User talk:Ryan (Wiki Ed)/Books

Feedback on the draft
Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback on this draft. Please leave your feedback in a new section below. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:14, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Feedback

 * (Saw your post on Mike's page.) I'd put a much larger emphasis on how the article is about the book itself. I can see students going into such an "assignment" planning to write a summary of the book with refs to the relevant pages from the book, but what they really should be doing is going to the book's major reviews (from newspapers/magazines, and usually not blogs, via Book Review Digest and Book Review Index in their library) to find what reviewers deemed important about the book. Second, they should use author interviews to write about its publication history, if available and if there aren't other dedicated articles. I'd also link a few FA/GA articles as examples. Here's a few of mine, offhand: Summerhill (book), Compulsory Miseducation, Fifty Years of Freedom, The Demands of Liberal Education, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited, God's Choice, Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn. Summerhill's reception prose is weaker (read: written earlier) than the others, but the first few examples have variety in their sections. Happy to edit directly if it would be useful czar  01:43, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Before I respond, I need to say that I made a mistake in tracking the word count of this draft and was unaware of some design considerations, and as such it's much too long. Just as with User:Ryan (Wiki Ed)/Films (the other handout we're working on right now), this one will need to be significantly edited (along the same lines of the other draft). The gist will remain the same, but it will e.g. repeat less of what's in the other training materials (this is intended to be a supplement rather than a substitute) and less detail from the wikiproject/style pages that can just be linked to. I'm about to set to work on that.
 * We talked about some possible examples but ultimately didn't for a few reasons. As it's a printed document and cannot include links, the examples would have to be few enough that students would actually type them in to check, and also means we cannot link to a stable version without a cumbersome URL in the text. FAs are obviously pretty safe bets, but if the purpose is to show structure/style/tone, there's no guarantee the structure won't change to be something that deviates significantly from the typical structure we're urging students to use -- and linking to examples may make concrete particular stylistic choices that we'd otherwise want to characterize as flexible or requiring judgment. There are not insurmountable concerns, to be sure, and there are good arguments for including examples -- these are just how we arrived without. Is there a particular context you'd recommend mentioning them?
 * I'm not sure I follow "much larger emphasis on how the article is about the book itself". Do you mean about the thing rather than about its content? It does, I think, try (along with the other training materials) to be clear about what kind of sources should be used -- relying on high-quality reviews/scholarly analysis rather than just sourcing the book itself (although it does say that's ok for a plot synopsis). How could this be refined? Thanks again. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 02:16, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Sounds good—not sure how the handouts were intended for use but thought students writing on books should get a little more guidance on sourcing (given how little guidance I received even when I went to library reference desks explicitly saying I was writing about books). If you can use an extra set of eyes, just let me know. (For what it's worth, I found getting students to the right guideline/policy pages on a computer was more productive than using the handouts when I did my high school class.) Re: context, if a whole class is writing on books, I'd recommend printing out one or two articles (perhaps GAs in a similar genre?) for them to read through. Otherwise they're going to look up A Tale of Two Cities or Gender Trouble or something as their model and end up repeating bad habits (reams of plot summary with poor sourcing) instead of writing productively. My hot take, at least. Again, I don't know the context, but I'd remind that the encyclopedia article is about the book as a thing (its publication, its reception, its legacy, its content, with due weight). If students receive an assignment to write an article on, for instance, Demanding the Impossible, the bulk of the work is getting a good bibliography (reviews of the book, which are rarely online or easily accessible) and focusing on paraphrasing those reviews instead of paraphrasing the book by chapter. Most of my peers/profs didn't know to look beyond JSTOR for book reviews—if a college class is all writing on books, I'd recommend that a librarian visit the class and discuss the relevant databases, but if the university doesn't do that, this handout might be the only opportunity for the students to know where to look: Book Review Digest and Book Review Index, in particular—each cover a mostly different set of popular periodicals—and students will still need to search EBSCOhost, ProQuest, & JSTOR separately for academic journals. Students expect a federated search akin to Google but in reality, each one of those aforementioned five starting points will link to different reviews. It's the difference between a student writing from a NY Times and single sociology journal vs. pulling from ten viable reviews, which totally changes what they're able to write. (Or least it has for me.) czar  05:18, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I made a couple changes based on this. Specifically, pointing to some specific databases and clarifying that the article can be just as much about the physical book as it is about the content. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 05:04, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Shortened/revised draft
I made a mistake when considering the length of the draft and was unaware of certain design requirements. As a result, the draft was much too long. I think that it still touches upon all of the main themes, but repeats less of the other training materials for which it's intended to be a supplement rather than a substitute, and similarly repeats less of what is available on the WikiProject page that could be linked to for more information. Pinging and  as the two users who have commented on it thus far. The gist is quite similar, but I want to ensure we didn't remove anything you would consider essential (and, in Czar's case, to ask if the edits change anything about your feedback above). Thanks. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:34, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I'd personally cut most of page one, which is covered in the "Editing Wikipedia" handout and give more specific guidance on finding sources (see above). This would be a big change and I could take a stab but didn't want to mess up your draft. I'd re-emphasize how WP is a tertiary source, why certain sources are more reliable than others, and I'd recommend having a minimum of four (five?) in-depth reviews, even though it might survive AfD with three. I'd reiterate that the reviews will likely not be accessible through Google and the free/open web alone. I'd also reduce the number of expected sections in case students end up writing a few sentences for some sections when they would be better off eliminating them altogether. (Besides the overview/background/publication history, the content summary, and the reception, they should know that their other sections should follow from whether their depth of sourcing lets them do justice to said section topics. Most books won't necessitate lengthy analysis sections, and the ones that do might not make good first assignments.) I'd reduce the infobox template too—remove params including dewey, cover_artist, set_in, etc. to focus on the bare minimum. Depends on how much space is fungible, I imagine czar  05:44, 4 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The content of page one is indeed included in some of the other training materials. It's intended to highlight some of the important basics, but also to ease them into the idea of getting down to business and editing an article. The front and back have less text than the middle pages to avoid being daunting. We could fit more advice that's specific to books if we scrapped it (or the final page), but it tries to walk a line between being helpful for a specific purpose and being too detailed that they either put it down, overwhelmed, or be better off just being pointed to the relevant Wikipedia pages. Ultimately, this is a conversation that may be worth having in the long-term, for possible alteration of the next round of handouts (we're tentatively planning an unusual one for next quarter -- history, with special attention to use of primary vs. secondary sources), but at this point this needs to get out to the printer in the next day or two. :) --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 05:13, 5 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Also this. I suspect my wording could be improved. Since the context is notability, I don't want to misrepresent the bare minimum, but agree it would be better to be clear they should aim higher than two. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 05:22, 5 June 2017 (UTC)