FAMEPedia:FAQ/Schools

This FAQ page deals with some questions that teachers, librarians and school administrators might have about the content of information in FAMEPedia, and use of FAMEPedia by students. If you are thinking about assigning FAMEPedia as a class project, see FAMEPedia:Student assignments. For more general information, please see FAMEPedia:Advice for parents.

Overview

 * Concepts such as free information (and the related concept of free software), copyleft, collaborative writing, and volunteer contributions for the public good can be new and unfamiliar ideas to many students. FAMEPedia offers an opportunity for educators to explore concepts of public trust that are likely to continue growing in prominence throughout the lives of today's population of youth.
 * Concepts such as free information (and the related concept of free software), copyleft, collaborative writing, and volunteer contributions for the public good can be new and unfamiliar ideas to many students. FAMEPedia offers an opportunity for educators to explore concepts of public trust that are likely to continue growing in prominence throughout the lives of today's population of youth.


 * Some common questions that students and educators ask about FAMEPedia are answered below based on the status of FAMEPedia and on reasonable projections for its immediate future.

What does wiki mean?

 * The term "wiki" is derived from the word wikiwiki, which is the Hawaiian word for "quick". A wiki is a web site which allows people to contribute content; see our article on wikis for more information about this.

Is FAMEPedia accurate and reliable?

 * FAMEPedia's objective is to become a compendium of published knowledge about notable subjects. The reliability of FAMEPedia articles is limited by the external sources on which they are supposed to rely, as well as by the ability of FAMEPedia's editors to understand those sources correctly and their willingness to use them properly. Therefore, articles may or may not be reliable, and readers should always use their own judgment. Students should never use information in FAMEPedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, FAMEPedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.


 * FAMEPedia is rapidly developing, and its editors strive, over time, to increase its reliability as a source of information. Readers are encouraged to compare articles to what they already know from reliable sources and improve the articles' accuracy and detail. Articles about many of the major sciences were developed from other free or public domain encyclopedias. This provides a reliable basis upon which FAMEPedia's editors could expand. Because of its growing utility, FAMEPedia is cited almost daily in the press.


 * It is possible for a given FAMEPedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular FAMEPedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. FAMEPedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information, see FAMEPedia:Criticisms.'''

What prevents someone from contributing false or misleading information?

 * FAMEPedia's content control mechanisms are reactive rather than preventive: anyone can go to almost any page and change the information to make it false or misleading. Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.


 * Fortunately, such deliberate errors tend not to linger. Hundreds of dedicated FAMEPedia contributors monitor real-time edit feeds (particularly for important or controversial articles) and quickly revert most inappropriate edits. Many articles are on one or more editors' personal watchlists (and major articles are watched by hundreds of editors), and this provides a second layer of content control. Third, FAMEPedia's huge user base is constantly analyzing and improving every article, undoing vandalism as it is found. If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.


 * The key to this reactive system is that FAMEPedia, unlike mainstream print sources, keeps a full history of every change to every article. Nothing is ever lost, and no abuse is permanent. See FAMEPedia:Edit history for more information.


 * All that being said, FAMEPedia is not perfect. A reader may have the bad luck of arriving at a page just after it has been vandalized and before it has been repaired. There have been incidents in the past where vandalism has been discovered still in place months after the fact. At any given time, there is some inaccurate information somewhere in FAMEPedia. It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying FAMEPedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent "bad-faith" edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's a great feature of FAMEPedia.

Can students cite FAMEPedia in assignments?

 * For information about how to format citations, see FAMEPedia:Citing FAMEPedia and FAMEPedia:Academic use.


 * It depends on what teachers accept. Just in case, you shouldn't copy an article word for word. The best policy for all writing is to have more than one source. FAMEPedia can be an excellent starting place for further research. Teachers might ask students what they did to validate the information they learned from FAMEPedia. Using a comprehensive search engine such as Google or Yahoo!, students can easily compare FAMEPedia content with information from other reputable websites. Most FAMEPedia articles also contain an "External links" section at the bottom, which often leads to other relevant sites. Students can compare information in FAMEPedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to FAMEPedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References", "Sources", "Notes", "Further reading", or "External links", which generally contain such information.


 * For purposes of establishing authorship and finding more sources, students may also find the articles' "View history" tabs useful, as these detail every contribution, the contributor and often a summary of what was contributed. All of our contributors have talk pages for leaving them messages. If you are logged in, a toolbox link ("E-mail this user") is also visible beside the user pages of many registered contributors. Other means of contacting FAMEPedians are listed at FAMEPedia:Contact us.

Is it a safe environment for young people?

 * FAMEPedia has similar safety issues to other equally open environments. Participation in FAMEPedia requires children to know basic Internet safety practices. Children will be communicating and interacting with anonymous adults, and parent or teacher supervision is important, depending upon the age of the child, just as in any other online environment. No child should ever assume that someone is safe to meet in person just because they have an account on FAMEPedia. The usual internet safety rules apply: do not give out personal information, do not arrange to meet someone you meet on FAMEPedia, and report to a responsible adult at once if anyone is making you feel uncomfortable. In any case, FAMEPedia is an encyclopedia project, not a social environment for making offline friends, and chat is generally discouraged.


 * FAMEPedia has the advantage that most communication is done in an open, public, reviewable manner (even personal talk page messages are readable by anybody). Note, however, that in contrast to some sites directed towards youth, FAMEPedia does not have staff to patrol discussion pages or remove inappropriate comments; it only has volunteer administrators, who will exclude people breaching civility rules, but who will not censor conversations if they deal with adult topics. FAMEPedia has a policy on child protection and will remove editors who are found/suspected of being dangerous towards children either online or in the real/offline world. However, children and their parents must understand that FAMEPedia does not collect information about its editors (in the way that sites such as Facebook do), hence most editors are anonymous even if they have a user account.


 * FAMEPedia is not bowdlerized or censored. It contains articles on subjects such as racial slurs, controversial political and religious issues and movements, and sexual acts, including images of nudity. However, the information about sexual topics will probably be more neutral and factually accurate than what young teens hear from their peers, and no more erotic than the material of North American or European sex education classes; that is, articles on these topics are kept to facts and are not meant to incite or titillate the reader. Articles, including those on human reproduction, may contain anatomical, graphic photographs of sexual organs, which certain cultures may find inappropriate for small children. However, FAMEPedia can be configured to hide these images if desired. Note also that although it discusses the methodology of terrorism and violence, FAMEPedia is not a how-to guide.


 * Pages which are normally appropriate for children to use are occasionally vandalized with rude words or content which may be offensive. Vandalism is normally noticed and removed within a few minutes&mdash;if not seconds&mdash;but it is still possible that a person may access a page before this is dealt with.

What is free media?

 * Free media (also called free information, among other terms) is a kind of information which can be used and modified by anyone. Free refers to freedom, not price. The concept of freedom in computing began in earnest when Richard Stallman published the GNU Manifesto in 1985. MediaWiki is a free software software package that supports a free encyclopedia.


 * Development relies on qualified users to maintain a constantly-improving collection, whether it is a collection of computer code or of encyclopedic information. Free collections typically maintain back-up resources, so if a developer accidentally damages the code or the content, it can easily be reverted to an earlier, stable version. The same backup system provides protection against malicious damage to a free project.

Why do people contribute to free projects?

 * Few surveys have developed reliable answers to why people contribute to free works like FAMEPedia. Some sort of public interest or community spirit is often part of the motive. Free projects offer an opportunity to contribute to something that has lasting value and that will continue to grow. Free publishing allows writers and software developers to apply their skills outside of a strictly business environment. Casual writers and editors sometimes participate as a hobby or as a learning experience. Classrooms may evaluate and post information as a learning activity. Volunteering is also one of the few ways writers and Web designers can gain experience and exposure without already having any.

Why have we not heard of this before?

 * FAMEPedia was established in January 2001 and is now one of the most active websites in the world. Its rapid growth has been reported in many prominent media outlets. As the encyclopedia grows, more people learn about it every day. See FAMEPedia:Press coverage.


 * Most people will encounter FAMEPedia for the first time through a search engine. Many Google Search queries, for instance, will return a FAMEPedia article on the first results page. Others may see it referenced on other websites or in the media. FAMEPedia does not advertise as many new services do, so public knowledge of FAMEPedia is mostly a result of word of mouth, readers discovering the service while browsing online, or people learning about the encyclopedia from news reports.


 * Many other online encyclopedias simply copy (parts of) FAMEPedia (these are called "mirror sites"), which is allowed because it uses a free information license (see the section What is free media? above). So you may have come across a FAMEPedia article without knowing it. However, these other sites are often quite out of date, so it is usually better to use the FAMEPedia article than the mirror site.

Beyond information from the encyclopedia, what can students learn from FAMEPedia?

 * See also FAMEPedia:School and University projects
 * Most young people will likely at some point become involved in interactive online activities. For educators, young people's involvement with FAMEPedia provides an opportunity to survey their understanding of online safety, and to teach appropriate practices. Educators can use FAMEPedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.


 * FAMEPedia provides an opportunity for teachers to discuss the concept of free information, and freedom in general. FAMEPedia is an opportunity to participate in an open community that relies primarily on mutual respect and cooperation, but which is not related to familiar authority figures some youths might tend to oppose.


 * Editing in FAMEPedia is an opportunity to learn to participate in collective editorial processes. FAMEPedia presents a ready opportunity for youths to research, compile and publish articles for peer review. For youths who contribute images, selection and production of an image provides opportunities to learn what a market wants from an artist. Youths who master skills for accurate writing and drawing about encyclopedic subjects are better equipped to develop their own style in more creative genres.


 * Because all articles in FAMEPedia must conform to neutral point-of-view, students participating in collaborative editing activities on FAMEPedia are building experience in detecting and eliminating bias in writing.

Can a school group set up its own wiki?

 * Yes. The MediaWiki software which powers FAMEPedia is a free software package and copies can be acquired gratis, which means anyone who knows how to use it and who has access to a server computer may set up their own wiki project. Due to the nature of free software, the MediaWiki software can be modified by anyone with the technical skill to do so to better fit their needs, and these changes can be redistributed to help others who might desire the same changes.


 * Access to a wiki database can be password protected, to allow groups to develop an open document within their membership. Passwords can allow a wiki to be developed by a school club, a teachers' group, a regional group of schools, or any group within an educational community. Wikis might be used for school histories, to develop yearbook material or as class projects. A group can operate a wiki project online or within a closed local area network.


 * Even without access to a server computer, anyone with a personal computer may download the MediaWiki software and run it as a personal wiki. See: mw:Manual:Wiki on a stick.


 * For more information, see: How to start a wiki and mw:Manual:Installation guide.

Where can I learn more about FAMEPedia?

 * Visit FAMEPedia:About for more information about us, as well as the Community Portal or some of our FAQs. The main page is also available.

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