EECS 5101 Wikipedia Assignment

In this assignment, you must find a wikipedia page on a data structure and improve it.

You should do the following tasks in order:

1. Read a little bit about how Wikipedia works.
   Start on this page and follow some of the links. WikiEdu also has an overview tutorial and a tutorial on editing basics.
   In particular, you should know about the Wikipedia policies on identifying reliable sources for information that you add to Wikipedia. WikiEdu has a good tutorial about wikipedia sources.
   Of course, you should avoid any form of plagiarism; see also the WikiEdu tutorial on avoiding plagiarism.
   Another good place to look if you get stuck on something is the Wikipedia Help page.
2. If you do not have one already, create a wikipedia account. (See this link for instructions.)
3. Choose a page of wikipedia to work on. This can be an existing page or one that you create. It should be about a data structure (or collection of data structures). Do not pick a data structure that was covered in class.
   Below are some possible starting points to use when searching for a page. Follow links from those pages to find others, or pick a different page altogether. There are lots of other pages about data structures that need work, so you are welcome to pick one not on the list below.
   • Segment tree
   • Dynamic connectivity
   • k-d tree
   • Leftist tree
   • Rank-pairing heap (see link on the page about heaps)
   • Hash tree
   • List of some data structure pages
   The page you choose should be in English (even though the pages about distributed computing in other languages need even more help than the English ones; feel free to translate your newly improved page into another language, but you won't get course credit for that).
4. Email me your wikipedia username and the page you have chosen. (This must be done before you make any changes that you want me to give you credit for.) This step is so that I can verify that you have chosen an appropriate page to work on.
5. Make an appointment to see me to discuss the data structure. At that meeting, I will expect you to be able to explain to me what the data structure does and how it works.
6. Improve the wikipedia page. This can include correcting errors, adding more material, adding references and citations, improving links from that page to other pages, and so on. This will likely require you to do some background reading in papers or textbooks. If your page is marked as deficient in some way before you begin, find out what kinds of improvements others have asked for, and check the discussion page for the article. Also, remember to make technical articles understandable for a general audience. Let me know when you have completed your changes.
   Important: remember to make all changes while you are logged in with your user name, since I will only give you credit for changes made by your username. You do not have to make all your revisions at once, but try to make them in a reasonable number of updates to the page.