Talk:Some Thoughts Concerning Education/Archive 2

Links

I have very carefully considered each and every link for this page. Please do not add links to this page without doing the same. Linking every topic does not enhance the reading experience because readers are encouraged to believe that there is relevant material on those pages. This is not always the case and many of the pages you have linked to will never have relevant material. Here are some examples.

• mind - I have linked theory of mind instead as this is more applicable to the discussion in the lead.
• It also does not help the reader to link to pages that lack historical specificity; many of your links take the reader from a word or phrase that I suggest has a historical context to a page that does nothing to enhance that understanding (e.g. virtue and moral character). A more concrete example is mathematics. It does not help the reader to understand the changing state of education in Britain when you link to a mathematics page that has nothing to do with seventeenth-century mathematics. It is not as if we need to link to "mathematics" to explain what mathematics is.
• I am also concerned that you are not looking at the pages you are linking to. If you read the self-discipline page, for example, you will see that it has nothing to do with "self-denial" in the way that I am talking about it here. Again, this is not a concept that has to be further explained - it is a word.
• Of all of your links, though, it is your links inside quotations that are the most questionable. I cannot be so confident that Locke meant working class when he said "labouring people" or vocational education when he said "working schools." Since historians are divided on how and when the notion of the "class" emerged, it is far from clear that Locke thought of people in terms of classes the way we do now. Also, I am highly skeptical that Locke conceived of his "working schools" as vocational education (particularly since the idea had not been invented yet). Have you read the "Essay on the Poor Law"? In the most basic terms, I believe that linking quotations alters an authors words and should be done with extreme caution. :Please note that I did go through each and every one of your links in the first go around (WP:AGF). I believe I retained two or three in the initial sweep. Awadewit 14:48, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Please STOP linking unnecessary concepts such as education, influence and European languages. If you read those pages, you will see that they do not help users understand this article. The education page is "presentist" and doesn't even have a section on the "history of education." I have included a link to it, despite this, in the infobox; redirecting users in the lead, though, is a travesty. I have included a link to the philosophy of education, which is more appropriate, in the "See also" section. The word influence does not need to be linked as it is not a crucial term here. A link to European languages will only confuse readers because that page is almost entirely a list of every European language and Locke's work was most emphatically not translated into all of those languges. I am trying to invoked the idea of the major languages that the majority of readers will be familiar with and linking them to that article is deceiving. Please read this article before you link and please read the articles you are linking. If you are not sure about a link, I would be happy to discuss it. I have carefully considered the links on this page; I have tried to make them as helpful to the reader as possible while still conforming to wiki custom. Thank you (again). Awadewit 00:31, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

• I think Latin, Greek, geography, astronomy, and anatomy are useful links. House of Scandal (talk) 17:58, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

• I'm not quite sure why they are useful - these are common words that anyone reading the article would know. Overlinking the article detracts from the value of important links (e.g. Scientific revolution, which is near this string). We should encourage readers to click on these high value links that will enhance their understanding of the article. Awadewit (talk) 18:22, 26 March 2008 (UTC)

• Yes, people will probably know these terms, but many might not know much about them. But linking such specific concepts the first time the appear in an article is part of Wikipedia culture. Sometimes, even before finishing an article, I impulsively decide "I guess I will read about _____ now" and click. I think that's one of the things people like about Wikipedia. I understand the temptation to feel ownership of an article and have made that mistake myself. I still, however, caution against it in the friendliest way possible. I understand your concern about overlinking but after careful consideration I am going to link the terms above as I feel they are useful to have linked. Thanks and best wishes. House of Scandal (talk) 15:43, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

My reading of Wikipedia:OVERLINK#Example is that if you were to link these, there would have to be some justification such as is given there for the links to price and goods. I don't see any such justification here; is there some technical information that you think would be valuable? I don't see WP:OVERLINK in general as supporting your comment about providing easy ways to read about other topics with only a tangential connection to the article at hand. I'd support unlinking again. Mike Christie (talk) 16:37, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. My reading of the same leads me to a different conclusion. The study of Latin and Greek literature versus the study of scientific subjects such as geography, astronomy, and anatomy is an issue of pedagogy germane to this article. Note also that the "link density" in this portion of the article is low. Opinions from more editors would be welcome. If concensus is against linking these terms, then I will concede in good spirit. -House of Scandal (talk) 16:48, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

I think "link density" is less of a problem than linking unnecessary words that most readers know and thus obscuring the important links. I'm not sure how many other opinions we are going to get. When I was working on this article, few other editors contributed to it, unless I asked for a peer review. Is anyone else out there, watching? Hello? :) Awadewit (talk) 17:00, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

I happened on this page because I was searching for "object lesson" - I'm an educator, but not a student of the education process or theory - but it does seem to me that this idea deserves it's own page?? when i did the search i found xxx hits (have to check it again), and it seems that | object lesson only lives over on Wiktionary. at the very least, i'd like to add the link back to the Wiktionary page, but it seems from the paragraph on Locke in this article, that the idea of "object lesson" is not trivial--Jkuruppu (talk) 16:48, 9 April 2008 (UTC)