Wikipedia talk:Canada Education Program/Courses/The Rhetoric of Digital and Interactive Media Environments (Rhonda McEwen)

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Toronto, we've got a problem...[edit]

Hi, much as I appreciate that you are using your class to try to improve Wikipedia, I would strongly recommend that you get some people involved that know WP better than you seem to do. Many edits of this class do not adhere to the manual of style. Worse, you seem to be unaware of WP:COI and WP:GNG. I don't know whoever came up with the idea to have a student group write an article on the person teaching this class (and, presumably, afterwards grading their efforts), but it's the weirdest case of COI editing that I've seen here. Also, please inform your students that it is inappropriate to copy-paste articles from their sandboxes into mainspace. They should use the "move" function for that, so that an article's edit history remains preserved, which is a requirement for the license under which WP operates. Thanks. --Guillaume2303 (talk) 18:20, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for taking a look at the class. I am one of the online ambassadors but this class seems to have slipped off my radar. Regarding your points above: MOS is learned gradually. We don't expect new editors to come fully educated in all of WP guidelines. Experienced WP editors, such as myself will go through the work and clean it up. Remember, WP is a work in progress. I did not notice the Rhonda Nanette McEwen article. This is does violate Wikipedia:Conflict of interest and I have emailed Rhonda McEwen about this. Regarding the inappropriate moves, I do not see which article your are referring to. maclean (talk) 18:49, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The very same one, see the article's talk page. Concerning WP:MOS: I am a frequent reviewer for academic journals. If an author submits an article formatted very differently from a journal's guidelines, that already convey's the impression that this person is not doing his/her homework (and I am most certainly not the only one looking at these things as a reviewer). So I think it is important to get students (some of whom may go on to have a research career) get used to the boring details of writing as early as possible... --Guillaume2303 (talk) 19:08, 1 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

There are bigger problems than either non-adherence to MoS or conflicts of interest: copyright violation, addition of unencyclopedic material, and lack of verifiability.

I first became aware of this project via "Photo manipulation" (recent history). Here is the work of the class (with only a minor interruption or two). It has forced Jan Arkesteijn (with occasional help) to do a great amount of work. My own impression (see the talk page) is that the writers have only a patchy understanding of what they are trying to talk about, and haven't taken such obvious measures as going to the university library and reading up on the matter.

Feeling rather guilty for having done little to help "Photo manipulation" and thus leaving Jan Arkesteijn to do almost all of the work, I thought I'd put into another article the effort I'd failed to put into that one. Pretty much at random, I selected "Ray-Ban" (recent history). Here is the work of the class, which starts promisingly with removal from the introduction of the silly term "high end" but which is otherwise problematic. I devoted early 30 March to the removal of "sourcing" to what was obviously junk, the questioning of "sourcing" to what seemed to be junk, and removing miscellaneous other excrescences. Now, I wouldn't at all mind the occasional spelling mistake or lame phrasing, or frequent mistakes of Wikipedia markup. But my edit summaries probably reveal my increasing irritation with what struck me as an failure to approximate university standards. Still, I tried to be polite, both in the edit summaries and in the talk page. But the U Toronto editors haven't responded.

maclean, perhaps you could pick one or two of the many articles listed here, take a quick look at their histories, and see what you think about the recent edits. -- Hoary (talk) 01:45, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I have reviewed Section 201-Group 4's University of Toronto Mississauga Educational Buildings. The first thing I notice is that each student appears to have done a section by themselves, so we should not blame the entire class for the mistakes of a few. This is a new article the students created in a sandbox and moved into the mainspace correctly. There is, of course, MOS fixes that should be done, like wikilinking, unformatted references, instances of WP:DATED and Words to watch. As each student independently did one section there is an inconsistent tone and writing style. The only instances of copy&pasting from a source are lists (one of features in the building (in Recreation, Athletic, and Wellness Centre) and one of programs that use a building (in Communication, Culture and Technology Building)). The sourcing seems appropriate, and I don't endorse the {{primary sources}} (based on a comparison to the referencing in Featured List List of Washington & Jefferson College buildings which I think validly uses content published by the university/college), but it is limited (I see lots of potential references in The Mississauga News). It is better than what I normally see from newcomers (at new page patrol) but what I expected from new editors who have had an introductory lesson. maclean (talk) 05:20, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this article is a lot better than those I'd previously looked at. It does have some oddities, but oddities can be fixed. -- Hoary (talk) 06:39, 2 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Hi all, I'm one of the Campus Ambassadors for this course and am also on the teaching team. I'd like to thank you for bringing these matters to our attention, and please rest assured that we'll follow-up with the students involved. While we hope they'll continue to engage with the broader Wikipedia community in further revising their contributions, I should note that the assignment is now complete and that we fully understand that other Wikipedians will edit the students' content as they see fit. I should also note that our class edited and/or created about 72 different articles, that many of their contributions are quite good for "newbies", and that the project certainly did not ask them to create an article about the Professor. Many thanks again for your feedback. Michael Dick 22:56, 4 April 2012 (UTC)