Wikipedia talk:Student assignments/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

New case about sandbox edits

Please see:

1. The second external link, that I recently added to this page.
2. WT:MED#Super-spreader student problem
3. Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 13#How to encourage newish editors to make small edits

I wonder if, here, we should strengthen what the page says about the problems of suddenly moving student assignments from a sandbox to the mainspace. Thoughts? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:44, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Questionable articles

I have been reading a lot of neuroscience articles from beginning to end recently, and can immediately pick out the ones that were written as assignments, especially when reaching the mid-body of the article and towards the end, where it reads like obvious sophomoric crap written by somebody with a basic understanding of the subject. They have awkward, essay-like formatting which looks and reads unencyclopedic, and have other aberrations, like awkwardly placed, unnecessary quotations and poor referencing. Even in the case of ones that were "rated" well on the talk pages. This is even obvious for subjects that I know little about. I suppose further down the article are the areas that haven't been sufficiently seen by later editors, who give up after the first few sections. Is there anything that can be done about this? Is this part of the project really worthwhile?

142.25.33.105 (talk) 06:55, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

In addition to my interest in student editing, I'm also very involved in neuroscience editing, and unfortunately, I see this problem too, and sometimes it's just too much to fix everything that a class does. There are two actions that are available to you (particularly because this talk page isn't really monitored with respect to specific student problems). One is to post at WP:Education noticeboard, where alerts about problems with student edits are responded to promptly. The other is to post at WT:WikiProject Neuroscience, which is monitored by editors interested in that subject area. (I'll post a link there to this discussion here.) In either case, it is essential that you name and link to the specific pages where you have found the problem. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:31, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

The basic problem is that when professors give "Wikipedia" assignments, their goal is to give the students an educational experience, and they don't really care very much about the impact on Wikipedia or its readers. After struggling with this stuff for a while, I eventually gave up and just started ignoring those articles (as long as they stay away for the really important, widely read articles). Looie496 (talk) 22:46, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

If you have specific articles you've come across, Tryptofish is right, the education noticeboard or the Neuroscience noticeboard are good places to post. You can also see from any student's userpage which course they're affiliated with. Try leaving them a message there or leaving a message for the content expert and we'll look into it. Adam (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:32, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Come off it! This is a perennial problem in a range of subjects - ask User:SandyGeorgia. You can't post to the course pages, as these are transcluded from some other edu-only wiki. Neither the students nor professors ever read talk pages. You just have to wait until the course is finished & then revert completely, or rewrite/restore as possible. WT:WikiProject Neuroscience is a dead zone in my experience. Johnbod (talk) 04:06, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

If I may offer a word from the land of the dead, it's really not like that at WT:NEURO. Rather, it just gets really old really fast when being faced with lousy student edits. It's fatigue, but reports of death are, as they say, premature. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:37, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Hi Johnbod, while it's true that the instructors and students may not be monitoring their Talk pages very closely, if the course is registered with Wiki Ed, they'll have either Adam or User:Ian (Wiki Ed) get in touch with them to let them know about what's posted there, or handle it directly. Staff also monitors the Education noticeboard. If you flag a particular problem to either Adam or Ian, or the ENB, we can usually take care of it pretty quickly. --Eryk (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:04, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Johnbod - please ping me. I'll always do what I can. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:17, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, Johnbod, but most folks know I can no longer stomach editing Wikipedia because of what THIS program did to medical content and the negative impact IT had on US. I log in as unoften as possible. Best to my friends, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:20, 7 March 2016 (UTC)