I've gone through most of these article, cross referencing all those on vfd. Some are pretty good, only needing minor sweeps, but for every good article, there's atleast one bad one. The pcw has a responsibility to provide us with a list of articles worked on. He can accept what twaddle he likes for his assignment, but yes this does reflect badly on him and the university (especially with one idiot trying to defend the reserve football team by impersonating RickK). I think people sweeping this rubbish should give themselves a round of applaus. pcw should be warned not to attempt this again in a similar form unless he changes the wording of his assignment, as it may constitute organised vandalism.
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As someone who has used WP in teaching before, I must say the wording of the assignment is quite terse, and likely inadequate. It's not clear what the goal is - article writing, learning markup, interaction with Wikipedians, learning NPOV, etc. An assignment which is too open ended or too loosely defined results in exactly what we see - a selection of articles (sadly) consistent with stereotypes of Dartmouth such as beer pong, ski team, fraternities. No wonder folks early on felt it was troll bait. :)
In the future, a better option would be to put up constraints or "bumper guards", such as pointing to existing WP lists as a starting point. Suggestions include:
[[Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs]] [[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]] [[Special:Shortpages]]
Or, tell students to link in at least "N" number of articles in: [[Wikipedia:Orphaned_Articles]]
I've started a new section with these in [[Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects#Considerations_and_suggestions]]
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado) University of Hong Kong
On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:44:59 +0000, Duncan Harris dunc_harris@hotmail.com wrote:
I've gone through most of these article, cross referencing all those on vfd. Some are pretty good, only needing minor sweeps, but for every good article, there's atleast one bad one. The pcw has a responsibility to provide us with a list of articles worked on. He can accept what twaddle he likes for his assignment, but yes this does reflect badly on him and the university (especially with one idiot trying to defend the reserve football team by impersonating RickK). I think people sweeping this rubbish should give themselves a round of applaus. pcw should be warned not to attempt this again in a similar form unless he changes the wording of his assignment, as it may constitute organised vandalism.
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On Wed, 25 Aug 2004 07:25:12 +0800, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
As someone who has used WP in teaching before, I must say the wording of the assignment is quite terse, and likely inadequate. It's not clear what the goal is - article writing, learning markup, interaction with Wikipedians, learning NPOV, etc. An assignment which is too open ended or too loosely defined results in exactly what we see - a selection of articles (sadly) consistent with stereotypes of Dartmouth such as beer pong, ski team, fraternities. No wonder folks early on felt it was troll bait. :)
As a recent college grad, I can confirm that neither beer pong, ski teams, nor fraternities are unique to Dartmouth :).
In the future, a better option would be to put up constraints or "bumper guards", such as pointing to existing WP lists as a starting point. Suggestions include:
[[Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs]] [[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]] [[Special:Shortpages]]
Or, tell students to link in at least "N" number of articles in: [[Wikipedia:Orphaned_Articles]]
I've started a new section with these in [[Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects#Considerations_and_suggestions]]
Good thought. The vast majority of student work is positive contributions; some of your students, I've noticed, have problems with copyright, which may be cultural, or simple carelessness - but they added original content. An assignment to "create two articles" _will_ lead to things like articles on drinking games, if only because students can't think of subjects we don't cover.
Nathan/Pakaran
Duncan Harris wrote:
I've gone through most of these article, cross referencing all those on vfd. Some are pretty good, only needing minor sweeps, but for every good article, there's atleast one bad one. The pcw has a responsibility to provide us with a list of articles worked on. He can accept what twaddle he likes for his assignment, but yes this does reflect badly on him and the university (especially with one idiot trying to defend the reserve football team by impersonating RickK). I think people sweeping this rubbish should give themselves a round of applaus. pcw should be warned not to attempt this again in a similar form unless he changes the wording of his assignment, as it may constitute organised vandalism.
The proper term for this kind of response is "arrogance".
Why does he have any more responsibility to provide such a list than anyone else?. Everyone on this project has the right to anonymity, and you are promoting a breach of that privacy. I think the type of exercise offerred by this prof was commendable, and more of it should be encouraged. Some of the articles may appear sophomoric and local, but if people like you were not putting on such superior airs more might be encouraged to produce better material.
I know nothing about Dartmouth, but I did go to the article, [[Dartmouth Film Society]], and found it perfectly acceptable. A society that has been active since 1947 is certainly worthy of mention. I then looked at a sample of other items that you had recommended for deletion, and they certainly seemed worthy of articles. The various articles about high schools were talked about and generally found acceptable more than a year ago.
Pcw appears to have acted in good faith; that's not vandalism. If there's any vandalism being practised it's by those individuals who maintain a pogrom against anything that does not fit into their narrow little worlds.
Ec