Wikipedia talk:School and university projects/CS345

Comments from Chzz 19 August

Hi there.

I've read through those notes, and in general I think it's a good project and should work well. A few ideas and thoughts;

• Instead of linking to Wikipedia:Questions, it might be better to just direct them to the WP:HELPDESK.

• If you want to link to the live chat, put this;

...use the [http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=wikipedia-en-help live help] system.

• I noticed you said ""/my sandbox" (put two square brackets around it instead of quotes)"

To put codes within a page, you can do this: <nowiki>[[sausage]]</nowiki> - which will appear on the page as [[sausage]].

• It might be a good idea to put a message on the top of the user pages and user talk pages of the students, explaining that they are members of a course, and linking to your own talk page. That could be done neatly with a template, to make a standardized boxed notice. Here is a quick-and-dirty example of what I mean;

• Before they create their new article, it might be a good idea for them to edit some existing articles - even just a little. You might get ideas from the cleanup campaign, the newest articles, or the backlog.

• Quite an important point: when the article is ready to go live, instead of copying and pasting, it would be preferable to move it to the live area. This will then retain the history of edits made whilst it was undergoing creation. It is important to the principles of the WP:GFDL that history is retained. Note that brand-new users cannot move articles; the account must be 4 days old, and have performed 10 edits.

• If the new users only build an article in their own sandbox, then I doubt that they will have any contact with other users - to encourage such interactions takes a little thought. That's one reason I mentioned about editing other articles first; other ways to get in touch with the community could be use of {{helpme}} or - perhaps more appropriate, given the nature of your course - participating in some Wikipedia discussions, such as the village pump or even (with a little reading about policies) the articles for deletion discussions.

• Instead of linking to WP:starting a new article, I think that WP:FIRST might be more appropriate

• You may wish to mention somewhere about the use of talk pages for discussions - in particular, use of the article talk page, whilst working on an article. When the article is made live, it would be good to add suitable project headers on the talk page, and to collaborate further on that page.

• I see that you've mentioned about referencing, but that really is absolutely essential - it's the biggest challenge they will face in making a new article. Please make absolutely sure they have at least 3 or 4 good, solid, accessible reliable sources before they start. If they have those, it will all be so much easier; if they don't, they will have many problems.

That's it for now. I'm sure we will chat more about this soon. Cheers,  Chzz  ►  04:23, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Welcome, and what pages have you done?

Hi, and congrats to those of you who got your assignment done! I've been able to determine some of the pages you've worked on, such as Pub Golf and Multnomah County Poor Farm. I'm wondering what other pages have been done for the class!

The following discussion has been created to discuss some of the changes. I'd encourage you to let me know what page you created, or edit the conversation below and add it.

• Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Oregon#We have some DYK competition

Hopefully many of you will go on to edit Wikipedia in the future. I hope the class has given you an introduction to editing here, as well as a positive experience while doing so.

Cheers, tedder (talk) 03:06, 2 December 2009 (UTC)