I've been wanting to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia for a long time now. I noticed a while back that Prime doesn't yet have a Wikipedia page, so I figured writing one would be a good opportunity to learn about contributing to Wikipedia.
I've been slowly working over this for the past year, but haven't made much progress lately. So, in the spirit of open source and the open web, I figured I'd ask for help from the great community of Prime students, faculty, and alumni. Obviously I can't stop you from posting this on Wikipedia, but I'd really appreciate the opportunity to do it myself. Once we have a solid chunk of information finished, I'll post it for the rest of the world to see and edit.
There are lots of things I don't know or have forgotten since attending Prime, so any help filling in the blanks would be greatly appreciated. See the Information Needed section below for specific things we need.
There are a few good ways to make contributions:
- Create an issue here on GitHub
- Fork the repo and make a pull request with your suggested edits or additions
- Message me on the #prime-wikipedia channel on the Prime Academy Slack
- Send me an email with your thoughts and ideas
GitHub provides some basic previewing of .mediawiki
documents, but leaves much out (no tables for instance). There aren't any great ways to preview your edits, but Wikipedia does offer an OK one: the Sandbox.
The MediaWiki markup format (a.k.a. Wikitext) is… confusing. Here are some handy resources for learning how to write it:
- Wikipedia's Wikitext guide - a long and in-depth guide to the markup
- Wikipedia's Cheatsheet - a more condensed document for quick reference
- Wikipedia's Manual of Style - a style guide for Wikipedia pages
- School Infobox Template - y'know those little boxes on the side of every Wikipedia article? Those are known as Infoboxes, and they have a specific format, and specific content based on the type of thing they're describing.
- Names of founders (Was it just Mark? I can't remember.)
- Significant dates
- Date of incorporation (or whatever you call it when you officially start a school)
- Date of first class start
- Date of first class graduation
- Date of move to downtown campus
- Cohort information - Names, dates of attendance, nicknames, slogans
- High resolution images of the old campus, and the new one
- High resolution images of the Prime logo
- Links to references that talk about Prime (the Wikipedia editors will delete the page if we don't have credible sources)
- Literally anything else you can think of that would be useful on a Wikipedia page
You can check out some research notes I took while listning to Manu Garcia's New Developer Podcast interviews with Mark Hurlburt (episode 7 and episode 8).