MPauker

Hello, MPauker, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

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MPauker, good luck, and have fun. PamD 11:54, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

PamD 11:54, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

Hints for students

Hallo Monica (and @Shalor (Wiki Ed):), I've come across one of the articles a student on your course has been editing, and looked at another too, and have a few comments which might be worth sharing with the whole class. I notice that you aren't an experienced Wikipedia editor yourself, so it's obviously quite challenging trying to help the students to edit - I hope you and they have worked through all the excellent teaching material made available online, linked from Wikipedia:Student assignments (see Wikipedia:Training/For students and https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/instructors).

Some points:

• Be careful. Type accurately. Check your spellings. Do the rest of us, and the readers, the courtesy of remembering that this is a grown-up international encyclopedia, not just a school lab project. If someone writes for a magazine called "Geist", don't spell it as "Giest". Don't use contractions like "don't" (OK on talk pages, not in an encyclopedia).
• Be careful when copying ideas for formatting etc from another article. Format, fine: content, strip it out - it may be inaccurate, it may be copyright violation. I've just removed a series of completely fake postnominal letters, copied accidentally from the infobox for a more celebrated person. I also removed claims that a magazine article had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, similar sort of problem of careless copying.
• Be concise and relevant. I understand that your students' assignment includes a word count to aim for, which is probably a Bad Idea: it would encourage bloated prose, irrelevant content, and stretched use of references. Quality matters above quantity.
• Link appropriate items. If someone has written in a literary journal for which we have an article, link it - it makes their notability clearer. If they have worked with an organisation for which we have an article, ditto. Linking is the essence of Wikipedia.
• Don't assume that you know better than long-established editors. One of your students removed the lead of an article which began in standard style as "Xyz (born nnnn) is a (nationality) (occupation)" and replaced it with something on the lines of "Born in nnnn in (country), Xyz came into the world at a time when ...": we didn't get to see their occupation, their claim to notability, till the 3rd paragraph. The opening sentence must summarise their claim to notability, and is hugely important as it's what's seen in search results, etc. If your students don't understand basics like this, and haven't looked at Wikipedia enough to pick up the standard style, they shouldn't be editing here.
• If you link something and the link is red, think about it. Search. Perhaps you've got the name subtly wrong (It's not "xxx Book Award" but "City of xxx Book Award", or the article title is singular and you're linking the plural). There's nothing the matter with having red links in an article, but if it seems to be a topic on which you'd expect there to be an article, check carefully.
• In a reference, "publisher" means publisher and "title" means title of the article; some of your students' refs are a bit strange. Remind them that their references should be as high quality as those they would include in a written paper (assuming that you do indeed demand a reasonable academic standard from them).

Oh I think that's enough for now, but I've had an exasperating morning finding more and more which is awful in an article I'm trying to defend at AfD. I don't know whether I can trust anything the student has added to the article, their editing practice has been so sloppy. Please encourage your students to take their editing very seriously, to check everything, and to treat the encyclopedia with respect. It's great that students are being encouraged to edit, and to redress the male/female balance, but they've got to be adding quality content, not the sort of stuff I've been looking at today. Good luck to you all. PamD 12:15, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

• Thanks PamD! These are some great pointers - and thank you for helping with the Gillian Jerome article! With the "Born in...." article, which one was that? Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:52, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

@Shalor (Wiki Ed): It was Gohar Dashti. 06:40, 6 April 2018 (UTC)