... 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article on an unpublished work by Jane Austen as being the product of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(a)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/