Wikipedia talk:Wiki Ed/University of North Carolina School of the Arts/History of Musical Styles I and II (Fall 2015, Spring 2016)

Re.

DO NOT EDIT THIS PAGE!

It looks like you're trying to edit a course page here on Wikipedia. Be aware that any changes you make here will eventually be replaced by the official course page at dashboard.wikiedu.org. If you want to make permanent changes, please make them there.

Really? This is not how Wikipedia works, not on any level. I'm going to edit the page with my suggestions, please adapt, or find another project for your school assignements. --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:05, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Article titles

Most of the suggested article titles are less than suboptimal. For the teachers managing this project: please see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (music), particularly its section on classical music articles. Tx! --Francis Schonken (talk) 06:28, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Further suggestions

The material below is a copy of my comments at Dr. Mueller's talk page here (8 December 2015).

I just wanted to make a few suggestions re your class assignment this semester. Much of the students' work has been very good indeed. However, there have been a few problems.

• Creating articles on topics which already exist rather than expanding the pre-existing article
  • Prelude in C Minor (BWV 999) duplicated Prelude in C minor, BWV 999 (now merged and redirected)
  • Circe, an opera by Desmarets duplicated Circé (Desmarets) (now merged and redirected)
  • Aure soavi e lieti duplicated Aure soavi e lieti (Handel) (now merged and redirected)
  • Bach Prelude and Fugue No. 16 may duplicate the topic of Prelude and Fugue in C major, BWV 846 (this one still needs to be sorted out and I'm going to ask the members of WikiProject Classical Music for help.

Duplicate articles like these require a lot of work from other editors to carefully merge the material into the existing article, redirect the duplicate, and add the necessary attribution templates. I'm not sure if this is because the students didn't know how to paste their work into the existing article and created a new article instead, or if they were completely unaware of the existing article. If it's the latter, before they start their drafts, they need to do a thorough search on Wikipedia (using the search box and relevant Category pages) to find out if their topic already has an article, albeit with a slightly different name.

• Overwriting existing articles

The students need to take care that when expanding an existing article, they do not simply do a blanket overwrite. They need to integrate their work carefully and preferably gradually. Quite a few of the overwrite articles resulted in the loss of valuable information, references, templates, categories, and formatting, all of which had to be restored by other editors. Sometimes they simply replaced the existing text with their own version of it which unfortunately was not an improvement—introducing grammar errors, confusing phrasing, misspellings, unencyclopedic style, etc.

• Adding inappropriate external links

I suggest pointing your students to the guidelines at Wikipedia:External links. YouTube videos are very problematic as many of them are copyright violations and will be removed from the article. The only acceptable ones are those on the official YouTube channels of the recording companies or the artists involved.

• Using inappropriate references

Related to the above, YouTube videos are not a reference and should not be used as such. Ditto links to Amazon and other commercial retailers. If the students wish to discuss a recording in depth, i.e. at least listing the artists, record company, ensemble, conductor and date, then they should reference it to a published review in the mainstream press, music journals, or books (not blogs or self-published websites) and/or minimally provide the OCLC number. If they just want to link to to a YouTube recording of a work (providing it is copyright compliant), then it belongs in an External links section, not the body of the article. Likewise, Wikipedia articles can never be used as references. The students should all become familiar with the guidelines and policies at Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources.

In future, you might also want to direct your students to the WikiProjects related to their topics. WikiProject Classical Music, WikiProject Opera, and WikiProject Composers all have very useful and valuable guides on how to title, write, reference, and format articles in those areas. This can save all your students a lot of valuable time trying to reinvent the wheel, especially for those creating completely new articles.

Voceditenore (talk) 08:04, 20 May 2016 (UTC)