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Archive for material dealing with the WP Educational Program

thoughts?

I'd be rather interested in your thoughts about this. By email if preferred: no need for you to wade in to that page if you'd rather not do so. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 07:15, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

US/CAn Edu Program Working Group

DGG, annotated the membership list accordingly. I don't know how Phase II is going to play out yet, but my intent is to transfer the Working Group documents that comprised the Phase I Final Proposal over to the the Education Wiki space once it is submitted to the WMF next week. How we document and make transparent any Phase II activity is still TBD. --Mike Cline (talk) 06:33, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

wherever they should be , they never should have been in your user space. If you intend to keep they confidential, they need to be off wiki; if not, where people would naturally look for them. It gave the impression that it is your private project, or that you are trying secrecy by obscurity. DGG ( talk ) 14:53, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

A problem with homeworkers

Re arsenic, I responded to your helpful criticism on my talk page.

Here is the bigger problem: Teachers want students to write essays that would be more than waste-bin material. So Wikipedia offers that venue. But the maturity of Wiki Chem catches these teachers by surprise. There are few opportunities to dump mid-level essay work on us. At my university, we have dozens of honor students who are tasked to write wiki-like articles but they dont really have a place to upload any of that content. They dont know what to do. Their essays are ok but not good enough for Wikipedia chem, especially since the teachers themselves are often mid-level. It would be great if you or anyone can figure out a Wiki-venue for utilizing this vast resource of mid-level but highly enthusiastic talent and energy. --Smokefoot (talk) 13:20, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikiversity says they accommodate essays, or even research.

At WP we are having enough trouble trying to keep students from inserting junk or plagiarism into WP to worry about anything mid-level. Mid-level, after all, describes almost all WP articles, though the Chemistry workgroup has been one of the few with higher standards.

But looking at it more broadly, there are several basic mismatches between class essays, and WP articles. First, in a class essay, at least in the humanities, students are expected to give their own view of the materials--they are usually aimed at proving a point of some part, with an emphasis of developing personal critical ability; this is course is the opposite of what we want for an article. In one class in legal history, where I was the ambassador, the instructor, who well understood WP, solved this by having the students write a WP article, and then-- for the class only--a supplementary analysis of the issue. Second, the topics of many class essays are limited very narrowly, such as a particular theme in a particular novel, partly in order to focus the student on an amount of material they can be expected to analyse. This is too specific for a WP article. For most broad topics, we already have articles--finding the right level of specificity can be quite a problem , and requires advice from those very familiar with that area of WP. The initial education project, public policy, concentrated of developing new substantial articles, and aimed at GA status. We normally no longer advise this, unless an entire term's work of an advanced class is to be devoted to the wikipedia assignment. Rather, we advise either finding articles such as short biographies on relatively minor figures, or adding a section to an article.

Unfortunately, not everyone takes our advice; most instructors are inexperienced, but in addition most ambassadors have less than the ideal experience, and find it difficult to devote the necessary time over the period of an academic term. The inexperience of the teachers can, as you noticed, extend to more than WP--a high percentage of them have been beginning instructors; relatively few experienced teachers are eager to modify successful major class assignments.

But still, the people in these classes have more guidance than the ordinary volunteer editor. Sometimes they do worse--but that's presumably because they are not editing voluntarily, but on compulsion. Often the WP assignment is option to a conventional term paper, but they may still find themselves in for more than they expected, and such an optional assignment loses the benefit of a class working and discussing a single project. DGG ( talk ) 19:40, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

• I assume that this string is the other half of the above conversation. My view -- both issues are valid issues.

I think the treatment of the newbie was unnecessarily bitey. And over-stated, in an officious tone, what wp accepts -- of course we do in fact accept large contributions from editors, whether they be new or established (other than some system-wide limitations on article creation and the like). Otherwise, editors such as DGG and me, each with nearly 100K more edits than Smoke, would be inhibiting Smoke's edits on the basis of our greater seniority. Which, of course, would not be proper. I'm especially troubled by the officious-sounding statement as to what "we typically do," both because I don't agree with it and because it sounds like someone speaking on behalf of the community -- inaccurately.

At the same time, the points made by Smoke as to quality of work by newbies is of course correct. But we consciously don't limit editing to experts. Any effort to do so, or suggest we do so, at the community level has met with to my knowledge a negative reaction. Likewise, we should make every effort to avoid an appearance of "I'm an expert, go away." Something one runs into from time to time on the project, that is counter the very tone we wish to have, especially with newbies. I have little tolerance with vandal newbies. But to throw cold water, unnecessarily, in both tone and revert on a good-faith newbie is to act, IMHO, counter to the best interests of the Project. I say this while having concern for the correctly noted problem of newbies having contributions that at the outset are often of lower quality.

The one area where I strongly agree with the notion that non-experts have too much "say", to the detriment of the project, is in the interpretation of the law of copyright. Non-lawyer-editors seem to think that it doesn't require a law degree to opine on legal issues of copyright as applied to wp articles, and as might be expected the result at the project IMHO is often the same as if we had wikipedians who were not appropriately qualified performing surgery or acting as architects.--Epeefleche (talk) 21:36, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

the most important contribution non-lawyer WPedians can make on copyright is asking the experts enough questions to make sure that everything is stated clearly, and that the areas of doubt and uncertainty do not pass for settled law. And in any case the usual problems are not the actual law, but the degree to which our policies should be strict beyond the requirements of law. Anyone's view is equal in that. DGG ( talk ) 22:53, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Actually, my experience is that the problems in that area have been laymen either not knowing or not understanding the law (not that one would expect them to), but happily opining (incorrectly) ne'ertheless. A gleeful "I'm not surgeon, but this is wikipedia -- pass the scalpel" attitude.--Epeefleche (talk) 23:09, 9 April 2013 (UTC)