Wikipedia: Edit Correctly

4.11.2015

Training on changing, posting and writing articles to Wikipedia was held at LNU.

The classes were presented by the already mentioned Wikipedia-experts Pavlo Lakiichuk, Ledonid Ovcharenko, Dmytro Karlov and Levon Azizian.

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

Theoretical part of Wikischool was started with these words of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Participants learned the brief history of project, main rules and aspects of editing, posting and writing the articles to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia editing principles are listed in “the five foundations” and a lot of policies and recommendations intended to form the corresponding content.

Coaches gave the reasons of necessity to edit Wikipedia: a possibility to take part in the volunteerism and so, to be helpful to society; to gain a valuable experience of editing articles by markdown which is common for many similar websites.

Everyone can edit Wikipedia so it is often criticized because of the fact that information is not always true and correct. The problem was solved by adding the links to authorities after the articles.

According to the rules of Wikipedia, each entry on the website must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-like. A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article’s subject.

After theoretical part of Wikischool, everyone had a chance to try editing the articles on the website. Participants were very impressed because they felt as a part of so great and useful job.

Yuliia Tretiakova, Press-Center of LNU