SarahReckhow

Quinton Lucas in your course

Hi there! I am such a fan of the WikiEducation setup and I thank you for your work. I think college students are a good source of potential editors, and I already want a bunch of college students as encyclopedic researchers, even if they aren't editing, even for myself as a volunteer editor doing all the editing. It is good for society to have the exposure of comprehending Wikipedia and the nature of an encyclopedia, even if they have no ongoing interest in editing it.

Anyway, I found you via some student activity on Quinton Lucas. I live in KC and I'm interested in the subject. My goodness, politics is a hard subject so I rarely touch it, and encyclopedic writing is hard enough. So they really bit a chunk. :) This stuff is hard, and I was just wishing for the last two years that I had somebody to help.

I read your excellent course guidelines PDF, which every Wikipedian should be forced to read and complete before even trying to edit. It's most impressive and I think I should refer everyone to it from now on. I was relieved to see that my reversion of your students' edits will not affect their grade. For a project that's due today, and the edits having been submitted only yesterday and a few days prior with no other interactions, it seems that the community review step of the process has been skipped. A bunch of unencyclopedic stuff got dumped on the article with no volunteers to fix it.

All three of your students editing that article recently have made all the same foundational errors, beyond fixing as I see it. In the page history, you see my edit summaries saying that it just couldn't work because they're basically just giving a long and detailed summary of the mayor's own press releases and essays, mostly citing just those self-published and autobiographical sources (WP:SPS), about totally generic and inevitable ideas and current events that happened in every city of the world (WP:NOTNEWS, or "Wikipedia is not a newspaper"). That significantly includes the mayor's thoughts, hopes, and plans, that haven't happened yet or may never happen (WP:CRYSTALBALL WP:NOTBLOG). They wrote all of it in an informal and unencyclopedic tone that's pushing the subject's agenda as if it is inherently true and correct and simple, sometimes WP:OR, with no comprehensive coverage of extremely controversial things like covid mask policies. That kind of content must be precisely thoughtful and unique, and selected (WP:NPOVT). We can cite self-published primary sources (WP:SPS WP:PRIMARY) which have no editorial oversight, like the mayor's office's press releases and essays, but only as a situational source that is about something that can't be challenged such as personal factoids, if that citation follows a secondary WP:RS.

I would have fixed the formatting errors, like putting citations before punctuation. I am proud that they used citation templates instead of the stupid paper-based junk that many academics use. But the citations are all ruined, only citing your school's proprietary search engine. Now about half the article's citations are non-citations whose titles are even just the name of the search engine. That's all for public news articles! I would have looked them up and replaced them but I don't even know what they're talking about (WP:V).

If there is some quality-based reason that mandates an article that can only be accessed via an academic paywall, to provide the best quality source, then it should be formatted as such. See how we handled citing ancient dead trees via the proprietary Newspapers.com archive, at Hiram Young. We use the "via= url-access=registration" type of stuff.

Maybe at best, the totally generic subject matter like mayoral pandemic policy, could be shortened to maybe one or two sentences instead of whole sections. That is, unless they can provide some real unique insight, like how KC's policies stand out among the state, nation, or world—if that is even the case. I would have done that too, but these subjects are so generic and with such intense implications that I'd have to simply redo all the research. Just imagine if every thought or plan or deed of every mayor became their biography. Mayors do agree that bad things are bad and we should do stuff about it.

Sorry for writing an essay here. I don't know if it's all obvious to you. Let me know if I can help. I feel bad about it, but they didn't reply at all. — Smuckola(talk) 14:58, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for this feedback-- I will share this with the students and follow up. Yes-- there have been some challenges reminding students about the paywalled citations. I will also review the content choices with them. Appreciate the thoughtful response to their edits. 35.22.70.93 (talk) 17:53, 7 December 2022 (UTC)