User talk:Pcw~enwiki/2005exercise

Hi! I read the discussions. I'm Swedish and have little idea what degree of maturity your students have or how far they have come in their education, but as Dartmouth is supposed to be a good university, I am sure you have some bright ones among them, and that they have interests covering a variety of scientific, cultural or historical topics.

Why don't you ask your students to take a look at WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles, where there are links to lists of topics notable enough to have already been in other encyclopedias. Some of these projects are all about using somewhat dated public-domain material from old publications such as the Catholic Encyclopedia or the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica as a starting point for a new article, formatting and updating it as needed, which might be a good preliminary exercise before writing one's own article. (Wikipedia sometimes already has an article on the topic under a different title. Some searching and checking of links from related topics may be needed to ascertain whether that is the case.)

Other of these projects are about covering topics included in contemporary encyclopedias, such as the 2004 Encyclopedia topics, which lists topics covered by the Encyclopædia Britannica 2004. (The same caveat applies here about topics possibly already in WP under a different title.) This forces the student to do his own work researching the topic. It is important that the article itself does not even get close to plagiarizing the EB. The point is to try to cover the same topics by using standard handbooks, journal articles etc.

There are many other lists which show clearly notable topics missing. I just noticed this morning that we lack articles on several of the kings of the Twenty-second dynasty of Egypt. Or take a look at Linnean Medal, where several of the recipients of the medal are red, or the subpages of Fellows of the Royal Society. (And again, make sure the article doesn't exist under a different title...) Uppland 07:48, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Monkees
Hi. On your project page, you mentioned "the Monkeys," but quoted the Monkees. Sacrilege!!! Kidding, but thought you might want to know. Cheers! -- BD2412 talk 01:15, 9 September 2005 (UTC)