Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Discover New York (Turner)

Course information
St. John's University Discover New York Instructor: Benjamin Turner, Course Start Date: August 29, 2012 Assignment Due Date: October 17, 2012


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Course description
Discover New York is a course taken by all incoming freshmen at St. John's. It is meant to acquaint students with the University and the City, and allows Professors to teach about New York City through the lens of a particular discipline. The discipline focus for this course will be history, specifically the history of New York City in the early twentieth century. Topics covered include the red scare, the great migration, Harlem Renaissance, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Margaret Sanger and birth control, and the economic boom and bust.

Wikipedia assignment
The purpose of this assignment is to give students practice in analyzing and evaluating information.

Students will critique a Wikipedia article from the list below, focusing on the general question:

Is the Wikipedia article credible, and is it good enough to be used as a source for a college-level research assignment?

Use the questions provided to guide your critique, but feel free to include any other relevant observations that are not specifically addressed by the questions. Just be sure to stay on topic. Your critique should be roughly 1,100 to 1,300 words.


 * Rand School of Social Science
 * Immigration Restriction Act of 1924
 * Jacob Riis
 * Ku Klux Klan (focus on the "Second Klan")
 * Eugenics
 * Triangle Fire
 * International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union
 * Marcus Garvey
 * NAACP

Article: How is the information organized? Is the organization effective? What type of references are used? Books? Articles? Web sites? How reliable do these sources seem? Do the sources listed in the bibliography include those assigned for class reading? Is anything missing? Anything included that you were not assigned? Are there any areas where the author makes factual assertions that are not supported by references? Is the article missing anything important that you read in the class readings? Describe. Are there any sections of the article flagged for lack of references or in-line citations? Bias? Cleanup? Describe.

History: When was the article created? Who first created the article? What types of edits have been most frequent: additions? Reversions? Describe.

Talk: What are people discussing? How have disputes been resolved? Are the discussions primarily related to form or content, or a combination of both? Has the article been vandalized or filled with deliberate misinformation? Are there any outstanding issues that have not been resolved?

Student resources
For on-wiki help, please refer to this student orientation and this brief resource page.

Immediate help
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