Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
Hmm, what sorts of articles are students writing that leads to that sort of argumentation? I write lots of missing articles and rarely really run into *anybody* commenting, positively or negatively---I have some articles I wrote 2-3 years ago that have no talk-page comments, and no edits besides rewording and category shuffling. It seems that writing few paragraphs with a few references on a random subject that is usually relatively obscure (or it would've had an article already) doesn't raise many eyebrows.
Are these getting more criticism because the editors explicitly identify themselves as doing a term project (so people give the contributions extra scrutiny), or are they trying to write contentious articles like major overviews instead of more narrow stuff? If it's the latter, we might want to guide people away from that---if you want to start writing about, say, philosophy on Wikipedia, the easiest path IMO is to start with a narrow, well-defined topic, or biography of a relatively minor figure, in order to get an idea of how the process works. Starting with The One True Overview of some broad area of the subject as a first article is much more likely to run into trouble.
-Mark