User talk:Jbmurray/Madness

Feel free to edit!
Obviously, this essay derives from personal experience. But it's on wikipedia, so you should feel free to edit or contribute to it. Your reactions and comments are also most welcome. --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 12:15, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Encourage other profs
I enjoyed reading your draft. I hope you work it up and get it published in a dead tree journal! I had no idea that by nominating several of your project's articles to GA, that I was in effect nominating your students for an A grade. Cool. My wish is that the class at UBC that reads Harry Potter novels - I know it is an upper year course specializing in children's lit - would do the same as your project. I would love to see some serious contributions at the Harry Potter Project. Hope you return next term. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 19:22, 18 March 2008 (UTC)

Some thoughts
A very interesting and thought-provoking essay - thank you! I do think we're approaching the point where educators are going to have to accept that WP will be used by their students - I know my engineering apprentices find it invaluable... although unfortunately for them, I also know which articles they use ;) As an aside, one of them told me a story a couple of years ago that rather nicely illustrates at least one of Wikipedia's pitfalls: they were set an essay assignment by an electronics lecturer as part of their coursework. One of the apprentices, more computer-savvy than the others, did his research on Wikipedia. He then vandalised the article he'd used, adding "[lecturer's name] is a c*nt" into one of the paragraphs, and directed a fellow apprentice to the 'brilliant resource' he'd found. The article was duly copy/pasted by his friend and handed in... I found it rather funny, despite my opinion on wiki-vandalism, but our budding genius learned a valuable (and painfully embarrassing) lesson on plagiarism versus research.

Your insights into the nature of how Wikipedia works are spot on, emphasising tact, negotiation and teamwork skills over the ability to argue a position. There are, of course, areas of Wikipedia where debate is the norm, and often heated debate at that (for example, Articles for deletion). However, bringing 'traditional' debating skills to Wikipedia is not generally something that either endears one to the community or wins arguments. Arguments (sorry, debates!) tend to revolve around points of policy rather than anything else; only to be expected, given our stance against original research. Again though, the ability to compromise and negotiate (and remain civil whilst doing so) are highly regarded, and often seem to sway community opinion more than a logical but aggressively - or even impolitely - argued position. This was illustrated for me whilst involved in one of the deletion debates for Star Wars vs. Star Trek; I don't know if you're aware of the background, but this topic has had an active and highly adversarial debating community on the net for years. With 'their' article up for deletion, many members of that community descended on the debate to defend it, throwing around terms like 'straw man', 'ad hominem' etc that they were accustomed to use to win debates. Many of their comments were technically correct, but the article was deleted regardless (it was basically pages full of unsourced OR) and its current version consists of just two well-sourced, two-sentence paragraphs. Lesson learned, and arguably (!) one that is indeed of more benefit in the real world than the ability to coerce an opponent into submission. It's actually quite difficult to engage an experienced Wikipedia editor in that sort of debate - the talk pages of many controversial articles are illustrations of this: for example, Talk:Holocaust denial contains a number of posts objecting to the article, most of which have remained largely unanswered. Occasionally one of us will give in to the temptation though...

I've started waffling now, which is a sign I should go and find something else to do. I would be interested in your answer to one question though (although I doubt you could say yet): would you do this again? All the best, EyeSerene talk 19:32, 18 March 2008 (UTC)


 * To follow up, it is worth noting that extremely contentious articles can and do make it all the way to FA status. This has surprised me the most. Before I started this hobby, I thought that troublesome topics would result in useless Wikipedia articles. Only a couple of weeks ago, I heard a call in program - CBC Radio's BC Almanac - in Vancouver posit as conventional wisdom that the best and only reliable Wikipedia articles were the bland non-controversial ones. Not so. For example, Global warming, Intelligent design, Introduction to Evolution and Evolution have all made it to FA status. The synergy that you discuss in your essay really does work for the good. It isn't all a downward spiral here. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 19:49, 18 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Jimmy Wales's recent BBC interview is also interesting. Personally I don't buy the argument that our work is inherently unreliable because we 'lack authority'. Wikipedia is in many ways a true meritocracy - as an editor and a member of a largely collegiate community, credibility is everything. That, in my opinion, is at least as much of an incentive as a publishers paycheque to work together and get things right. EyeSerene talk 20:11, 18 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your comments. A few quick responses...


 * I'm not sure about a dead-tree journal. But that opens up a whole other series of issues there regarding publishing on a wiki for academics, which would be interesting to think about.  Indeed, someone, somewhere is no doubt thinking about those issues right now.  But when I mentioned in class today that (we calculated) there are around 600,000 visits to the Gabriel García Márquez page every year...  well, the students in that particular group found their jaws dropping somewhat.  So I said to them, "That's why it should be better, don't you think?"  And then: "You're the ones to make sure it is."


 * On argumentation, I hadn't considered the many areas of debate that are indeed part and parcel of wikipedia. That's another step altogether, and not one for my classroom at least... perhaps if I were teaching anthropology!  ;)  And yes, there are contentious issues confronted within wikipedia, but the site (sensibly, no doubt, and in line with its vocation as an encyclopedia, at least an encyclopedia of a particular sort) choose to deal with them by downplaying the role of argument.  But by contrast, in the Humanities above all (and perhaps literary criticism especially), it is the original argument, the incisive point skilfully made, that wins most plaudits on the whole.  More banally, just about every paper you write has to have a thesis; but wikipedia articles very strictly shouldn't.  I'm not saying that's wrong (though I do cautiously mention that perhaps the bias towards thesis-driven argumentation within academia could be re-examined), just that academics using wikipedia in their classes should be aware that it will not teach their students how to develop a thesis.  Except perhaps negatively.


 * Would I do it again? Yes, I'm pretty sure.  I hope first to have some kind of feedback from the students once the semester's over.  I'll be very interested in what they have to say.  And I'd have to see how many good articles and even feature articles we actually come up with!  Then I could sit down and consider what might need to be changed.  In some ways it's only now that most of them are really "getting" it.  It might be worth structuring things differently to frontload the assignment a bit more.  Plus I'd probably like a TA if at all possible, so I didn't feel I had to be overseeing quite so much.   But that may also be my own anxiety.


 * Anyhow, that's it for now. I look forward to any further responses.  --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 05:57, 19 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Oh, but just on the Jimmy Wales interview and on citing wikipedia. I am actually one of those teachers who (in other classes) tells students that they should not cite wikipedia.  In part this is because in general (OK, more than in general: 100% of the time), they cite it badly.  I know each page has the "cite this page" link on the bottom left corner which, like much else on wikipedia when you get to know it a bit more thoroughly, provides an admirably complete range of ways in which to cite that particular version of the page.  But I wonder what proportion of readers know really that each page retains all its archived versions (and that those are what have to be cited) or what proportion know that link is there, or ever click on it.  I have never ever seen a wikipedia page properly cited.  Were Wales serious about wanting wikipedia to be cited regularly, that link would be much more prominent: up the top, say, right next to "edit this page."  On the other hand, so few pages still deserve citing...  but again, I wonder why "good articles" aren't marked as such on the page itself (as featured articles are), say with a little green circle up the top right.  And lest nobody notice the stars (and circles) up on the top right, feature articles and good articles could be highlighted a bit more: for instance by making the whole page a slightly different colour, for instance.  I might hesitate less, though I would still hesitate, about, say, telling students that they could indeed cite good articles and feature articles, were it made more obvious which those were.


 * I can't help but think that these ideas have already been put forward (and no doubt debated at length) in some now archived corner of wikipedia. But they do seem reasonable first steps if the site wants to become a genuinely scholarly resource.  Not that that is what it should necessarily want to become.  There's a certain glory in the more anarchic and democratic vision that you suggest, .  In an ideal world such flags wouldn't be necessary, as people would have the skills to evaluate the various information sources they come across on the web and elsewhere.  And those indeed  are the skills that I hope my class is helping to inculcate.  --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 06:11, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

I very much enjoyed and appreciate this article - and by no means do I think that you've unduly praised this assignment! I particularly liked the observation that Wikipedia editors are "attracted to activity", and that you also point out the flipside of this. As per comments above, I would also encourage you to think about publishing this article in a journal of some sort - I think that it would perhaps need to be rewritten or managed differently for a "dead tree" journal, but there are other kinds of (more progressive journals) out there, including First Monday and M/C, and you might also consider, for example, an educational magazine (Educause might be difficult, but I'd go for it anyway!). And of course, on Wikiversity (where I'm most active), we would be happy to create a (name)space for such articles, and undergo our own peer review system. (Such a system is not in place yet, but it's something that myself and others are highly motivated to do.)

I also had some pretty basic questions about the course itself, which you don't give much information about. I would encourage you to describe more clearly what the course you teach covers (and perhaps how you teach it), and what level of university progression it is at. If you have a university web page that details this, you could link to this also.

Ok, all the best with this assignment, and thank you for such a lucid description of your experience! Cormaggio is learning 09:18, 19 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Congratulations on the featured article! :-) Cormaggio is learning 13:56, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Good article green dot
You guessed 100% correctly that this has been debated to death. The debate always starts off as 'this is a really good idea' and ends up 'this is a really bad idea.' I've never fully understood why it is opposed. One truly odd thing about Wikipedia culture is that the 'Feature Article' project doesn't like the 'Good Article' project, and vice versa. The two projects behave as if they are in a deadly competition. For example, there is no procedural reason that any of the articles at WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem need to stop by Good article nominations but can skip and go straight to Featured article candidates. As far as FA is concerned, an article must be 'ready' for FAC but it doesn't need to be GA marked. Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 13:15, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I don't really understand the lack of public GA recognition either, but I think it's got to the point that, whenever it's raised, no-one bothers debating it any more. I think it would be a mistake to overstate the rivalry between the two assessment projects though; they perform complementary rather than competitive functions, and many editors are active in both. I've never personally encountered any antagonism (although I'm aware it has existed at times). EyeSerene talk 17:15, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Not the only educational project to generate a good article!
Just a little brag for one of my students from when I ran a Wikipedia term paper project in Fall 2006. A young woman in my class re-wrote the majority of Nature (journal), which, with subsequent work by other Wikipedians but retaining the core of her work, became a Good Article in July 2007. I think that a couple of other articles from that assignment are within spitting distance of being Good Articles as well.

Great write-up of a very exciting assignment.--ragesoss (talk) 02:10, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Heh. All bragging credit to you and your student! :) NB that article's not listed at Wikipedia articles as assignments (though I have to admit I haven't gone through all of those either).

And thanks for your kind words. --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 02:43, 4 April 2008 (UTC)


 * I just added appropriate banners to the 30 articles (that I can remember) that my students have been involved with for classes. Back in my day -- :) -- no such category existed.--ragesoss (talk) 03:35, 4 April 2008 (UTC)


 * You mean in the old days, they didn't have banners? ;)  Hehe.  --jbmurray (talk|contribs) 04:12, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

There was also Renewable energy in Iceland started by User:1013-Isaac, which originated in a University of Minnesota project. Still obviously you've done way more than that, with a whole raftload of GAs, and even a FA, which is a pretty great accomplishment. Imagine if we had 50 professors teaching classes like this every semester... Wikipedia would never be the same.--Pharos (talk) 17:31, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Article
I assume you've seen this but if not it's by a guy out in Langley, BC at Trinity Western University. He suggests: :• A professor or information literacy instructor assigns groups of students to evaluate and edit Wikipedia articles, using research from other sources as an evaluative tool.
 * What to Do With Wikipedia By William Badke, Trinity Western University.

You are the future :-) Cheers! Wassupwestcoast (talk) 14:18, 10 April 2008 (UTC)