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Intensive course on research state of the art and Wikipedia for PhD students/Politecnico di Milano

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The Intensive course for PhD students about Wikipedia has been designed by Politecnico di Milano. The first edition was organised in 2016 and in 2024 the eighth edition was organised.

Politecnico di Milano
Frame Organised in the frame of the PhD programme at the Politecnico di Milano. Every year it is possible to submit proposals for seminars targeting the PhD students. Those seminars focus on soft skills, such as public speaking. The proposals for seminars are selected by the Politecnico di Milano.
Fundings In the frame of seminars, the course had a budget of 5'000 euro. The budget was used to pay the tutors.
Participants Around 35 PhD students.

Students of engineering, architecture, design. Mainly scientific and technical education.

Team
  • 2 organisers from the Politecnico di Milano (teachers).
  • 3 Wikipedia tutors (around 1 tutor every 10-12 students).
  • Involvement of external independent reviewers to evaluation the articles from a scientific perspective.
Logistics Organised in the Politecnico di Milano.
Duration From Monday to Friday - 5 days

30 hours. Hours per day: 6 hours (from 9.30 to 12.30 and from 14.00 to 15.00) The students appreciate the all-inclusive format: during this time they have the time to learn and deliver the assignment.

Preparatory work Not planned but suggested.
Attendance Attendance obligatory for minimum 80% of the time.
Programme Lessons the morning on Monday (Wikipedia), Tuesday (Wikimedia Commons) and Wednesday (Wikidata).

Most of the time dedicated to work on your own article(s).

Last day dedicated to peer review among participants and evaluation of the article quality.

Language Course in English. Tutoring in Italian. Possibility to write articles in English or Italian (and possibility to translate articles in other languages for other points).
Certification Course framed in the PhD program with evaluation and full credits.
Challenges Some cases (very limited and unintentional) of copyright violation.
Results
  • Around 15% of the students excel and 10% reach the minium requested.
  • Production of 1 or more articles during the week

Assignment

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  • Production of 1 or more complete Wikipedia articles. The article can be a new article (preferred choice) or a significant improvement of an existing article. The bare translation of an article is not considered sufficient.
    • Articles can be written in English or Italian (local language)
    • Articles are chosen during the first/second day in agreement with the teachers
    • The evaluation considers
      • Quality of the article according to Wikipedia criteria (evaluation made by the Wikipedia tutors).
      • Quality of the article according to a scientific review (evaluation made by an expert in the field).
    • Articles are developed in individual sandboxes.
    • The full articles have to be published by the morning of the last day of the course
  • Every student has to review at least 3 articles by other students.

Programme

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Based on the documentation of the 2024 edition.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday
Morning

9.30-12:30 CET

  • Introduction to the course (Fabio Parmeggiani)
    • Motivations
    • Language issues
    • Criteria for final evaluation
    • Practicalities
  • Wikipedia (Marco Chemello)
    • What is Wikipedia?
    • Wikimedia Foundation
    • Sister projects
    • Multilingual features; translation policies
    • Licensing and reuse
    • Page layout
    • Page histories
    • Diffs
    • First steps: account creation, user page creation on Meta, signature
    • Basic editing techniques (formatting; linking, etc.)
    • Watchlists
  • Assignment (Guido Raos/Niccolò Caranti/Marco Chemello)
    • Choosing a topic
    • Finding stub pages
    • etc.
 Wikimedia Commons (Niccolò Caranti)
  • Purpose
  • Editing interface
  • Copyright & licensing
  • Uploading – wizard
  • Categories
  • (it) Diritto d'autore italiano (Niccolò Caranti)
 Wikidata (Marco Chemello)
  • Purpose
  • Differences from Wikipedia
  • Licensing
  • Identifiers
  • Editing interface
  • Configuration for multi-lingual editors
  • Labels, descriptions and aliases
  • Properties and values
  • Qualifiers
  • Finish editing
  • reviewing the articles by the lecturers.
  • Group photo!
  • Cross reviews by the students.
  • Beginning of evaluation by the lecturers.
Afternoon

2:00-5:00 CET

Wikipedia (continued) (Niccolò Caranti)
  • Notability
  • Avoiding plagiarism and copyright violation
  • Edit wars & other disputes
  • Sandbox creation
  • Source-code editor vs. Visual Editor
  • Referencing and citations
  • Discussion (talk) pages
  • Infoboxes & other templates
  • Authority Control
  • Wikimedia Commons (continued) (Niccolò Caranti)
    • Templates
    • User pages
    • Using media on Wikipedia
    • Using media externally
  • (it) Wikipedia in italiano (Marco Chemello)
 Wikidata (continued) (Marco Chemello)
  • Query SPARQL
  • tools for Wikidata
  • ORCID
Assignment Take a photo for tomorrow Bonus:

Recommendations to replicate the format

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  • Important and challenging the work with the scientific reviewers
  • You can consider to ask students to do online preparatory work before the course, using the flipped classroom approach and by providing digital documentation (videos, MOOC, training materials).

Sources

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