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(a)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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