User talk:DrMichaelWright

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Hello, DrMichaelWright, and welcome to Wikipedia! It appears you are a course instructor leading a class project.


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We hope you like it here and encourage you to stay after your assignment is finished! House1090 (talk) 09:31, 9 January 2018 (UTC)

Your class project's reviews
While I generally think that having students who have little or no experience with Wikipedia review the work of other students who have equally little experience with Wikipedia is the blind leading the blind, I'm particularly concerned about the reviews of Escheit2's sandbox. The sandbox was reviewed no less than four times, including by yourself, and yet no one seems to have noticed a glaringly obvious error of fact:
 * After the Allies took over Mannheim, the United States Army began to reconstruct the city by repairing the infrastructure and churches. This started with fixing the damaged church and recasting the 5 new church bells which were escorted by the 77th Engineer Battalion of the United States Army in 1956.

It should be obvious to everyone that repairing and rebuilding Mannheim would have started with essentials such as residential buildings, not with recasting church bells, and it certainly didn't start in 1956. Are people supposed to have lived in bombed-out ruins for a decade? (Also, "escorted by the 77th Engineer Battalion" - why did church bells need a military escort?)

Additional problems with that rather short sandbox:
 * Much of the content, including claims of grandeur, is unreferenced.
 * The lone reference for the added content, the official website of Mannheim, is of at best middling reliability - it certainly is not subject to peer review or the like. Surely there are better sources discussing Mannheim in WWII. (You noted this issue, but you apparently missed that the Mannheim article already cites better sources for the WWII history that were removed in the sandbox version.)
 * There's also this external link in the body of the article. Firstly, if it is supposed to be a source, it should be turned into a footnote; inline external links are inappropriate. Secondly, all I can see there is a Portland State University sign-in page. Since there's no metadata, there's no way for people who happen not to be Portland State University members to even figure out what the link target is supposed to be, much less to access the source.
 * "Many thought that the action of replacing the bells showed a sense of religious significance to be able to hear those bells again and take part in church services." The grammar is so garbled that I have trouble understanding that sentence. Is that some Google translation from a German source? Even if the grammar were fixed, I rather don't think peoples' opinions on whether replacing the bells showed a sense of religious significance improve our readers' understanding of the history of Mannheim. As an aside, the repaired church was consecrated again only in 1960, so it took another four years after the casting of the bells for services to be held in that church.
 * The claim that the US Army was involved in recasting the church bells seems to be false. de:Jesuitenkirche (Mannheim) says the bells were cast by de:Friedrich Wilhelm Schilling, a German, and the German article on Schilling says he did so in his German company, located in Heidelberg.
 * "To this day, those bells hang with 3 additional ones made since then." - I'm not going to comment on the grammar here, but the statement is factually wrong. One of the other three bells wasn't "made since then" but in the 18th century.
 * "These bells were originally taken down in 1942 to help the war for Germany." - Again garbled grammar. War doesn't need help and can't be helped. What the author means is "... to help [or aid?] the German war effort".
 * Whether that statement is true or not depends on the definition of "These bells". As mentioned above, one of the original bells still exists; another also survived but is no longer hanging in the church. Four were lost during WWII. Compare the archdiocese website. When four are lost and five are recast, I wouldn't call it "these bells".
 * Why is the recasting of the bells, which happened in 1956, part of a section on WWII in the first place? Last time I checked, WWII ended in 1945. There is a "1950s to 1980s" section in the Mannheim article; if the recasting of the church bells belongs anywhere, that clearly is the place.

In summary, the additions in that sandbox, beyond just being largely wrong, violate two of Wikipedia's core content policies, namely WP:Verifiability and WP:Neutral point of view (particularly the section on undue weight, and they contain numerous grammar problems (there are even more than those I explicitly listed here). None of those issues were found by any of the reviewers, with two even giving "exceeds standards" for validity. BethanyJJohnson was the lone reviewer who noted that not citing sources might be a problem.

I haven't looked at other sandboxes quite as closely as at this one, but your review process needs improvement. Huon (talk) 01:05, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Quick reply
Hi Huon,

Thanks for your review and concern. I hear you about the adequacy of the peer review process and your criticisms on this sandbox page. That's exactly why I have them work in sandboxes, rather than directly on Wikipedia proper. Yes, some do get enthusiastic and go straight to work on live Wikipedia, but hopefully that enthusiasm also means that these are the higher-level students who are doing better work to begin with. At this stage, they are certainly more cheerleadery than really critical, and that is going to sting in their peer review grades.

Are you rising to this occasion because some of my students' edits on Wikipedia proper?


 * I saw this because one of your students asked an unrelated question in the IRC help channel, I took a look at their contributions, found the class project, was intrigued and took a closer look at the specific page I expected to be most familiar with. I haven't seen any mainspace edits related to this class project, but this week's assignment was "Begin moving your work to Wikipedia" - what is in sandboxes so far will become live article content soon, if I understand that assignment correctly. Besides, your review of the specific sandbox I checked said, "This is a decent start, and good enough to post to Wikipedia proper" - I'm not sure I agree with that. Of course my main concern isn't their grades but whether errors of fact such as those I pointed out above find their way into live articles. Maybe you'd want to contact the people at WT:WikiProject Cities whether they'd be willing to take a look at your students' content before it gets added to live articles?
 * I should add that this isn't the first class project I've seen where students were supposed to peer-review each other's work; I believe that's a recommendation by Wiki Ed. So I don't mean to blame you for following that recommendation. I do think, however, that such a peer review is useless if the peers don't know Wikipedia (and what possible problems to look for) any better than the authors themselves. There's a reason why other review processes on Wikipedia such as new page patrol and reviewing pending changes aren't open to anybody but require specific user rights (which are only given to somewhat experienced editors). I should probably talk to Wiki Ed about that recommendation and whether they also recommend giving some instructions to the peer reviewers. Huon (talk) 19:19, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

I certainly understand your concern. That WikiEdu assignment was not one I intended. It's part of the boiler plate assignment structure, and it's my fault for not having weeded it out as I intended to do. In my experience with teaching this course a number of times is that most students do not contribute anything to mainspace, since I do not offer a grade for doing so. In the past I've reviewed students' mainspace work (rarely finding any), and corrected what they did. However, I do that when the term is over and I have time to breathe again.

But, yeah, if you disagree with WikiEdu policies, take it up with them. They seem to prefer more rather than less, even if that comes at the cost of quality.

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