KSDark

Hi KSDark,

I noticed that you are the instructor for Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Cal State San Marcos/Sociology of Education (Spring). Could you please make a few basics clear to your students?

• Capitalization of titles: not Teen Parents and Education but Teen parents and education, not Migrant Students Educational Difficulties but Migrant students educational difficulties (or perhaps better Educational difficulties for migrant students

• Globalization: e.g. Migrant Students Educational Difficulties should be about the difficulties globally, not just in the US; alternatively, the the title could be amended with "in the US" or something similar.

• Do we even need these articles? Take e.g. Nurses in K-12, is this topic notable enough to have a separate article from School nursing?

• Why we need elective courses in Education or other similar articles will never be acceptable for Wikipedia. We describe things (Elective courses in education, we don't advocate for or against them.

I don't know whether the students have chosen their own titles or whether they have been given assignments (or were allowed to pick from a list), but some scrutiny of the titles and subjects before any work is being done on them could prevent a lot of frustration and useless extra work. Fram (talk) 07:56, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Articles

Hi! I came to say some of the same things. I posted an explanation for some of the concern at a student's page here, over the page Why we need elective courses in education. It's a bit lengthy, but does go over the major concerns. I'll try to sum them a little here since they seem to be representative of some of the other pages.

The main problems are/were (since the article is still existent) as follows:

1. The article was written as a personal essay, which is a different format than an encyclopedia article. This is actually a pretty common issue with students since the two seem like they'd be similar, but actually have some major differences.
2. It contained personal opinions, which falls under original research to an extent. This is part of the first, but is important enough that I wanted to emphasize it a little more.
3. The sourcing needed work, since one of the sources was to a blog posted by an e-commerce site that sold online test prep assistance, which makes it a non-neutral and problematic source for Wikipedia's purposes.
4. Aside from the tone, the article is a little too specific for an encyclopedia. I've recommended that the student look into expanding the article on Course (education), which includes material on electives. It's possible that electives could merit its own page, but at this point it'd be best to try improving the existent article.

Aside from that, here's what I can recommend: I think that it might be a good idea if the students were to use their userspace or the draftspace to create articles. The reason for this is that while the articles wouldn't be live, they would have more opportunity to edit and improve the articles before moving live. There are a few different ways to do this: the first is to create an article at a target name like User:KSDark/(topic page name). This is called editing in the WP:USERSPACE and after they're done they can make it live by moving it to the mainspace. Another option would be to use the articles for creation process. This takes a little while since it requires that another, uninvolved editor examine the page before it's accepted. This can be helpful if you have an article that you're unsure about.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask for help from myself or any of the people at the education WikiProject. You can always grab a specific user's attention by posting {{ping|Tokyogirl79}} on your talk page or the applicable article talk page (my name is inserted as an example). Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 09:42, 16 March 2016 (UTC)