Education/News/November 2022/Wikimedia Russia has released the "Introduction to Wikipedia" textbook
Wikimedia Russia has released the textbook "Introduction to Wikipedia"
Summary: On November 28, 2022, the Russian-language illustrated teaching aid "Introduction to Wikipedia" was released. The new 245-page book is a training course and is intended for anyone who wants to thoroughly understand the functioning of the Wikipedia encyclopedia, learn how to work with sources and write high-quality encyclopedic articles.
Wikipedia, as of 2022, contains almost 60 million encyclopedia articles. At the same time, it is widely used in many languages precisely as a reference encyclopedic publication. However, only a few users edit or write articles on Wikipedia themselves, although the main idea of this project is that anyone can write and edit articles on Wikipedia.
In many ways, the small number of Wikipedia editors compared to readers is due to the fact that there are certain difficulties in understanding the rules for editing articles in it. As a rule, new contributors and editors of Wikipedia do not cope with Wikipedia's rather complicated interface at first glance and begin to get confused by its rules, sometimes seeming contradictory at first glance, so they stop actively editing it pretty soon due to various difficulties, which are easily solvable.
For the first time, this manual provides Russian-speaking readers with a free, fairly detailed, compact course that allows a person to independently master the basics of editing Wikipedia in the shortest possible time. The course was created by a group of experienced administrators and editors of the Russian Wikipedia, each of whom has been regularly writing and editing Wikipedia articles for more than 15 years.
This course will also be useful for those who teach students or schoolchildren the basics of editing Wikipedia, it can be used as a convenient teaching tool for such courses.
The manual is written on the basis of of the online course of the same name launched in September 2021, which has been completed by about 1800 people so far. The course has been significantly improved based on a lot of feedback received during this time, comments and suggestions from students, taking into account the typical mistakes and difficulties of students and teachers not only of the online course but also of various offline events: lectures at universities, seminars and practical classes on editing Wikipedia. Now, this course is available to everyone in the form of an electronic edition under an open free license.
The course contains twelve lessons divided into topics. After completing all the lessons and the proposed tasks, the reader can confidently navigate the Wikipedia space and independently create and edit articles. Also, the reader will learn how to post photographs and illustrative materials in an auxiliary project called Wikimedia Commons, which can later be used to illustrate the created and edited Wikipedia articles.