open source typeface to help support the creation of hundreds of localized Wikipedia wordmarks, and the internationally-recognized puzzle globe has been recreated in 3D and includes even more languages.  
• If you don't like the new features you can switch back to the older version: see directions

What do students say about Wikipedia?

WikiTrust: Orange Alert Comes to Wikipedia

WikiTrust, developed by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, color-codes the information on a Wikipedia page using algorithms that evaluate the reliability of the author and the information itself.

The algorithms do this by examining how well-received the author's contributions have been within the community. It looks at how quickly a user's edits are revised or reverted and considers the reputation of those people who interact with the author.

A white background, shows that a piece of text has been viewed by many editors who did not change it and that it was written by a reliable author. Shades of orange signify doubt, dubious authorship, or ongoing controversy.

Wikipedia for Schools

The 2008/09 Wikipedia for Schools is a recent initiative which offers free, hand-checked, non-commercial selections from the regular Wikipedia which are useful for English speaking students because articles are targeted around the UK National Curriculum.

The project is designed to help the education of poor and rural communities in India and Africa. SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation wanted to make the content free for those areas which lack Internet access. SOS Children, a British charity allows for downloading onto a DVD which can store the 5500 articles; it is equivalent to a twenty volume encyclopaedia and has 34,000 images.

Unfortunately, due to the size and scope of the project it was not possible to check the reference and external links for each article, so they are not included. As a librarian, that makes me a bit dubious of the whole thing since we teach our students to always look at the references and external links.

Readability statistics are for articles is another area for concern when using this in an educational setting. In the few articles I checked for readability, the average reading score was grade 11. As an educational tool, this would limit the use to high school students. In an effort to make the articles uniform, the editors did not seem to be thinking about low reading levels in high poverty areas.

That being said, it's a noble effort with good intent.

Take a Look at Debategraph

http://debategraph.org/ Check out the Climate Change debate featured on the home page.

It's a collaborative, creative commons social venture that combines web-based, argument visualization with collaborative wiki editing to make the best arguments on all sides of complex public debates. Best of all, it's a free tool.

Look at the "about" tab to figure out how it works.
Look in the gallery to see more kinds of maps. There is one started on "Intelligent Design"

Read the BBC article in which founder David Price says that it's better than a blog format on complex issues.

"The way that the map works is that once an argument is being represented on the map, it's there and everyone can see that that argument is being heard.

Then the question becomes, can you improve that argument or can you respond to it and challenge that argument?

This tends to lead to more constructive discussion...". Here's the thing: It allows students to collaborate in the real world. Sounds like something we should explore.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

School Library Journal's article "Britannica Gets Wikified" explains how this venerable encyclopedia is launching an open source project which will allow experts and the public to create and share knowledge on their site. The carefully edited Encyclopaedia Britannica will continue to exist but there will be another section for its new "community of scholars". Works posted by the public will not be checked for grammar, spelling or punctuation. Unlike, Wikipedia each contributor will have total control of his/her article and can decide whether to permit others to contribute. Readers will also be allowed to rank the accuracy of the information. I tried to find this on the website but the ads were making me crazy.