[WikiEN-l] Re: Dartmouth class project now on VFD

Tue Aug 24 23:25:12 UTC 2004

As someone who has used WP in teaching before, I must say the wording
of the assignment is quite terse, and likely inadequate. It's not
clear what the goal is - article writing, learning markup, interaction
with Wikipedians, learning NPOV, etc. An assignment which is too open
ended or too loosely defined results in exactly what we see - a
selection of articles (sadly) consistent with stereotypes of Dartmouth
such as beer pong, ski team, fraternities. No wonder folks early on
felt it was troll bait. :)

In the future, a better option would be to put up constraints or
"bumper guards", such as pointing to existing WP lists as a starting
point. Suggestions include:

[[Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs]]
[[Wikipedia:Most_wanted_articles]]
[[Special:Shortpages]]

Or, tell students to link in at least "N" number of articles in:
[[Wikipedia:Orphaned_Articles]]

I've started a new section with these in
[[Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects#Considerations_and_suggestions]]

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
University of Hong Kong

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 22:44:59 +0000, Duncan Harris
<dunc_harris at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I've gone through most of these article, cross referencing all those on vfd.
>   Some are pretty good, only needing minor sweeps, but for every good
> article, there's atleast one bad one.  The pcw has a responsibility to
> provide us with a list of articles worked on.  He can accept what twaddle he
> likes for his assignment, but yes this does reflect badly on him and the
> university (especially with one idiot trying to defend the reserve football
> team by impersonating RickK).  I think people sweeping this rubbish should
> give themselves a round of applaus. pcw should be warned not to attempt this
> again in a similar form unless he changes the wording of his assignment, as
> it may constitute organised vandalism.
> 
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-- 
Andrew Lih
andrew.lih at gmail.com