Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 March 1

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March 1

When did Wikipedia get talk pages for their articles?

These edits from 2001[1][2] show editors discussing an article in the article itself. Did Wikipedia not have article talk pages back then? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 19:18, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

No, we originally used manually created subpages. You added /Talk to the article and created an Article/Talk subpage for the discussion. Sometimes people tried to split the discussion by also adding a /Discussion page or whatever as a second subpage! Rmhermen (talk) 19:31, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

The legacy of which is that talk pages are called .. well, Talk pages, that is, their actual title is "Talk:<article name>", yet to get to such a "Talk" page you click on a tag called "Discussion". -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 20:04, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

An etymological mixed metaphor, I expect: "talk" would likely be from Anglo-Saxon, "discussion" would likely be from Latin via French. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:19, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Are there no references anywhere for what Wikipedia was like in the early days? That's something I'd love to read... Vimescarrot (talk) 21:34, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Did some Googling, and...ewww! [3]! Vimescarrot (talk) 21:38, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Hey, that looks familiar. Guess I must have been there :-) 93.97.184.230 (talk) 19:35, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I was going to make a hilarious joke about how Israeli–Palestinian conflict probably didn't even need to be semi-protected at that point; and then I looked at Israeli–Palestinian conflict just now, only to find: It's not protected at all! Good for Wikipedia. Comet Tuttle (talk) 21:49, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 22:36, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I just checked the date on the first linked edit - Wikipedia was only 8 days old at the time. There wasn't a lot of procedures and rules back then! Rmhermen (talk) 23:56, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Still in nascent stages but I started "Wikipedia:Time machine" some time ago. About half the links on the page point at the versions of the pages as they existed as of April 28, 2002.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 00:56, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

The earliest versions of Wikipedia ran on Hollerith cards. It could get a little tedious. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:01, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Hollerith cards? You were lucky to have Hollerith cards! We had to make paper tape out of wet seaweed! DJ Clayworth (talk) 14:20, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Seaweed would have been a luxury for us. We were so poor we had to run Unix on an Abacus with rusty wires and one bead. No I tell a lie, we couldn't afford a bead. Or wires. But we were happy. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:42, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

The earliest surviving version of Wikipedia Announcements [4] has part of the explanation for the move away from subpage in article space (while being full of links to non-article subpages including /Talk) Rmhermen (talk) 13:58, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

In the very earliest days, discussion did take place on articles, but editors were already being asked to use /Talk subpages by early March 2001. Warofdreams talk 16:25, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Paper US dollars in cents

Can you tell me if there was ever paper US dollars printed for value of 10 cents? My friend found a bill like this in her attic in her grandfathers wallet and we would like to know if it is real or not? Reesie123 (talk) 21:09, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Yes, such bills were printed in the 19th century. See Fractional currency, and also Shinplaster. If it doesn't look like the one in the first article, does it have the name of a bank on it? --Anonymous, 21:30 UTC, March 1, 2010.

Before that, also. Though most of them proved to be "not worth a Continental". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:59, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

People who write essays for money

There are loads of "buy your term paper" websites out there, and I'm just wondering where they find their staff? By kidnapping PhD students and getting them hooked on smack? Or do they just take your money, send out a page or two of word salad, and do a runner? 89.195.94.188 (talk) 22:45, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Our article R2C2 is about a firm which runs several of these web sites, and which is being attacked via copyright infringement claims. The article claims the practice of selling the term papers is illegal in 17 U.S. states. Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:56, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I see, so they are taking essays that already exist and reworking them just enough to pass through a copy detection program. Thanks, though I'm disappointed. I did hope there was some kind of secret society of geniuses dedicated to saving college slackers (for a suitable fee ;-)) 89.195.94.188 (talk) 23:15, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I recently came across a listing for a term paper writer on Craigslist. It was a piecework payment offer. Woogee (talk) 23:35, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

There are ads for this kind of thing posted all over university campuses (well, mine anyway). Sometimes it's a company, but it usually seems to be grad students looking to make some extra money writing for undergrads. I had a friend who did this for awhile. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:39, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Do you know if your friend earned a decent hourly rate doing that, and if he got in trouble at all? 89.195.71.84 (talk) 13:14, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

He didn't get in trouble but it wasn't financially worthwhile. Whether the students got in trouble for submitting something that obviously wasn't their own work, I don't know...it seems to me that this would be the biggest problem. From my limited teaching experience it is pretty easy to tell when that happens. Adam Bishop (talk) 14:59, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

There are two types of things here. One is where you buy "pre-written" essays (e.g. essays that other students wrote for their own classes). The other is where you pay someone to write them for you from scratch. The latter necessarily will cost a lot more—you are paying someone to do significant work for you—than the former, where the work has already been done. There was an article about this... somewhere. Maybe in the New York Times, a year or two ago? I can't find it on a quick search, but I definitely read something on this. Note that for a graduate student in a given discipline, writing a passing undergraduate term paper is not very hard. They write a lot of papers over the course of their graduate career (assuming we are talking about humanities here), they grade a lot of these kinds of papers too, and thus they know the genre and expectations for undergraduate work quite well. (Indeed, a large part of graduate study is just learning the particular genre of the field—what the "right" type of question to ask is, how to answer it correctly, how to structure the paper so the logic goes in the expected order, etc.) Writing a solid 5-15 page essay is not a big deal for an English or History Ph.D. candidate and can be done over the course of a day or so.

I agree that as a teacher these things are not too hard to spot. When student essay quality goes from "barely paying attention" to "clever and articulate" in one fell swoop, you know something is up (unless the student has met with you, shown signs of new interest/improvement, etc.). Unfortunately this is basically impossible to prove, and so plagiarism accusations are going to be basically nil (unlike, say, copying things off of the internet or out of library books, which is increasingly easy to diagnose thanks to Google). Even in cases where such things are egregious (I know of one student who went from being totally incomprehensible to being able to tell witty jokes in their analysis of a complex subject in one paper), they get passed on by, at worse with a somewhat diminished grade. (As compared to the dummies who copy off the internet and get kicked out of school.) --Mr.98 (talk) 19:02, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Sure, one might have to consider that a very sharp student is putting forth minimal effort, and then concentrates on their final paper so that they get a passing grade. That might appear to be someone else writing the paper, but there should be signs of that. Googlemeister (talk) 22:01, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

In my experience, if you have read a few papers by a given student, you can usually tell when they make a quantum leap that is unusual, to say the least. It might be for legitimate reasons—they started early, got tons of input from writing tutors, etc.—or it might be for illegitimate reasons. Either way, if you can't prove the illegitimate reasons, you can't make the accusation. (Universities are afraid of being sued, etc.) You can always find ways to dock points on any essay (hooray for subjectivity and impossible standards), so if it is something where there is clearly something shady going on, you can give them less than an A, but that's about it. Even then you probably don't want to go too far. In the one case I know of, a heavily disabled student had what I would consider to be egregious help from a tutor, who basically wrote the essay as an "interpretation" of the things the student said to them. (Obviously students suffering physical disability are welcome to help... but in this particular case, the tutor was clearly involved in basically writing the entire thing themselves, including improving vastly on the student's reasoning abilities.) Even with that admission on the books (from the tutor), it was too much of a hot issue to do much with. Student got a passing but not stellar grade on the paper. Life goes on, nobody dies, the standards of the academy get a tiny bit smaller, the kid learns the wrong lesson, etc., etc. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:32, 3 March 2010 (UTC)