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.

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 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 There was nothing in particular to identify an excellent article on an unpublished work by Jane Austen as being the product of a Dartmouth class exercise.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/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l