[WikiEN-l] Welcoming Peter C. Wayner and...

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

... the hundreds of good articles his class is about to contribute.

I put up a note about this in the Village Pump Miscellaneous section.  
I hope some of us will try to keep an eye on things and try to make  
this years' experience is more positive than last year's. Here's what  
I said in the Pump, minus the links:



Peter C. Wayner (who wrote some books on cryptography and one on the  
free software movement) is again giving a course on computer science  
for non computer-science majors. One of the assignments is to  
contribute an article to Wikipedia.

Last year, his students contributed about 600 articles. As he says on  
his user page, "Some were great and some were just quick hacks turned  
out to get some credit." Most of them went completely unnoticed by  
Wikipedians. There was nothing in particular to identify an excellent  
article on an unpublished work by Jane Austen as being the product of  
a Dartmouth class exercise.

But. Maybe ten per cent of these articles were puff pieces on  
subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth student life, talking about some  
student activity in language that would have been appropriate to a  
recruiting brochure, traditional games played in certain living  
units, and so forth. The sudden arrival of a few dozen pieces of  
Dartmouthcruft brought out the very worst in the Wikipedian community.

The final disposition of most of these articles was that they were  
cleaned up and merged into Dartmouth College, which is a much better  
article than it was two years ago, so even these articles were  
beneficial, but along the way there was a great deal of unnecessary  
incivility and hurt feelings.

This year, let's welcome the Dartmouth students and the hundreds of  
decent articles they are about to contribute.

We will probably get a few articles on topics that seem too narrow to  
be encyclopedic. Let's remember that redirects are cheap and that  
anyone can merge-and-redirect, which is a far gentler process than  
nomination for deletion. If we do feel a need to nominate any of them  
for deletion, let's really adhere to the policies of

*civility and
*assume good faith and, oh yes,
*Don't bite the newbies.
Nobody is trying to spam us. And we have a standing invitation to  
professors to engage in just such projects.

Welcome back, Big Green.


--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/