On 30/10/2007, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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_art… 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. - d.

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(a)telus.net> wrote: -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.

Ray Saintonge wrote: 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

On 10/30/07, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil(a)wikinewsie.org> wrote: And this, a more substantial piece: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/29/wikipedia -Sage