[Foundation-l] Term papers on Wikipedia

[Delirium]

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