Wikipedia:Peer review/Insect development during morgue storage and autopsy procedures/archive1

Insect development during morgue storage and autopsy procedures
This peer review discussion has been closed. I've listed this article for peer review because… -The article may consist of grammatical/spelling errors -Any comments on how to improve the content of the article would be greatly appreciated

Thanks, Best js 2007 (talk) 18:10, 20 March 2008 (UTC) best js 2007

"Grammar and spelling errors" is a serious understatement regarding the problems with this article. The article doesn't look like a Wikipedia article at all; it looks like a high school or college essay.


 * It does not follow Wikipedia's manual of style.
 * It is not cited properly using inline citations.
 * There is no lead section.
 * The title is long, not short, concise, and descriptive, and it looks like it's trying to capture several topics into the article at once. The title looks more like something you might read in a blog or on a news site and not an encyclopedia.
 * Titles of subsections do not follow the manual of style, and are long and wordy. Encyclopedia titles should be short and concise, and easy to be read within the table of contents.
 * The wikilinks that are present in the article look like they were inserted at random and don't really have any context whatsoever to the article.
 * There are some significant WP:NPOV issues.
 * There are no images.

While I think it's good that colleges are trying to include Wikipedia in their assignments, I think such classroom assignments should still understand what the purpose of Wikipedia is. We're not compiling a database of term papers here. We're trying to publish an encyclopedia on topics of academic interest to people. If I was the professor in charge of this course, I would assign a grade of F to the student or students involved in writing this. If the purpose of the course, and the assignment, is to help build and contribute to Wikipedia, this fails at it completely. It's a stand-alone essay, and not helpful to Wikipedia's purpose and mission. If students want to truly use Wikipedia in a way to maximize their education, they need to do a thorough and comprehensive search of articles related to the subject that they are researching, and then look at the sources cited by those articles and go to those articles for further research into the subject. As such, Wikipedia should never actually be cited itself, it is merely a starting point for research (but a very good one!). Once you've looked at other sources, if the goal is to contribute to improving the encyclopedia, then identify specific gaps in the Wikipedia articles that you've researched, and improve those articles based on new sources that you've found through your research. If new articles are created through this research, that's great, too! True, it makes the grading from the professor's point of view a little more difficult, since they've got to look at more than one article, as well as the contributions of his/her students across several articles instead of just one. But if you want your students to work on a collaborative group project of individual library research, then have them write a paper on their own, print it out, and turn it in. Wikipedia is not needed for this. If you want your students to gain real world experience of helping to improve an encyclopedia with a very wide readership, then work within the standards and context provided by the publisher, instead of trying to put your own standards into the publication in question. Most good professors **should** be well aware of this.

As it is, this article is an example of an "epic fail" in terms of Wikipedia collaborating with education, and it is nothing more than useless drivel that will most likely either be ignored or deleted once the course is done. To the encyclopedia we're building here, this article is useless. The students involved failed here to get an idea of what Wikipedia is and how it works, but this isn't so much the students fault -- it's the professor's fault for failing to understand the purpose and procedures of Wikipedia, how it works, and effectively communicating this to his/her students. Dr. Cash (talk) 15:58, 21 March 2008 (UTC)