User talk:Marykartowski

Lemma Senbet Fund
Hi! We just had an edit conflict. As you were deleting the no longer used citations, I was hiding the cite definitions by placing following the two defs (using this method, the defs are still there for future use, if necessary—just remove the two markup strings).

If you have any questions about my edits, I will be happy to explain. Some edits I made were to tone down or remove modifiers, some about concision, some about arcane (until familiarity sets in), some perhaps a matter of taste.

In editing the material of the fund namesake I more or less followed the language used in bios of academics here on Wikipedia. Lemet qualifies as WP:NOTABLE—I created a red-link to attract editors’ attention toward creating a bio article.

The ‘experiential learning’ seems clunky to me; I suggest a better phrasing would be to pipe the Wikipedia article title with another phrase. hands-on investment, giving the results hands-on investment (though not that particular word, ‘hands-on’).

Wikipedia has a best practices essay, WP:BRD. Though not strictly necessary, when an edit has been Boldly made, then Reverted, consensus can more easily be reached by then Discussing rather than restoring the original edit. My deletion of ‘top tier’ Is based on the puffery connation of the phrase. A press release uses the phrase because the organization wishes to tell their audience what the organization wants that audience to learn. An encyclopedia is written to provide the information which its readers wish to learn. In addition, top tier is redundant, as selectivity is a given (and attested to) in other places in the article. And—the phrase has no precise meaning here. I believe the ref states the course is only open to seniors, in the school, in this specialized track. The article is better, more encyclopedic, without.

— Neonorange (Phil) 03:04, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

(Addendum from Phil): Please don’t be discouraged. The article is a very fine attempt. I only fixed details. You created an article. Please forgive me for being so tardy with my post here on your talk page—I’ve just replaced my six-year-old iPad and the new keyboard layout and auto correct is slowing my typing to a few letters per second—many of the Wiki markup short cuts refuse to work.

Some of the details, however, are connected to a very sore spot at Wikipedia (English). Particularly those connected to advertising and promotionalism. As Wikipedia has climbed to the fifth most visited site on the Internet, it has become a target for advertising and other promotionalism. Reducing the flood has become an existential question. To return to the “top tier” phrase: that phrase is only meaningful in the context of how many students are in the right school, the right class, and the right speciality. I did a little digging—my preliminary estimate is that the twelve selectees come from a pool of fewer than fifty students. — Phil Neonorange (talk) 03:39, 20 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Hi Phil, Good luck with that sluggish iPad. Not fun. Your approach to comment-out (rather than delete) is excellent. Please give me some time to respond - I'm in the middle of travel, a sick kid, and storm damage on home. Good times (-;  - Mary  Marykartowski (talk) 14:51, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Hi Phil,

I agree with (or acquiesced and simply accepted) nearly all the edits you made the the Lemma Senbet Fund article in Wikipedia. In fact, in one case (remove "selected"), I implemented the edit you had intended to make April 20 2018. Similarly, I was finishing two of your edits when we ran into our edit collision. Where's git when we need it? (-;

Your editing approach to comment-out the footnote citation (rather than delete) is better than my method. Good thinking, sir.

Finally, your explanation herein is very cogent, organized, and articulately presented. It's a pleasure reading such intelligent discourse.

Notwithstanding, there is one important issue that I strongly disagree with. I'll respectfully submit my viewpoint below.

Puffery is essentially false praise or exaggerated praise. I agree puffery has no place in an encyclopedia.

You are correct that promotional messages often use terms that represent puffery. I'll go one step further - in some of those promotional messages, the puffy term used is also meaningless (e.g., "must see" movie). However, it would constitute a logic fallacy called "affirming the consequent" to assume that a term that is sometimes used for promotion must therefore represent puffery whenever it is used. Promotional materials might use "top tier", but encyclopedias can and should use "top tier" where appropriate. It is appropriate in this part of the Lemma Senbet Fund article because the students offered are "top level, top rank, top standing, highest level, highest quality". The term is accurate, objective, informative, meaningful, supported, cited, etc. The term is not puffery in this article.

Schools sometimes offer courses on a limited-enrollment basis. That essentially means that student demand is likely to exceed course supply. Limited-enrollment does not imply the method for selecting students. Undergraduate colleges (e.g., Harvard, Rutgers, Berkley, etc) use various alternative methods to govern student selection. Here are 10 common methods and criteria:
 * 1) First come, first serve
 * 2) Lottery
 * 3) Student's primary choice and secondary choice and tertiary choice, vis a vis other students
 * 4) Limited to those with certain education goals (e.g., post-graduate plans)
 * 5) Limited to students with deeper ties to school (e.g., full-time student preferred over part-time, day student favored over night student)
 * 6) Physical presence (favor domestic over international students, favor on-campus over online students, favor main campus over remote branch students)
 * 7) Demographic factors (race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, minority status)
 * 8) Perceived disadvantage faced by student (income, hardship, inner city neighborhood, difficult sports schedule)
 * 9) Student's academic performance (GPA, standardized test grades, grade in academic major, course difficulty, classroom contribution, homework, TA contribution, certifications earned, peer mentoring, demonstrated mastery of material, ability to intelligently discuss topic, project quality, etc)
 * 10) Hybrid of the above methods

In the Lemma Senbet Fund, Robert H. Smith (RHS) students do not register to take the course. The $1 million fund is real money owned by the school, so great caution is exercised. The school selects 12 students from the top tier of student body and offers a position to the chosen student. The course catalogue reads "BMGT 449 ... The Lemma Senbet Fund ... is a year-long, advanced finance course available to undergraduate finance majors in their senior year. Ten to twelve students will be selected in the spring of their junior year to participate on the fund...". The RHS method and criteria for Lemma Senbet Fund is #9 above. This is confirmed by Jim Cramer's independent financial journal TheStreet in the citation.

I contacted 2 RHS representatives (Dr. Nagpurnanand R. Prabhala - Chair of Finance Departement at RHS) ( Greg Muraski - liaison with external public and media - only to get permission to share private RHS enrollment data with a fellow Wikipedian) by telephone on Friday 20-Apr-2018. Both men confirmed that Lemma Senbet Fund's student selection criteria is only the "Smith School's very top tier students are offered" 1 of the 12 posts on the fund. They also confirmed that Finance (followed by Accounting) is RHS's most chosen academic major, double the enrollment of other majors, "thus making it very, very difficult for a student to get offered a spot on the Lemma Senbet team". It was kind of them to receive my calls, as the RHS school does not know me and I am not associated with their school. I told them truthfully that I was calling on behalf of Wikipedia.

The 2 RHS representatives provided enrollment data (Fall 2017 totals 2,884 and 3,880 and breakdown by major, Spring 2018 total of 2,950), and gave me permission to share the data with fellow Wikipedians. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_H_Smith_Enrollment_by_Academic_Major_Apr-2018.png. You can see there are more than 259 RHS senior finance majors eligible to be selected, of which 12 represents less than 5%. Based on the school's "top student" selection criteria (not first-come-first-serve, not lottery, etc), those are the top 5% of students. I say "more than 259" because approximately 1/4 of the 422 "undecided major" students will likely elect the Finance major, and thus also be eligible for selection for Lemma Senbet Fund.

Finally, the term "top tier" is not redundant with any other content in article. This term is the only place where the reader is informed of the selection criteria for RHS to offer a position on the fund.

Phil, I hope my attempt at clarity does not come across as overly firm. I understand and respect your views. - Mary Marykartowski (talk) 17:22, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

Phil, I later found a publicly-accessible UMD portal to run UMD Student Enrollment By Major reports: https://reports.umd.edu/reportHolder.html#NumberofRegisteredMajors/NumberofRegisteredMajors. This supports the data I provided above - Mary Marykartowski (talk) 15:47, 24 April 2018 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for September 29
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 * Yes. I agree and understand. Thank you for your good counsel. Yesterday 28 Sep 2020, I had knowingly linked to the descriptive definition laid out on an entry ("Top-down investment analysis") on the disambiguation page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down), but only because that DAB entry did not have any hyperlink (red or blue) to an encyclopedic Wikipedia article. Nonetheless, today 28 Sep 2020, I resolved the issue by repointing the link to a Wikipedia article. Please see Lemma Senbet Fund change history at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lemma_Senbet_Fund&diff=981000319&oldid=980829233. - Mary Marykartowski (talk) 18:31, 29 September 2020 (UTC)