Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/California State University, Fullerton/Gender and Technoculture (Fall 2014)

WELCOME to CSU Fullerton's Gender and Technoculture "Talk" page!--Dalton D. Hird 20:02, 5 December 2014 (UTC)

Proper links and editing

Hi, are you the instructor in this course? if so, will you please tell your students to stop adding "proquest' links? They are not operational to the rest of us who are not students at your school. Further, they are not formatted in proper citation form, so it's hard to even find the original article. Thanks. Please also tell your students that adding random additional links to articles already at WP:GA status is just screwing things up? Thanks. (My concern is the editing that is occurring at Rosie Napravnik by two people in your class. Also, this edit added another totally useless link to a web page only accessible from a paywall) Montanabw^(talk) 04:31, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Will pass this on and request that these students review the students tutorial on this again. Thanks for letting me know. Kind regards, --Dalton D. Hird 17:52, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

They mean well, but they need to help improve the articles, not mess up already solid work by others. Thanks. I'm probably going to be helping some faculty at a college initiate some wp editing projects, I sort of dread the chaos that could occur, I've had to clean up so much of it by others... sigh... Montanabw^(talk) 01:06, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

@Montanabw: & @DaltonHird: just stopping by (came here from Margaret K. Butler), but I think the ebscohost thing is acceptable as long as it isn't just the bare url. Most of the ebsco stuff is actual journals and articles and ebsco is the distributor, so if editors point to the first published source, I think it should be fine. As for the article I was editing, I fixed it up some, but editors who use shortened referencing style should use Notes at the bottom for their reflist and then include a list of sources (Help:Overview of referencing styles), if it's mostly web links, they should probably use the long referencing style and use the {{cite web}} template, otherwise it's impossible for us to find them when trying to fix them up; source #3 in the butler article is a bit vague. Nice to see such a large participation though, especially with a gender-related class and the gender gap on wikipedia (I'm part of the 13-ish percent!); never heard of it being done at my own institution. I applaud you. — kikichugirl ^? 06:16, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

@Montanabw: & @Kikichugirl: Thanks for the good feedback. My students were very nervous about this assignment at first but have since become very excited - perhaps the most excited I have seen students over an assignment ever! I am planning on doing this assignment again in the spring, though with a much smaller group.--Dalton D. Hird 16:46, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

I will give an example of what NOT to do: inserting this link with a "proquest" url, first off, went to a site that I (not being from your college) cannot access, it was behind a login, presumably limited to students from this school only. (Ebsco is not the point, the inability of other editors to verify the material is the problem... linking directly to the New York Times was desirable here) Second, it was also a duplicative link verifying material already cited and so completely unneeded in the article. Third, it was also an incomplete citation, lacking author, date, etc... What was particularly irritating was that the exact same piece (under a different title: [1]) was already in the article!! I don't really want to "bite the newbies," but when students do things like randomly insert a citation (and incorrectly to boot) into an article that already has appropriate citation, presumably because they were given an assignment like "add a citation to wikipedia," they have just created a bunch of work others have to clean up. I happen to be a person who favors colleges and universities using wikipedia editing in their classes as a tool to both teach writing and to improve wikipedia, but there is also a faction of folks here who are hostile to student projects for this very reason. Sorry to rant a bit, but this is about the third class project where I have wound up cleaning up student messes, and I'm rather tired of it. I encourage you to help students learn about editing articles in a way that helps (even poorly formatting links are better than no links on start and stub-class articles, but they need to not be experimenting on GA and FA-class articles.) but have them practice in sandboxed article spaces first, perhaps. Montanabw^(talk) 04:50, 20 December 2014 (UTC)