We also need to emphasize transparency on the talk pages, so we know whom to contact. Some of the teachers involved have reported considerable difficulty in finding encyclopedic topics, and anyone with experience at WP could surely help them there. There's a tendency to try for traditional term paper topics, which can often end up as OR, when things like bios of people involved in whatever the course topic is can be more suitable. And of course everyone involved must realise there is no way of preventing others from editing during the term. But if they pick out-of-the-way people, this shouldn't be a real difficulty. It also appears to my continuing dismay --but certainly not surprise ---as a librarian, that many of the teachers involved haven't the least idea of how to do references, or sometimes even the need for it. I say "teachers"--for it is not the fault of their students.
On 10/30/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 30/10/2007, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
From what I've seen surveying the various classroom projects people have tried, the most successful are ones where some effort is made to screen topics for encyclopedicity and gaps in Wikipedia's coverage, and/or the assignments are focused on interacting with the Wikipedia community (i.e., content is posted early and students follow the fate of their work over the semester).
Yes. Rather than just telling the students "go write something", send them to a wikiproject's list of redlinks, or to the missing articles project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Missing_encyclopedic_arti...
With university research facilities onhand, writing some decent articles with good references shouldn't be much work at all. We'll get more good content and they'll get a good introductory experience to Wikipedia.
Indeed, and this sort of thing should be encouraged, and we need to accept that some contributions will be dogs. Nevertheless, the social graces of some of the people who review these contributions leave much to be desired. They do little to help these people to improve their contributions.
There was a time when the primary outside criticism of Wikipedia had to do with the accuracy of contents. I seem to encounter more these days about the social environment. It would be great if more Wikipedians understood the implications of that.
Ec
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