A Truly Authentic Audience: Editing and Writing on Wikipedia

Writing Wikipedia offers undergraduate and graduate writers, both native speakers and ELLs, an authentic audience providing dynamic feedback; opportunities to collaborate on meaningful writing; practice with summarizing, paraphrasing, and sourcing; and the opportunity to practice and learn grammar and vocabulary. In this hands-on workshop, participants will learn and practice strategies for using Wikipedia—and the power of Web 2.0—in the classroom

Rozwijanie kompetencji akademickich przez pisanie artykułów do Wikipedii

Many teachers of academic writing want to help students bridge the gap between writing for personal purposes and writing for academic purposes. The latter seems considerably more challenging, and decidedly less familiar. One way of facilitating students' initiation as academic writers is to ask them to write a Wikipedia article, which requires several academic writing sub-skills, such as summarizing or paraphrasing. Students need to be able to demonstrate critical thinking while choosing a suitable topic, and assessing the reliability of their sources. Then, they must show their familiarity with the genre conventions of Wikipedia. This article focuses on a project done with a group of archaeology students of the Jagiellonian University. The students were asked to choose and research a topic, and later write a short Wikipedia article, based on what they had found out about their respective topics. The article presents the benefits and potential difficulties of this project, and I will share my students' perspectives as well

Learning to generate one-sentence biographies from Wikidata

We investigate the generation of one-sentence Wikipedia biographies from facts derived from Wikidata slot-value pairs. We train a recurrent neural network sequence-to-sequence model with attention to select facts and generate textual summaries. Our model incorporates a novel secondary objective that helps ensure it generates sentences that contain the input facts. The model achieves a BLEU score of 41, improving significantly upon the vanilla sequence-to-sequence model and scoring roughly twice that of a simple template baseline. Human preference evaluation suggests the model is nearly as good as the Wikipedia reference. Manual analysis explores content selection, suggesting the model can trade the ability to infer knowledge against the risk of hallucinating incorrect information

Text Summarization Techniques: A Brief Survey

In recent years, there has been a explosion in the amount of text data from a variety of sources. This volume of text is an invaluable source of information and knowledge which needs to be effectively summarized to be useful. In this review, the main approaches to automatic text summarization are described. We review the different processes for summarization and describe the effectiveness and shortcomings of the different methods.Comment: Some of references format have update

Black Culture In A Post-Soul Era (ENGL 068) Syllabus

Generations of African American writers, artists, and intellectuals have emerged since the 1960s to reconsider the meaning of Blackness in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that preceded them. Supported by historical and critical studies, we examine how Black novelists, playwrights, and poets in the ‘post-soul’ era have dealt with a complex of shifting, but interconnected, concerns, including the imperatives of racial representation in a society increasingly driven by mass consumption and global media, the contentious discourses of sexual politics, and the polarization of classes within Black America. For this version of the course, the major project entails producing a Wikipedia article on a topic relevant to African American literature and culture from the 1970s to the present

Patterns of creation and usage of wikipedia content

This is the Post-print version of the Article. The official Published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 IEEEWikipedia is the largest online service storing user-generated content. Its pages are open to anyone for addition, deletion and modifications, and the effort of contributors is recorded and can be tracked in time. Although potentially the Wikipedia web content could exhibit unbounded growth, it is still not clear whether the effort of developers and the output generated are actually following patterns of continuous growth. It is also not clear how the users access such content, and if recurring patterns of usage are detectable showing how the Wikipedia content typically is viewed by interested readers. Using the category of Wikipedia as macro-agglomerates, this study reveals that Wikipedia categories face a decreasing growth trend over time, after an initial, exponential phase of development. On the other hand the study demonstrates that the number of views to the pages within the categories follow a linear, unbounded growth. The link between software usefulness and the need for software maintenance over time has been established by Lehman and other; the link betweenWikipedia usage and changes to the content, unlike software, appear to follow a two-phase evolution of production followed by consumption.This study is partly funded by the University of East London