User talk:Ajm mich

Welcome to Wikipedia!

Hi, this is Bill Wedemeyer, an assistant professor in biochemistry up the road at Michigan State University. Martin Walker, a professor from SUNY Potsdam, alerted me to your chemistry initiative and I thought I'd lend my encouragement and offer my help. I'm still a relative newbie to editing myself, but I and my students have been studying Wikipedia for over two years now, so I've learned a little.

I've been developing some materials to help people get started editing on Wikipedia, which you'll find listed on my user page (2nd section). There's an overall tutorial (see the bottom of the page for an illustration), an article template, and sundry "small" tutorials, a few with Camtasia screencasts. Perhaps they'll be useful to you and your students?

I'm leaving tomorrow to give a workshop in San Francisco for the American Society for Cell Biology, where I'll hopefully put those materials to good use. I could send you my slides, if that'd be helpful to you. If you have any questions or suggestions for me, please write to my user page or to my faculty e-mail, proteins at msu.edu. Good luck and good editing to you and your students! Proteins (talk) 20:02, 11 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Advice for class

Since you asked. Here are some suggestions:

As professor, you might proof what the students have before they post their essays. Students write poorly generally. They can view the text using a sandbox or some temporary mock up.
Be careful about selecting topics. Yes, many topics do not have their own articles in Wikipedia, but such topics do not necessarily merit their own articles. Often, the students could upgrade a pre-existing article, since the most important topics are generally already covered but often crudely.
Emphasize references to books and general sources (students tend to cite hyper-specialized journal articles because they lack perspective).
When they must cite journal articles, give titles of article and DOI's.

You will get many different recommendations from different editors on this topic, since it is mildly anarchic here.--Smokefoot (talk) 03:43, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

CHEM540 Fall09 articles

I assume [1] are yours again? I'm seeing a lot of good ideas and improved material being added, but the overall format is pretty far from Wikipedia standards. For example, Host-guest chemistry involved removing lots of useful links in the beginning, writing as in a teaching-style ("we see", "tells us", etc.) (WP:TONE) and not even having a WP:LEAD. And there is lots of redundancy, as if several editors are each contributing chunks of an essay rather that writing components of an interwoven encyclopedia. As always, WP is a great opportunity for a school project. Maybe this one needs a better framing for the students in terms of target-audience or style? DMacks (talk) 08:43, 15 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

CHEM507

Not sure if this is your class, but I thought you might be able to assist here. The students in this class, perhaps not familiar with local customs, are pissing people off by their seeming rudeness.[2], [3], [4], [5], etc. Cooperation will lead to a good working relationship, and who knows, some may choose to continue to work here after their classes end. In contrast, drive-by replacement essays will often be met by reversion, warning, block, especially if attempts to contact them are met with silence. Maybe they have achieved their class objectives, but if their edits are reverted on sight, I'm not sure what real value would come out of this project. Perhaps you can talk to them? --Rifleman 82 (talk) 06:35, 11 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]