RickK wrote: I phoned the instructor a couple of days ago. I am almost certain that RickK is wrong in saying that "most of [the articles created by the students] have been listed on VfD." I checked out one or two that the instructor happened to refer to indirectly, and they're fine. They're almost models of what we'd like to see on Wikipedia. Since they're a) not obviously connected to Dartmouth and b) first-rate articles, they never got listed on VfD, and I don't believe they ever will be. One purpose of the exercise is to give nonprogramming students hands-on experience in a collaborative an open-source project is like. The persona he projects in private emails and on the phone is so different from the uncooperative persona he projects in Wikipedia VfD discussions that at one point I actually wondered whether it was the same person. It is. When I commented on the apparent personality difference he said something to the effect that he'd been on USENET for years, knows a flamewar when he sees one, and was just determined to defend his students. The instructor's perception is that there is actually an anti-Dartmouth animus among WIkipedian. I would have said both were wrong, but after a recent "second wave" I am actually starting to perceive such an animus. Many Wikipedians' perception is that a group of Dartmouth students are systematically and deliberately spamming Wikipedia with a flood of Dartmouth-boosting promotional pieces. The well-written assignment directs students to all the places you'd want them to be directed, such as "What Wikipedia is not." Unfortunately they call for creating entire articles. The instructor commented that he didn't know how you could give an objective grade to "improving an article." The pieces that are starting to arouse such irritation are not all that terrible. In most cases, what seems to me to have happened is that some feature of campus life that should have been a line or a short paragraph in the Dartmouth College has become the subject of a full-page article that uses the sort of breezy, promotional language that is appropriate to a college's website, or a campus freshman resource guide. We should patiently cut 'em down, clean 'em up, and stick 'em in the Dartmouth College article and make the articles redirects. No big deal, except that people resent having to do the work. There's not even any big rush about it. Who cares if there's a page up for a month or so lauding the wonders of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center? These article all fall squarely in the "borderline" category. Get them cleaned up, but we don't need to drop everything and do it right away. Not that it matters, but the instructor personally seems to fall somewhere in between the extremes of the deletionist/inclusionist spectrum. He cited "Internet is shit" as a good example of an article that needed deletion. (And I hadn't mentioned it. He knows more about Wikipedia than I had thought). But he's uncomfortable with measuring "notability" and would set the bar lower than today's VfD community consensus would set it. I'm getting Wikistressed about all this, by the way. Here's a lovely opportunity for what should have been a positive interaction. It all has a beautiful tragic Rashomon-like quality to it. I wish people would just cool down instead of piling on. If you've dealt with too many Dartmouth articles and your patience has run out, then deal with something else and stay away from them. Come back in a month and if they're not all cleaned up by then, start cleaning them up. And I think we really need to ask whether something about VfD is actually _inducing_ the demeanor shown by User:Pcw in VfD discussions. Just for the record, so there's no misunderstanding, I think every Dartmouth article placed on VfD by RickK is royally VfD-worthy, and sparkling examples of article meriting "ruthless editing" (or what some editor called a "POVectomy"). I just happen to think that the right resolution for most of them is trim them down to 5 to 20% of their current size, merge into Dartmouth College, and redirect. Sir, as I have said, it is a small college, and yet there are those of us who are starting to see it as a PITA. But, personally, if I can't judge an article on the basis of the content of the article, rather than on the presumed organizational affiliations of the article's authors, then I don't think I should be discussing that article's deletion. -- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)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/