User talk:Rdstanley

Welcome!

Hello,, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Unfortunately, one or more of the pages you created may not conform to some of Wikipedia's guidelines for page creation, and may soon be deleted.

There's a page about creating articles you may want to read called Your first article. If you are stuck, and looking for help, please come to the New contributors' help page, where experienced Wikipedians can answer any queries you have! Or, you can just type   on this page, and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Here are a few other good links for newcomers: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you have any questions, check out Where to ask a question or ask me on. Again, welcome! WWGB (talk) 13:29, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Your first article
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A customized toolbox for you to use in setting up your project
I thought I'd put together a bit of a toolbox to help you with your proposed plan of getting some of your students to work here! If you'd like, you can leave it here, or copy the script to your userpage for further ease. The links provided by another editor above are standard links for new users—many of them will be useful for reference; the links below I've compiled and explained in order to help you with the specific plans which you suggested.


 * 1) School and university projects provides a broad overview of how university projects usually work on Wikipedia, with many useful links to things like Instructions for teachers and lecturers and instructions for students.  You should start at this page, and read around from there; it might take a while, but you'll be quite familiarized (and perhaps better understand how you want to frame the assignment) with how such projects work on the Wiki!
 * 2) WikiProject Classroom coordination is where Wikipedia volunteers coordinate their efforts to help with such projects as you are proposing.  The page has a list of Wikipedians who work on the Classroom Coordination Project, and if you just want to ask a question to them straight-up, you can go to the project's talk page at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Classroom coordination.
 * 3) Links to the first page you created at William Pinar and its talk at Talk:William Pinar might be useful.
 * 4) There are a few particular considerations given the project you have suggested, you'll come across them as you read.  Two very important ones will likely be Notability (academics) and Biographies of living persons.  You'll want your projects to fit into these guidelines, and they should be safe!  Specifically, make sure you quickly assert notability, lest the articles may be quickly deleted.  As you come up with more ideas or specifics for your project, just drop me a message (or, perhaps even better, the WikiProject Classroom Coordination I've linked above).
 * 5) A bit more general, but here's Wikipedia's Manual of Style (MoS).  From here you can find out just about any technicalities about how articles are formatted properly (it links to a whole bunch of more specific MoS pages, too); I find it a useful link.  And if there's anything you can't find out after hunting, just go to the MoS talk page, and ask your question there!
 * 6) How to create a sandbox subpage→this may be extremely useful for your students.  First of all, given the chances of deletion and other oddities on Wikipedia, students should keep a saved copy of their planned contributions in a word processor.  Then there's no way they can just end up "going the way of the Dodo."  Second, if they want to play around on the Wiki, they should create a user-subpage.  This is very important step and will help protect their contributions while they're getting ironed out.  It will also allow them to ask the help of other experienced editors before they paste their article onto the "live" wiki.

Right now, I feel like I ought to go to bed. But I plan on coming back here and giving you any help I can; so keep an eye on your talk page here, I'll be back.
 * Peace and Passion &#9774; ''("I'm listening....") 06:14, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

I've added you to my watchlist as well. cheers!Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 06:37, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

More advice
There is also good advice at User:Jbmurray/Advice. One problem that often occurs with articles written as student assignments is that the whole point of many student papers is to put forward a new idea, or to combine existing sources to advance a new point of view. Both of these are against Wikipedia policy, and you and your students should read and understand WP:No Original Research, including particularly the section headed "Synthesis of published material that advances a position." Regards, JohnCD (talk) 14:54, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Another point that often causes problems is that on Wikipedia no author owns any article - see WP:OWN. As soon as your students post an article, other editors can and will edit it or (if it doesn't seem to meet Wikipedia's requirements) nominate it for deletion. It is therefore a good idea to start a new article in a user subpage - see WP:User page - where it can be worked on undisturbed until it is ready to be moved to the main article space. Regards, JohnCD (talk) 17:29, 4 October 2009 (UTC)