You must contribute at least one good piece of
cited information to
Wikipedia and then submit a page to us listing your contributions. Have fun with this!
Details:
- You need to get a wikipedia screen name---you can register here. If you have never contributed to Wikipedia before, it takes a little bit of getting used to. Start with the Editing Tutorial. If desired you can also read about the Five Pillars, look at the Contributing to Wikipedia page, etc.
- The easiest thing to do is submit to us a print-out of the Wikipedia page or pages that you contributed to, with your contribution (including citations) highlighted and your name at the top of the page. If you have a different way you'd like to submit your work, ask your TA.
- Note that Wikipedia contributions can be rapidly edited or deleted by others, so you should make sure to save a copy of your contribution on your computer and/or print it immediately after you make your contribution.
- The emphasis in this project is on your making a cited contribution to Wikipedia, so you have lots of flexibility about how you do that. Your contribution could be a sentence, or even part of a sentence, or even just a citation (if somebody else entered some information but didn't provide a good citation), or some editing so that an existing page is clearer, or a photo (but note that photos need to be non-proprietary).
- If you want to contribute to Wikipedia in a language other than Engish that's terrific, but you'll also need to provide us with a translation.
- Your contribution must be relevant to environmental studies, but remember that this is a broad interdisciplinary field. Anything you come across in your coursework or in preparation for your Town Hall or memo/poster assignments should be fine.
- Your Wikipedia contribution must include citations. This is in accordance with Wikipedia's policy on verifiability and in accordance with our class policy on the importance of citing sources.
Because of the way Wikipedia works, not all of these examples may still exist, and if they do they might not be in their original form. If you find an outdated example, please let us know, thanks!
- Salmon: Bullet point beginning "Reduction in freshwater base flow in rivers..." and accompanying citation.
- Spokane River: Paragraph beginning "It has also been confirmed that there is heavy metal pollution..." and accompanying citation.
- Tonkin Snub-nosed Langur: Paragraph beginning "Sightings of the Tonkin Snub-nosed monkey have become increasingly rare..." and accompanying citation.
Here are two examples using different types of references; you can use either type.
- In-line reference: See the first sentence here about the carbon content of natural gas. Click on "edit" and you can see that the way to generate this in-line reference is to type "[http://website.org TextHere]", so that the sentence linked above comes from this source code: "According to the [http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/coefficients.html EIA], emissions total 120.6 pounds..."
- Footnoted reference: See the end of the first paragraph here about social costs of CO2 emissions. Click on "edit" and you can see that the way to generate this footnoted reference is to type "
[ Citation here ]". Note that the footnote above includes links to two websites---see the previous bullet for how to generate a hyperlink---so that the sentence linked about comes from this source code: "...(US$95 per tonne of carbon dioxide.)[ [http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM13apr07.pdf 2007 IPCC Summary for Policymakers], based on [http://ideas.repec.org/p/sgc/wpaper/19.html Tol (2005), Energy Policy 33(16):2064–2074]]"