Wikipedia talk:School and university projects/ITESM Campus Toluca

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[edit] WikiMexico Class Project

Hi Thelma,

I think your proposed project is great. If you need advice, please feel free to leave a message on my Talk Page (User talk:Richardshusr).

--Richard 15:25, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

Copied from my talk page...

Thank you for responding to my message about my class project! I figure that the best way to go about this is to learn how to write and submit an article in Wikipedia... that means I will have to do one myself! However, I dont feel that I should do one on Mexico as I am not a native Mexican (I just kinda ingratiate myself over here hee hee hee). Maybe an article on my native NJ or something like that.
I realize that I will be the first and primary resource for my students as they figure out how to do this themselves. To that end, Ill need to be something of an expert. However, if you or any others involved with WikiMexico want to help out as a kind of online mentor... that would be great too, esp. if you guys can read article drafts and comment on the context (what is acceptable or not). It would carry a lot more weight coming from Wikipedia than from me all the time.
While the final project is a new article to submit, in the third evaluation period, I want them to learn their way around Wikipedia and do some minor contributions like adding citations and other things... what other things, fairly easy to write, do you suggest? I thought about translation, maybe an English article into Spanish. Is this something Wikipedia needs?
More pertinent to me right now is to learn how to get around on here.
What a masochist I am!
Thelmadatter 18:54, 22 June 2007 (UTC)Leigh Thelmadatter leigh@itesm.mx or osamadre@hotmail.com


Saludos Thelma,
Thanks for your message. I have lots of ideas for you but I don't have time to write you a detailed message right now. For now, let me ask this: how old are your students and how strong is their command of English?
Also, just on a personal note, you're from Joisey. As the old joke goes... "What exit?" Where in New Jersey are you from? I grew up in New York City and Connecticut (Fairfield County) although I haven't lived there in 20 years. I live in the San Francisco Bay area now. I know some Spanish. Mostly I can read it but I don't speak it or write it very well.
You wrote "More pertinent to me right now is to learn how to get around on here." Do you have any specific questions that I can help with?
Let's continue this conversation here on your Talk Page. That way, anybody else who wants to help can follow what has already been discussed. I have this page on my watchlist so I will know when you post messages here.
You may find it useful to put pages that you edit on your watchlist. You can do this manually by checking the "Watch this page" box just above the "Save Page, Show preview, Show changes" buttons or you can have it done automatically by setting it on the "Watchlist" tab of "my preferences" (upper right hand corner of the window).
Best regards,
--Richard 19:11, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

OK.. still working this out... thanks for your response!

My students are college level (usually first year) and have excellent command of English. To get into my Advanced B class, they must score at least 550 on the TOEFL exam (the requirement to attend a US uni) and many have 600 or higher (677 is the limit). Usually the difficulty I have is getting students used to project-oriented / writing classes as most are used to grammar exercise-based classes.

The course is a semester (Aug-Dec) divided into 4 evaluation periods. Periods 1-3 are about 4 weeks long each and we do all the "instruction" at this time with projects for eval. Period 4 is dedicated to doing the final project. In Periods 1 and 2, I will teach them about culture, language and style and how they interact - with a globalized perspective. In Period 3, I want to start applying what they learn in Periods 1 and 2 by learning to navigate Wiki (in groups) and making "small" contributions. Im thinking of the following: writing a "stub", edit an article adding at least one citation and translating a Wiki article from Spanish to English and submitting it.

To learn this process myself, Ive decided on writing an article on Wicca/Neopaganism in Mexico. I see nothing about this in either the English or Spanish versions and while Im not Mexican, I do know about these religions and have contacts.

I have to admit that Wiki does not seem terribly user-friendly. I find myself frequently lost on here!

Right now, I writing an assignment for the third partial to help guide them in exploring the site. So far, Im recommending that they visit the following pages Your First Article, How To Write a Great Article Wiki Mexico Project and What Wikipedia is not. I will have them register (individually or as a group?) and to post on my talk page. The goals will be to 1) learn what Wikipedia values in contributions, 2) how to communicate in Wikipedia 3) how to find ideas for submissions and last but not least, 4) how to put up a change/new article. Im writing it now. If you like I can send it to you and you can give me feedback if you like.

BTW... left NJ in 1986... but as the saying goes "You can take the girl outta Joisey but..." :D I do die for a decent bagel here tho :( Thelmadatter 15:39, 27 June 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter

OK. Thanks. It took me a while to see your reply because, although I have your Talk Page on my watchlist, I have many pages on my watchlist and sometimes stuff gets by me as apparently this one did. It wasn't until you asked about your edit to Template:Paganism-stub that I saw the message above. Feel free to drop me a reminder on my Talk Page if I don't respond to you here within a few days.
I do agree with what you wrote about Wikipedia not being very user-friendly. It's easy to get started making simple edits but there are actually a lot of deeper concepts to learn and rules to obey. Unfortunately, users often learn some of these rules by breaking them and other users can be less than kind in correcting the errors.
On the other hand, some users try to help newbies come up the learning curve. There are a number of ad-hoc mechanisms by which this happens. One of them is Wikipedia:Adopt-a-User. In some sense, you might say that I have adopted you informally. Wikipedia:Adopt-a-User is just a more formal way of pairing up those seeking adoption with those willing to adopt. Wikipedia:Admin coaching is another mechanism although this is oriented more towards those who would like to become administrators.
You might consider doing the admin coaching thing (I'm willing to coach you). You might consider having your students get "adopted" via Wikipedia:Adopt-a-User. However, this is inherently a "hit or miss" kind of thing. A student might find a great person to adopt them or they could get someone less than ideal. I haven't heard anything bad about the adoption program but I just throw this out as a general caveat. The Internet is both a wonderful and a dangerous place at the same time.
--Richard 17:12, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Neopaganism in Mexico Article

Well, I made my first stub about Wicca and Neopaganism in Mexico Care to check it out and critique it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thelmadatter (talk • contribs)

Moved here from the top of the page. Convention is to add new messages to the bottom of Talk Pages. Putting new messages at the top may lead to them being ignored. I only saw this because I was checking to see if I had put a welcome template at the top. --Richard 17:42, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

[Copied from my Talk Page... let's just continue the discussion here. Feel free to leave a reminder message on my Talk Page if I don't respond within a few days.]

Hi Richard!

I tried to include a stub yesterday using the stub template (for paganism). But it got deleted. Obviously I did something wrong. Can you help me?

Thelmadatter 16:40, 5 July 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter

Thelma,

Your effort yesterday reveals some misconceptions and gaps in your knowledge. This isn't your fault. There's a lot to learn and it's easy to make mistakes.

First, it's important to learn how to use the "history" tab. Go to Template:Paganism-stub and click on the "history" tab at the top of the page. You will see the "edit history" for that page. You will see that User:Jcvamp "reverted" your edit and explained why in the "edit summary", saying "This template is to mark stubs, not to provide info on Mexican Paganism."

This is an important lesson for your students. It can be very confusing and frustrating to make an edit and then have it disappear. The "edit history" is the first place to look for an explanation. Sometimes, the person reverting your edit leaves a clear explanation. Sometimes, they are unclear or don't leave any explanation. Sometimes, the person reverting your edit has a valid reason. Sometimes, they don't.

One thing to avoid doing is getting into an edit war over it. Your students might wish to write that so-and-so from XYZ football team in Mexico is the greatest football player in history. This is clearly unacceptable and they need to be aware that this kind of thing will get reverted fairly quickly. They may wish to write that Felipe Calderón stole the election or that López Obrador is a crybaby. These are also unacceptable and will also get reverted. You will want to teach your students about WP:NPOV, WP:RS and WP:V.

The point here is that the edit summary will usually give a clue as to why an edit has been reverted. However, edit summaries suffer from being short and terse. For more involved discussions, the Talk Page of the article is a better communication medium. Thus, you could have asked your question on Template talk:Paganism-stub and User:Jcvamp might have given you a better explanation. (Or he might not have. It just depends on the individual user and what mood he/she is in.)

Now, my understanding of why User:Jcvamp reverted your edits is that you misunderstood what the purpose of a template is. Read Wikipedia:Template namespace for an explanation of what templates are. For an example of how a template is used, take a look at the Aztec article. Then take a look at Template:Aztec. The Template:Aztec is included on all articles related to the Aztec empire. Go to the Aztec article and try clicking on some of the article titles in the Aztec template. You will find that this template is a navigation template which will let you bounce around articles related to the Aztec empire. For reasons of readability and space, only the important articles related to the Aztec empire are listed on the template but most, if not all, articles related to the Aztec empire have the Aztec template included in them.

So, you should see by now, that including text about paganism in Mexico in the Template:Paganism-stub was a mistake because it put that text on every page that used the template. The purpose of the Template:Paganism-stub is to allow stub articles to be identified as such. Click here to see a list of every article that your text showed up on until User:Jcvamp reverted to the original version of the template.

A more proper location for your text might have been to create a new article titled Paganism in Mexico. There aren't too many articles about "Paganism in X", however, so you might just put the text in the Paganism article. The real question is how much more text do you envision there might be on this topic? If it will never be more than one or two paragraphs, then it would be more appropriate to put it in the Paganism article. If you can envision it being at least 4-5 paragraphs then maybe it warrants an article unto itself.

Hope this helps.

--Richard 17:42, 5 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your response Richard. I did indeed misunderstand what a template was for. I was looking to see how to include something new into Wikipedia. The idea is to first include it as a stub and then expand it myself into an article. I figure many of my students will do likewise as one of thier smaller projects will be to write a stub and their final project will be to write a complete article. I figure most will expand the topic they create as a stub, which is fine. My goal this week is to figure this whole Wikipedia thing out myself, now that Im back all rested from vacation (which is never long enough of course!)

OK... I tried again with the stub and I think I got it right this time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neopaganism_in_Mexico


Thelmadatter 14:54, 16 July 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter

Looks good. I made a few minor fixes which are described in the edit summary of my edit. As explained above, you view the edit summary by clicking on the "history" tab of the article.

One concern that I have about your idea of starting from a stub is that many new articles get nominated for deletion within minutes of creation. The "New Page Patrollers" often look at an article and think "This isn't an encyclopedic topic" or "This topic has already been discussed in the XYZ article." Thus, asking your students to come up with a topic and then create a stub could lead to quite a number of them seeing their work get nominated for merging of deletion before the day is out.

It might be good for them to come up with a list of ideas and then run it by a group that has a better perspective of what is and is not likely to be nominated for deletion. WP:MEXICO is probably a good place to look if the topics are going to be about Mexico.

That, by the way, is something that you will have to decide. What if some of your students want to write about something else that is not strictly related to Mexico? Will you allow that? If so, then the students will want to find the appropriate Wikiproject for their article. Of course, there may not be a Wikiproject that covers that topic. If that happens, you will have to improvise and try to find an appropriate community of editors who are interested in that topic.

Keep up the good work and feel free to ask for help if you need it. If you need help quickly, you can put {{help me}} on this page and someone will come around to help. The {{help me}} puts your Talk Page on a list of pages that have requested help. A bunch of generous Wikipedians voluntarily monitor that list to see who needs help. The amount of time that it takes to get help varies though depending on how many people are monitoring the list at any given time.

--Richard 17:13, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Thanks again Richard!

So youre saying that my students should run thier topic by the folks at the applicable project before posting. OK... I can have them do that before they write the stub... that way when they write the full article, they wont have to worry. Most of my students are Mexican and I want them to write articles in English using Spanish-language resources. When I introduce Wikipedia to them, I have them look at the article "Music in Mexico" and critique it. They usually have a LOT to say about the accuracy of the article. Doing that with prior classes gave me the idea of this project BTW. What I hope it will do is to peak their interest in doing something to give the world a more accurate picture of their country - which they know in a way that foreigners like you and me cannot. I will probably have students from some other Latin American countries - in which case, they can contact the WikiProjects associated with those countries. I would rather they stick with these areas, but if a group (they are doing this in groups) comes to me and really wants to do something else, I can be flexible. Ill require that there be a WikiProject associated with their idea.

I noticed that the WikiProject Mexico page has suggestions for contributions. That should help a lot also. Richard..

[edit] Structure of group pages

I would propose that every student create their own user account. That way, if there is any question of impropriety, it will be easier to determine who was responsible. It will also help you figure out which student needs extra help or merits extra recognition.

However, each group should create a project page. The project page could be named something unwieldy like Wikipedia:School and university projects/ITESM Campus Toluca/Group 1, etc. or you could have them choose shorter names like Wikipedia:ITESM Toluca Group 1. Whatever name, they choose, they can always create shortcuts like WP:ITESM Grp 1. This way, all group discussions will be held on the group page while Wikipedia signatures will identify the individual contributions of both students and mentors to the discussions.

This may be what you were thinking but it wasn't clear in what you wrote and I figured it would be good to spell it out.

--Richard 21:25, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Group Pages

I think that having 2 kinds of pages (group and individual) is going to be too difficult for me. In group work, all sink or swim... if there is impropriety (which I dont expect) then it is the impropriety of the group. I dont think I can monitor 64 individual pages (if I have 2 full classes). 16 pages will be quite enough. If students want to have individual pages on their own, that is no problem, but they wont be part of the project. While Wikipedia is the focus of the semester, it is not the only grade they receive. There are individual assignments. The contributions to Wikipedia is of the group, not any individual.

As for my name... don't worry.. a lot of people get confused about it. My first name is Leigh and my last is Thelmadatter. I dont sweat it when people call me Thelma, esp. online. My last name is one I created - Thelma was my mom's name (she died in 1983) and datter is Norwegian for daughter (I have Norwegian heritage). So its my little way to honor her. Also makes an interesting way to introduce myself on the first day of class!

Thelmadatter 16:26, 31 July 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter

I understand your concern about "having to monitor 64 user pages" and I agree that would be burdensome. However, you could make it clear to the students that you will not monitor user pages and user talk pages. Only the group project pages will be monitored and considered for grading. The key here is to differentiate between the individual user (who may or may not have an associated user and user talk page) and the group page.
What I would counsel against is having several students share a single username. (Actually, it's arguably against Wikipedia policy. It is arguable that shared usernames are subject to blocking. I've started a thread on Wikipedia talk:Blocking policy to get some clarification on this.)
Thus, I propose that each student set up their own user account and do all their course-related discussion on the project page for their group.
This will also help students understand who is saying what. If students in a group are having a dialogue on the project talk page, the Wikipedia signatures will indicate who wrote what and help everyone follow the thread of the discussion.
We still need to discuss how to name these project pages. You will need to decide whether to impose a convention (e.g. Project 1, 2, 3, etc) or just let each group come up with their own page name. You could let the students organize their groups, choose their projects and register them with you by editing the class project page. What you would need to do is create a section on the class project page where each group can add a link to their project page.
--Richard 18:30, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How to link educational assignment to my project page?

I have put the template on a number of pages including the ones for machaca Music of Mexico Neopaganism in Mexico and Mexico City I tried putting the short cut and the full URL but clicking on the link only puts be on the main school projects info page.

Thelmadatter 13:23, 2 August 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter

I have added the {{EducationalAssignment}} template to the Talk Page of each article. The template will work if you put it on the article page but that would violate Wikipedia policy about keeping that kind of administrative stuff on the Talk Pages.
Next time, please specify the name of the template like so Template:EducationalAssignment. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about. Once I understood the problem, the solution was fairly straightforward.
--Richard 19:44, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks again Richard... I see where I had a problem. I dont eliminate the "link=" portion of the template, just put the link after it.

Thelmadatter 14:09, 3 August 2007 (UTC)Thelmadatter


Shocked heads 100 word comment

After reading the Shocked heads documents I could see the complexity of this project. We must focus on doing what we must do. We must put our effort and use all of our abilities in order to do the best work that we can. This won’t be easy to achieve, but we have your support, our previous knowledge and some help from our new and old classmates. It is important to have the help of experts and assessors. This is a serious project. This experience will be so exciting and interesting for us for we had never done something like this before. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ader51 (talk • contribs) 02:11, 25 September 2007 (UTC)