[Wikipedia-l] school articles : enough

[Ray Saintonge]

Andrew Gray wrote:

>On 26/01/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>On 1/25/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at 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.

Ec