When you contribute to an article on Wikipedia, there are best practices to consider regardless of what subject you work on, but there can also be particularities to different topic areas. For that reason, Wiki Education works with instructors, organizations, and the Wikipedia community to develop subject-specific editing brochures to supplement our other training materials. I’m pleased to announce the most recent publication: Editing Wikipedia articles on Political Science.
The “Editing Wikipedia articles on…” series of brochures provides in-depth information on how to get started, how articles on related subjects are typically structured, what kinds of sources are appropriate, whether special rules for style or sourcing may apply, and other helpful tips.
We chose political science for this guide in part because of our partnership with the Midwest Political Science Association. MPSA encourages their members who teach political science at U.S. and Canadian universities to participate in Wiki Education’s program, thereby improving the information on Wikipedia. As the number of political science courses we support has grown, so has our need for subject-specific brochure on the topic. Since we started our partnership, 500 political science students have added more than half a million words to Wikipedia, and their work has been viewed more than 25 million times. This new guide will help future political science students write even better content in this subject area.
We’re grateful for the help of Melissa Heeke and Wikipedians User:Notecardforfree and User:TheVirginiaHistorian in reviewing drafts of this brochure. It’s available for everyone to use in PDF form through Wikimedia Commons, and available in print form for courses participating in our program. To participate in our program, visit teach.wikiedu.org.
