Public outreach/Academy/RfC/Editing skills

IRC meetings – Goals – Survey (pre-Academy) – Schedule – Questions for the host – Pre-Academy communications with scientists – Useraccounts – S.F. Kick-off – On-site logistics – Presentations – Workshops – Post-Academy evaluation survey – Sustainability

Since we're planning to teach editing skills in the three parallel afternoon sessions, we should agree among ourselves which skills to cover in our limited time.

For convenience, we can call the three afternoon sessions the Basic, Intermediate and Advanced classes. If this scheme is adopted, we may assume that

the participants in the Intermediate class will know most of the skills taught in the Basic class; and
participants in the Advanced class will know most of the skills taught in the two lower classes.

However, we may wish to divide topics covered in the afternoon sessions along different lines, perhaps ones not organized linearly. The following is just a proposal.

Basic skills

After registering as a user, the basic editing skills would seem to be

How to open a page/section for editing
How to type in text, add an edit summary, do a preview, and save the change.
How to make a section heading and a subsection.
How to make an internal link (wikilink) and an external link.
Boldface and italics (rarely needed in existing articles; useful on talk pages)
How to create a reference, and to re-cite it elsewhere in the article.
How to use a talk/discussion page (new sections for new threads; proper indentation; signing); how to discuss with people

Intermediate skills

Intermediate editing skills would be:

How to use citation templates.
Using a page history to determine who did what; reverting
Monitoring pages (watchlist)
Adding a Commons image to an article, including captioning.
Special characters; subscript and superscripts.
Adding tables.
Creating a new article

Advanced skills

Advanced media (video and audio)
Handling content disputes
Handling personal attacks
Templates
Effectively reviewing an article

When should we teach templates/infoboxes/navboxes/etc.?

My feeling is that the participants should be exposed to such elements, perhaps in the morning talks, and taught to recognize them in the afternoon sessions. It seems too ambitious to teach them how to work with these non-standardized elements.

I've significantly altered "Advanced skills", as there was way too much there. Also, we should wait until the advanced level to teach about "interpersonal skills" - remember, it is a community. Also, one of the major problems academics have is interacting with people who do not share their same level of expertise. Awadewit 04:05, 1 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]