[WikiEN-l] The Dartmouth College incident

[wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com]

> >On 8/13/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> A couple years ago a professor at Dartmouth had his students put 
> articles on Wikipedia as part of a class project.  These kids promprtly 
> fell into the notability meat grinder.  While it would obviously benefit 
> Wikipedia to generate articles from that list, I don't think that that 
> many of these kids are ready for some of the abuse that's so frequently 
> doled out.  Such abuse does nothing to encourage co-operative work among 
> people who might never edit Wikipedia anyway.

That is emphatically not what happened. The professor was Peter C. Wayner, by the way...

What happened is that the class instructions specifically told students to stay "within the definition" and gave a link to WP:NOT. Approximately FOUR HUNDRED articles were submitted. Most of them had no obvious connections with Dartmouth College and passed more or less unnoticed. 

One example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beautifull_Cassandra , an article about a piece of juvenalia by Jane Austen. You'll notice it was never nominated for deletion.

Despite being told to read WP:NOT, perhaps forty articles were submitted dealing with fairly subtrivial aspects of Dartmouth life, such as entire articles on one relatively less notable a capella singing group, drinking games specific to one particular Dartmouth fraternity, etc. Many of these articles were written in breezy, promotional language. 

Indeed, there was bad behavior on the Wikipedian side. One notably brusque admin famous for nominating many articles for deletion made snide remarks in many of the nominations, and by the time uncivil AfD-ers had gone through half a dozen of them, many people started using dismissive language. If I recall correctly an article on something about DartMOOR in England got some comment about "they're at it again." Very unpleasant. But only about 10% of the students fell into the "meat grinder," and fewer would have if they had followed the professor's directions.

Of the subtrivial articles, many of them were de-breezed and boiled down and merged into the Dartmouth College article.

Far from being discouraged, Wayner repeated the exercise the following summer. There was a little more preparation at both the Dartmouth and Wikipedia ends and there were no problems.