Below is a sample entry from Wikipedia.
I'd like you to look at this entry a bit more closely. For our purposes in this course assignment, let's focus on the tabs along the top of the entry.
- The first tab, "article," gives you the current form of the "Stroganovs" article.
- The "talk" tab is very interesting. If you click on that tab--you cannot do that on the image above--for any entry, you will find an ongoing discussion among contributors about the article's information. You should read through the article's discussion for your research entry. These discussions often make for very interesting reading and explain the rationale behind some changes to information in the entry.
- The "edit" tab is not really relevant for us in this assignment, but this is where you would be able to log in and then make changes to an article. (Once you are a registered Wikipedian.)
- The "View history" tab is also very useful for your assignment. By clicking on that tab, you will get a list of all the versions of the article to have appeared before the current version. You can read any one of these previous editions. What is also important is that you can compare specific editions of the entry to see what actually changed. (See the "Compare selected revisions" button at the bottom of the history list.). Once you have seen some changes, you can try and go through the "discussion" and figure out why there were changes.
Finally, I'd also like to call your attention to all the links and wiki tools down the left side of the entry page. The "languages" section lists where you can find this entry in different language versions. Often there is more, or different, information in the different language versions of the article. That is certainly the case with this sample entry on the Stroganovs--The Russian version is actually, surprisingly quite a bit shorter.