Greetings...
Hello, Chrisweberbr, and welcome to Wikipedia!
- To get started, click on the green welcome.
- I hope you like it here and decide to stay!
- Happy editing! jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:35, 6 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I'm looking forward to working with your class during the semester - if you have any questions about the project or Wikipedia in general, please feel free to leave me a note at User talk:Awadewit. Wikipedians are here to help you! Awadewit (talk) 19:34, 7 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, here are the details of the MRR annotated bibliography assignment...
Good Wikipedia articles are built on a foundation of good sources. In this respect, Wikipedia articles are not much different from academic essays. In fact, if anything a good Wikipedia article is more reliant on good sources than are other academic or scholarly texts. The whole notion of verifiability, which is the first of the encyclopedia's five pillars, depends upon reliable sources.
The aim of this bibliography assignment, then, is to identify, read, and comment on the most important and reliable sources that relate to the topic of your chosen article.
In coordination with your group, you need to do the following:
- Identify the most important sources for your topic. These will be both books and articles. They will vary depending upon the kind of topic you have chosen, but to give a couple of examples this book is a key one for the general topic of magic realism, while this biography would be essential for the article on Gabriel García Márquez.
- Use databases and the Koerner library catalogue to identify these sources. Look for as many as possible in the first instance; you will later choose between them. On the whole, they will not be online sources (though of course many articles are now available online thanks to JSTOR and other services).
- Aim to come up with a long list of, say, 5-20 books and perhaps 15-40 articles. Obviously, for some topics there will be more material than for others. So for some topics you will need to do more searching; for other topics, you will need to be more careful and discerning as you choose between sources. Look far and wide and be inventive in thinking about good sources.
- In some cases, the article may already have a number of references, either in the article itself, or perhaps somewhere in its talkpage archives. You should take account of these, but you should still undertake your own search, not least to find new material that has not been considered before.
- To figure out what you need, you will also have to look at your article and consider what it is missing, what needs to be improved, where it could do with better sources, etc. In other words, you will have to start planning how you are going to work on and rewrite the article.
- Come up with a final short list of c. 2-4 books and perhaps 6-24 articles.
- Put the long list (of all the sources you have found) as well as the short list (of the sources you have decided are the most important) on your article's talk page by Wednesday, January 20.
- Distribute the sources among the members of your group. Each person should be reading the equivalent of one full book or six articles. Exceptionally long books may be divided up between group members.
- Read the sources, bearing in mind the information that is going to be useful as you work on the article. Think about what it covers and take a note of particular page numbers.
- Produce an annotated bibliography of the sources you have read. This will consist of a summary or précis of the most important aspects of the texts, which should be at least 150 words long for each article read; 600 words for each book. You should put this on your user page by Monday, February 8.
To coordinate with the other members of your group (whose names you can find here), use their talk pages. Each time that you log in to Wikipedia, you will notice that if you have a message waiting for you, there will be a yellow banner at the top of the page.
Good luck! --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:00, 11 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Heya, just to point out that if you look here you'll see that User:EyeSerene has volunteered to give special help to your article, The Kingdom of this World. Of course, you guys are to take the lead, and above all do the research required to improve the article. But you should definitely feel free to contact EyeSerene on his talk page. You'll find he's very friendly and knowledgeable about writing for Wikipedia, and will give you as much help as he can.
Incidentally, you should also (as I mentioned before) be putting our project page on your watchlist, so you can see changes like this one. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:32, 17 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Hi -- I've noticed you're responding to the GA review at Talk:The Kingdom of this World/GA1 by striking out the issues you feel you've dealt with. Just as an FYI, it usually works better to put a note under the comment explaining that you think the issue is dealt with. That way, the original reviewer can strike the comment when they think it's done -- which is what counts. Then you can visually quickly see what's resolved. If you do the striking out, then you can't be sure what's truly resolved. You could ask Lampman how he'd like to do it, or let it go as is; or you might want to undo the strikeouts and add comments instead. It's not wrong to do it the way you've done it, but it's not the usual way. Good luck with the GA review! Mike Christie (talk) 23:48, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the input Mike, will do!
That ebay auction seems to have ended and the image isn't showing (though that may be the restrictive filter I have to cope with at work!). Technically the seller, assuming it was them who took the picture, owns the copyright to the photograph but obviously not the cover art itself. I'm not sure how that affects the situation - I'll ask someone with more expertise for their thoughts. EyeSerenetalk 09:50, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- OK, an expert opinion can be found here. It looks like we're all right to use the image (which I can now see from home), though it might need trimming and reducing in size to comply with the "low resolution" clause for reusing non-free content. If you need a hand with doing that and/or uploading and licensing, let me know! EyeSerenetalk 15:44, 23 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Thank so much, EyeSerene! I will reduce the size and crop it to just the actual book. It's great to be able to use this after a LONG search.
- See File:The Kingdom of this World Eng 1st Ed.jpg. I adjusted the perspective to straighten out the image, cleaned up the edges where the paper cover had torn, and reduced the image scale. I'll leave it to you to put it in the article :) EyeSerenetalk 10:17, 26 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- You're welcome :) EyeSerenetalk 07:42, 27 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
