Andrew Gray wrote:
On 26/01/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/25/07, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
The problem is that complaints about school articles generate a steady flow to OTRS, which is picked up by Foundation volunteers. Then, the decisions of these volunteers are challenged.
There needs to be more visibility into these problems by the community at large.
What can we really do to contact the nebulous "community", though? David and I and others have been bitching and moaning about this at the slightest provocation for six months, but the project is big and you can only chat to so many people. Short of putting out quarterly Signpost announcements saying "The following seven areas of coverage are the ones that piss our readers off the most. Please make them less crap, we'd all live happier lives", I'm not sure we can easily do much about it.
The quarterly notices sound like a good idea, especially if they are well publicized.
Can you describe in more detail what types of complaints?
Surprisingly often, these are explicit allegations of illegal activity
- "The headmaster is a convicted paedo" and the like - or lots and
lots of junk personally-identifiable vandalism - "Mickey Smith is ---".
Getting rid of this stuff is a no-brainer.
A common but less worrying issue is a simple lack of context and scale
- many of these articles are seized by one enterprising student or
another to write about the school as they see it; these usually aren't *so* bad, but they tend to have a very blurred line as to what is and isn't appropriate material, which then leads into articles that the school is understandably annoyed by the existence of simply because, well, they're linked with this amateurish, hit-and-miss, erratically accurate and conceptually blinkered article. (These are often the hardest to deal with, in many ways)
A complaint about this from school administrators should be viewed as an opportunity, or what many educators would call a "teachable moment". A principal could refer the problem to a trusted student, or make the article and all its deficiencies an opportunity for a class discussion or other project.
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