[WikiEN-l] Welcoming Peter C. Wayner and...

Mon Aug 15 16:31:38 UTC 2005

Just a reminder, we have a page to track these types of projects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects

Please make sure to add them there, thanks!

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 8/15/05, Daniel P. B. Smith <dpbsmith at verizon.net> wrote:
> ... 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 article on an unpublished work by Jane Austen as being the product of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 at 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 at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>