User:OhanaUnited/University Presentation

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This page is used for a university presentation.

Contents 1 Intro 1.1 History 1.2 Who can edit? 2 Why (some) professors hate this site? 3 Other features 3.1 Talk page 3.2 Edit history 4 Beyond Wikipedia

[edit] Intro

[edit] History

• Launched on January 15, 2001
• Reached 2 million articles on English Wikipedia on September 9, 2007
• Attracts 683 million visitors annually reading over 10 million articles in 253 languages

[edit] Who can edit?

• Everyone (minus those who come here just to cause trouble)
• Every article is written and maintained entirely by volunteers

[edit] Why (some) professors hate this site?

• Not all articles on this site are trustworthy
  • Ideally, articles should have reliable references from credible sources
    • Examples of questionable articles: Alexander I of Russia, Economy of Algeria, 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill
    • Examples of well-written articles: DNA, Mozilla Firefox, List of acquisitions by AOL
• Sometimes users add misleading or prank information
• Credentials are discouraged, meaning a PhD professor specialized in black holes may have to argue with a high school student who didn't take physics course
• If you find a bad article, you are welcome to improve it, either directly or via a comment on the talk page, and encouraged (if not obliged) to register

[edit] Other features

[edit] Talk page

• The backstage of Wikipedia
  • Just about every article has its own talk page
  • Discussion and, often, more information can be found here

[edit] Edit history

• Some students said they went to a page and read something useful but didn't write or copy it down
• Few days later, they came back to that page and it's gone!
• Uh oh, they are doomed (or so it seems)!

[edit] Beyond Wikipedia

• Wiktionary (dictionary)
• Wikispecies (species directory)
• Commons (free media repository)
• ... and others