Wikiparty
How to start your contribution with the world
What are we doing here?
- Research: you will be given a particular topic about which you'll have to look for information in as many sources as possible: encyclopaedias, libraries, town hall documents, touristic leaflets, history teachers, online official websites, etc. Additionally, it would be very interesting if you could take your own photos of the town so as to graphically show what you are writing. All the research can be done in Spanish.
- Translation: you will need to sum up all the information you found, write a short but complete description of the town in the topic you were given, and correctly translate it into English. Please, don't use online translators, as they tend to commit very serious mistakes. Use online or paper dictionaries or ask your teacher for whatever you need.
- Edition: once you get the text that you are going to upload into Wikipedia, the edition stage begins. You'll learn the basic rules for editting in such a famous platform and the things you must and mustn't do during the process. This stage will be done during an English lesson.
Zero point: choose a topic
- Etymology
- History
- History - Roman times
- History - Modern era
- History - XXth century
- History - Spanish Civil War
- History - XXIst century
- Geography
- Geography
- Infrastructures
- Environments
- Neighbourhoods
- Weather
- Local Council
- Landmarks
- Demography
- Historical evolution
- Education
- Culture
- Health
- Economy
- Facilities
- Transport
- Sports
- Personalities
- Symbols
- Twin towns and sister cities
As you can see, there are 27 topics, but two of them (History and Geography) are just a title for smaller, more specific topics. Choose the one you prefer and enjoy it!
Take a sheet of paper and write your names with the chosen topic next to them.
RESEARCH
DEADLINE: Monday 7th, May 2018
First step: know what you are looking for
- What type of information is included in it? For example, if you receive the Geography section, you can talk about its coordinates, altitude, distance from the sea, distance from the most important cities, rivers, total surface, urban surface, etc. You can look at important wikipedia articles (Madrid, London, New York...) so as to get ideas about what to say.
- Where can I find information about it? For example, if we are going to talk about the History of Archena during the Spanish Civil War, you can look for Archena at an encyclopaedia (the Spanish Wikipedia is an option, of course), ask your history teacher about where to find information, search for online books about the Spanish Civil War, take a picture from the cemetery monument, go to the online historical archives of famous newspapers, etc.
Write down the sources
Reliable sources
Blogs
Newspapers
Wikipedia
Teachers
Encyclopaedias
Official websites
Can you trust Wikipedia?
Numbers
List of references
Original sources
Have a try
TRANSLATION
DEADLINE: Monday 21st, May 2018
Tools and instruments
- Online dictionaries: they are very useful for looking to the English translation of a word. It is very important to look at the whole list of words and choose the most suitable one. Don't just choose the first in the list. Look at the examples provided so as to check if that is the meaning you are looking for. The best bilingual online dictionary is wordreference, whereas a nice monolingual dictionary is merriam webster.
- Paper dictionaries: they are equally useful, as long as you follow the advices given above.
- Online translators: they tend to be better every day, but online translators can't do the work of a human translator. They make frequent mistakes in the selection of words or the translation of certain expressions. You shouldn't use online translators for this task, but if you do it, make sure you check every single word from the resulting text.
EDITION
DEADLINE: Monday 4th, June 2018
Let's do it!
1. Go to Wikipedia
2. Click on "Crear una cuenta"
Crear una cuenta
Fill in the form
There you are!
3. Look for an article
4. Get used to the website
On the upper right part of the article there are three more options: Read, which we use to simply read the article; Edit source, where we click to change something in the article; and View history, which is a list of all the changes that have been made in this article since the day it was created.
Click on Edit source and a small banner will pop up in the middle of the screen. There are two new options: Switch to the visual editor allows us to use a very easy-to-use editor, quite similar to Microsoft Word; Start editing allows us to edit the article using html codes, so it's quite more difficult to do. Choose the first option: switch to the visual editor.
Article
Talk
Read
Edit source
View history
Pop up
5. Edition
- Arrow to the left: undo changes.
- Arrow to the right: redo changes.
- Paragraph: this is the size of the letters. For the main titles of a section, select the option Heading; for a subsection, select sub-heading 1; for a subsection of this subsection, select sub-heading 2... and so on.
- Style: here you can choose bold letters, italics or other types of letters. However, Wikipedia has a very strict use of this style. Bold letters are only used at the beginning of the article for highlighting its name. Italics are only used for quotations. The rest almost never appear.
- Links: the icon of a chain is a way to add links to particular words. Just select the word "Roman" and click on it; two options will appear. In the search pages option you can link this word to a particular article in wikipedia. In the external link option you can link this word to any other website. It is always nice to link words to their own articles in Wikipedia, though they sometimes have different names. Click on Roman Empire and you'll have created a link. We don't usually create links to external websites.
- Citations: this is a very important part of your edition process. Here you can add the references, bibliography and sources for the information you have introduced. Click at the end of the text and then click on Citations. Then click on the Manual option. Choose the type of reference you have and complete the information.
- Structure: this option allows you to list items using small dots, numbers, etc.
- Insert: this options can help us upload a picture, a table with information, etc. If you want to try to find pictures on the Wikipedia gallery, click on Media and then type the words to find them. If you have taken your own photos, then the process is a little more difficult. Ask your teacher about how to upload them.
- Special character: finally, the special character option allows us to use letters, numbers or symbols that do not appear in your keyboard.
Undo
Redo
Paragraph
Style
Links
Citations
Organization
Insert
Special characters
6. Make your contribution
How?
You can simply copy from a Word document and paste on Wikipedia, but you'll have to personally check the information later.
Where?
Let's keep some order for the information. Add your contribution in the exact place as it appears in the list of topics above.
When?
There is a problem here, as two contributions can't be added at the same time. Add your contribution exactly the day and time in which your teacher told you.
7. Time to act
- Inés Ayala: Monday 21st (17:00-20:00)
- Laura Verdú: Monday 21st (20:00-23:00)
- Paola Ayala: Tuesday 22nd (17:00-20:00)
- Laura M. Vera: Tuesday 22nd (20:00-23:00)
- José Luis Brando: Wednesday 23rd (17:00-20:00)
- Eunice Solana: Wednesday 23rd (20:00-23:00)
- Mireya Brao: Thursday 24th (17:00-20:00)
- Elena Sánchez: Thursday 24th (20:00-23:00)
- Mónica M. Cáceres: Friday 25th (17:00-20:00)
- Rocío Pastor: Friday 25th (20:00-23:00)
- Ana I. Campillo: Saturday 26th (9:00-12:00)
- Nadia Ortiz: Saturday 26th (12:00-15:00)
- Alejandro Campuzano: Saturday 26th (15:00-18:00)
- Ana Méndez: Saturday 26th (18:00-21:00)
- David Campuzano: Sunday 27th (9:00-12:00)
- Aquilino Martínez: Sunday 27th (12:00-15:00)
- David Cano: Sunday 27th (15:00-18:00)
- Marta Martínez: Sunday 27th (18:00-21:00)
- David Egea: Monday 28th (17:00-20:00)
- Nayara López: Monday 28th (20:00-23:00)
- Lucía Gil: Tuesday 29th (17:00-20:00)
- María Lachmacki: Tuesday 29th (20:00-23:00)
- Alba Gil: Wednesday 30th (17:00-20:00)
- Feli Ibáñez: Wednesday 30th (20:00-23:00)
- Isabel Guillén: Thursday 31st (17:00-20:00)