... the hundreds of good articles his class is about to contribute.
I put up a note about this in the Village Pump Miscellaneous section. I hope some of us will try to keep an eye on things and try to make this years' experience is more positive than last year's. Here's what I said in the Pump, minus the links:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Last year, his students contributed about 600 articles. As he says on his user page, "Some were great and some were just quick hacks turned out to get some credit." Most of them went completely unnoticed by Wikipedians. There was nothing in particular to identify an excellent article on an unpublished work by Jane Austen as being the product of a Dartmouth class exercise.
But. Maybe ten per cent of these articles were puff pieces on subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth student life, talking about some student activity in language that would have been appropriate to a recruiting brochure, traditional games played in certain living units, and so forth. The sudden arrival of a few dozen pieces of Dartmouthcruft brought out the very worst in the Wikipedian community.
The final disposition of most of these articles was that they were cleaned up and merged into Dartmouth College, which is a much better article than it was two years ago, so even these articles were beneficial, but along the way there was a great deal of unnecessary incivility and hurt feelings.
This year, let's welcome the Dartmouth students and the hundreds of decent articles they are about to contribute.
We will probably get a few articles on topics that seem too narrow to be encyclopedic. Let's remember that redirects are cheap and that anyone can merge-and-redirect, which is a far gentler process than nomination for deletion. If we do feel a need to nominate any of them for deletion, let's really adhere to the policies of
*civility and *assume good faith and, oh yes, *Don't bite the newbies. Nobody is trying to spam us. And we have a standing invitation to professors to engage in just such projects.
Welcome back, Big Green.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Couldn't he make the assignment to write an article in a user subpage? Then after everything has been graded and everyone got their credit, the class can sit together and decide which of those articles are worthy of contributions to the article namespace.
Chl
Except then it wouldn't get edited mercilessly by other Wikipedians. The students will probably work a bit harder if they know it's going into the main article namespace where it will be subjected to many eyes and editors than if it's in their user namespace.
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
Laurascudder
On 8/15/05, Chris Lüer chris@zandria.net wrote:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Couldn't he make the assignment to write an article in a user subpage? Then after everything has been graded and everyone got their credit, the class can sit together and decide which of those articles are worthy of contributions to the article namespace.
Chl
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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Laura Scudder wrote:
Except then it wouldn't get edited mercilessly by other Wikipedians. The students will probably work a bit harder if they know it's going into the main article namespace where it will be subjected to many eyes and editors than if it's in their user namespace.
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
*WARNING: BRAIN IS CURRENTLY OFF. ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNICATE MAY BE DANGEROUS. CONTINUE [Y/N]?* y
Maybe we should... just as page moving is disabled until you have a certain number of edits, so should new page creation. It would probably save VFD a whole lot of trouble.
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
On 8/15/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Laura Scudder wrote:
Except then it wouldn't get edited mercilessly by other Wikipedians. The students will probably work a bit harder if they know it's going into the main article namespace where it will be subjected to many eyes and editors than if it's in their user namespace.
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
*WARNING: BRAIN IS CURRENTLY OFF. ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNICATE MAY BE DANGEROUS. CONTINUE [Y/N]?* y
Maybe we should... just as page moving is disabled until you have a certain number of edits, so should new page creation. It would probably save VFD a whole lot of trouble.
No!No!No! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!
Totally daft idea!
The first edit I ever made was creation of a new page. And it was a crappy stub. And had I not been allowed to make it I may never have become hooked.
Theresa
Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFDALd0/RxM5Ph0xhMRAw9gAJ9ngg6LBbcXsZOvmwHo66bLQMIz9gCeMu6f 42nBZoL9OX2zR5NtvJHO1g4= =mjpl -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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Theresa Knott wrote:
On 8/15/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
*WARNING: BRAIN IS CURRENTLY OFF. ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNICATE MAY BE DANGEROUS. CONTINUE [Y/N]?* y
Maybe we should... just as page moving is disabled until you have a certain number of edits, so should new page creation. It would probably save VFD a whole lot of trouble.
No!No!No! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!
Totally daft idea!
The first edit I ever made was creation of a new page. And it was a crappy stub. And had I not been allowed to make it I may never have become hooked.
See disclaimer :) But it would stop the amount of junk having to be scraped out of VFD, yes?
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
Alphax (alphasigmax@gmail.com) [050816 01:55]:
Theresa Knott wrote:
On 8/15/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe we should... just as page moving is disabled until you have a certain number of edits, so should new page creation. It would probably save VFD a whole lot of trouble.
No!No!No! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! Totally daft idea! The first edit I ever made was creation of a new page. And it was a crappy stub. And had I not been allowed to make it I may never have become hooked.
See disclaimer :) But it would stop the amount of junk having to be scraped out of VFD, yes?
Disclaimer or no, there are people who would take that reason seriously as a justification. This sort of thinking is an example of why VFD as it is currently constituted is poisonous to the wiki.
- d.
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David Gerard wrote:
Alphax (alphasigmax@gmail.com) [050816 01:55]:
Theresa Knott wrote:
On 8/15/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Maybe we should... just as page moving is disabled until you have a certain number of edits, so should new page creation. It would probably save VFD a whole lot of trouble.
No!No!No! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! Totally daft idea! The first edit I ever made was creation of a new page. And it was a crappy stub. And had I not been allowed to make it I may never have become hooked.
See disclaimer :) But it would stop the amount of junk having to be scraped out of VFD, yes?
Disclaimer or no, there are people who would take that reason seriously as a justification. This sort of thinking is an example of why VFD as it is currently constituted is poisonous to the wiki.
This disclaimer I was referring to was mine that I wasn't particularly awake when I made that post.
As such, I'm not entirely sure whether you agree with Theresa or myself.
Open question to all: do you think that new accounts should be prevented from creating pages? Would it clean out VFD? Or is the idea fundamentally unwiki?
- -- Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \
Alphax (alphasigmax@gmail.com) [050816 18:00]:
Open question to all: do you think that new accounts should be prevented from creating pages? Would it clean out VFD? Or is the idea fundamentally unwiki?
The idea is fundamentally unwiki and deeply awful. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make VFD manageable.
- d.
On 16/08/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Open question to all: do you think that new accounts should be prevented from creating pages? Would it clean out VFD? Or is the idea fundamentally unwiki?
The idea is fundamentally unwiki and deeply awful. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make VFD manageable.
Also wrote:
This sort of thinking is an example of why VFD as it is currently constituted is poisonous to the wiki.
Well said.
Dan
TERRIBLE idea. Terrible!
On 8/16/05, Dan Grey dangrey@gmail.com wrote:
On 16/08/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Open question to all: do you think that new accounts should be prevented from creating pages? Would it clean out VFD? Or is the idea fundamentally unwiki?
The idea is fundamentally unwiki and deeply awful. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to make VFD manageable.
Also wrote:
This sort of thinking is an example of why VFD as it is currently constituted is poisonous to the wiki.
Well said.
Dan _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
You know, the ultimate way to save VFD trouble is to just disable editing altogether! Can I get an amen?
FF
On 8/15/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Laura Scudder wrote:
Except then it wouldn't get edited mercilessly by other Wikipedians. The students will probably work a bit harder if they know it's going into the main article namespace where it will be subjected to many eyes and editors than if it's in their user namespace.
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
*WARNING: BRAIN IS CURRENTLY OFF. ATTEMPTS TO COMMUNICATE MAY BE DANGEROUS. CONTINUE [Y/N]?* y
Maybe we should... just as page moving is disabled until you have a certain number of edits, so should new page creation. It would probably save VFD a whole lot of trouble.
Alphax | /"\ Encrypted Email Preferred | \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign OpenPGP key ID: 0xF874C613 | X Against HTML email & vCards http://tinyurl.com/cc9up | / \ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
iD8DBQFDALd0/RxM5Ph0xhMRAw9gAJ9ngg6LBbcXsZOvmwHo66bLQMIz9gCeMu6f 42nBZoL9OX2zR5NtvJHO1g4= =mjpl -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Fastfission wrote:
You know, the ultimate way to save VFD trouble is to just disable editing altogether! Can I get an amen?
Excellent idea! And we can remove all possible NPOV violations by blanking all of the existing articles. Imagine how this will ease the server load - we could finally enable the article version rating feature. :)
If the professor wanted to be tough, he could tell the students they drop by one letter grade on the assignment if their article goes to VfD and is deleted (rather than merged) before the end of the session. 1/2 :-)
Stan
Laura Scudder wrote:
Except then it wouldn't get edited mercilessly by other Wikipedians. The students will probably work a bit harder if they know it's going into the main article namespace where it will be subjected to many eyes and editors than if it's in their user namespace.
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
Laurascudder
On 8/15/05, Chris Lüer chris@zandria.net wrote:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Couldn't he make the assignment to write an article in a user subpage? Then after everything has been graded and everyone got their credit, the class can sit together and decide which of those articles are worthy of contributions to the article namespace.
Chl
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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GREAT idea Stan! Would probably improve article quality alot.
On 8/15/05, Stan Shebs shebs@apple.com wrote:
If the professor wanted to be tough, he could tell the students they drop by one letter grade on the assignment if their article goes to VfD and is deleted (rather than merged) before the end of the session. 1/2 :-)
Stan
Laura Scudder wrote:
Except then it wouldn't get edited mercilessly by other Wikipedians. The students will probably work a bit harder if they know it's going into the main article namespace where it will be subjected to many eyes and editors than if it's in their user namespace.
Besides, we don't make other newbies' first articles go up for approval.
Laurascudder
On 8/15/05, Chris Lüer chris@zandria.net wrote:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Couldn't he make the assignment to write an article in a user subpage? Then after everything has been graded and everyone got their credit, the class can sit together and decide which of those articles are worthy of contributions to the article namespace.
Chl
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Subpages? How assume good faith?
SV
--- Chris Lüer chris@zandria.net wrote:
Daniel P. B. Smith wrote:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on
cryptography and one on the
free software movement) is again giving a course on
computer science
for non computer-science majors. One of the
assignments is to
contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Couldn't he make the assignment to write an article in a user subpage? Then after everything has been graded and everyone got their credit, the class can sit together and decide which of those articles are worthy of contributions to the article namespace.
Chl
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
On 15/08/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
But. Maybe ten per cent of these articles were puff pieces on subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth student life, talking about some student activity in language that would have been appropriate to a recruiting brochure, traditional games played in certain living units, and so forth. The sudden arrival of a few dozen pieces of Dartmouthcruft brought out the very worst in the Wikipedian community.
Assuming good faith, all these Dartmouth students will want to write a _useful_ article for their course credit. So, let's help them do so.
Would it be worth putting together a quick welcoming page, targeted at these students (and anyone else coming along later on the same sort of project, since there will be more), which points out resources like [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]], [[Wikipedia:Requested article translations]] (hey, *I'd* offer bonus credit for a translation), [[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] &c, with some notes on the kind of thing we'd really like and the kind of thing we'd discourage?
This'd also serve as an opportunity to make links like the Help Desk clear, mention the talk pages of some users willing to assist, &c &c... thoughts?
Requested articles and requested translations (along with maybe a pointer to substubs if the prof would count significant expansion) would be a really good resource for these folks. Coming up with an idea for an article on the spot can be hard, so while it's easy for them to write Dartmouth cruft, prominently displaying requested articles would make selecting something needed they know about almost as easy.
Laurascudder
On 8/15/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/08/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
But. Maybe ten per cent of these articles were puff pieces on subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth student life, talking about some student activity in language that would have been appropriate to a recruiting brochure, traditional games played in certain living units, and so forth. The sudden arrival of a few dozen pieces of Dartmouthcruft brought out the very worst in the Wikipedian community.
Assuming good faith, all these Dartmouth students will want to write a _useful_ article for their course credit. So, let's help them do so.
Would it be worth putting together a quick welcoming page, targeted at these students (and anyone else coming along later on the same sort of project, since there will be more), which points out resources like [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]], [[Wikipedia:Requested article translations]] (hey, *I'd* offer bonus credit for a translation), [[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] &c, with some notes on the kind of thing we'd really like and the kind of thing we'd discourage?
This'd also serve as an opportunity to make links like the Help Desk clear, mention the talk pages of some users willing to assist, &c &c... thoughts?
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 8/15/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
Assuming good faith, all these Dartmouth students will want to write a _useful_ article for their course credit. So, let's help them do so.
Would it be worth putting together a quick welcoming page, targeted at these students (and anyone else coming along later on the same sort of project, since there will be more), which points out resources like [[Wikipedia:Requested articles]], [[Wikipedia:Requested article translations]] (hey, *I'd* offer bonus credit for a translation), [[Wikipedia:Most wanted articles]] &c, with some notes on the kind of thing we'd really like and the kind of thing we'd discourage?
This'd also serve as an opportunity to make links like the Help Desk clear, mention the talk pages of some users willing to assist, &c &c... thoughts?
--
- Andrew Gray
I like this; picking an appropriate topic will probably be the hardest part. Actually, [[Wikipedia:School and university projects]] has most of these links already: perhaps a /studentguide subpage or something as a welcome page directed at students participating in these projects?
-Kat [[User:Mindspillage]]
On 15/08/05, Kat Walsh mindspillage@gmail.com wrote:
I like this; picking an appropriate topic will probably be the hardest part. Actually, [[Wikipedia:School and university projects]] has most of these links already: perhaps a /studentguide subpage or something as a welcome page directed at students participating in these projects?
It's now up at [[Wikipedia:School and university projects - instructions for students]] - comments or alterations welcome.
Just a reminder, we have a page to track these types of projects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects
Please make sure to add them there, thanks!
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On 8/15/05, Daniel P. B. Smith dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote:
... the hundreds of good articles his class is about to contribute.
I put up a note about this in the Village Pump Miscellaneous section. I hope some of us will try to keep an eye on things and try to make this years' experience is more positive than last year's. Here's what I said in the Pump, minus the links:
Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to contribute an article to Wikipedia.
Last year, his students contributed about 600 articles. As he says on his user page, "Some were great and some were just quick hacks turned out to get some credit." Most of them went completely unnoticed by Wikipedians. There was nothing in particular to identify an excellent article on an unpublished work by Jane Austen as being the product of a Dartmouth class exercise.
But. Maybe ten per cent of these articles were puff pieces on subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth student life, talking about some student activity in language that would have been appropriate to a recruiting brochure, traditional games played in certain living units, and so forth. The sudden arrival of a few dozen pieces of Dartmouthcruft brought out the very worst in the Wikipedian community.
The final disposition of most of these articles was that they were cleaned up and merged into Dartmouth College, which is a much better article than it was two years ago, so even these articles were beneficial, but along the way there was a great deal of unnecessary incivility and hurt feelings.
This year, let's welcome the Dartmouth students and the hundreds of decent articles they are about to contribute.
We will probably get a few articles on topics that seem too narrow to be encyclopedic. Let's remember that redirects are cheap and that anyone can merge-and-redirect, which is a far gentler process than nomination for deletion. If we do feel a need to nominate any of them for deletion, let's really adhere to the policies of
*civility and *assume good faith and, oh yes, *Don't bite the newbies. Nobody is trying to spam us. And we have a standing invitation to professors to engage in just such projects.
Welcome back, Big Green.
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/
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