User talk:CogPsyProf

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Welcome

Hello, CogPsyProf! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already excited about Wikipedia, you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field when making edits to pages. Happy editing! Smallman12q (talk) 22:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC) Getting Started The five pillars of Wikipedia • Tutorial • Your first article How to: edit a page • upload an image Getting Help Frequently Asked Questions New contributors' help page Where to: ask questions • make requests Request administrator attention Policies and Guidelines Neutral point of view • Reliable sources Verifiability • Citing sources • No original research What Wikipedia is not • Biographies of living persons Simplified Manual of Style • Three-revert rule Copyrights • Policy for non-free content • Image use policy External links • Spam • Vandalism • Sock puppetry Deletion policy • Conflict of interest • Notability The Community Community Portal • Adopt-a-user program Assume good faith • Civility • Etiquette No personal attacks • Resolving disputes Build consensus • Village pump Signpost • IRC channels • Mailing lists Things to do Be bold in editing • Help develop an article Maintenance • Peer review • Requested articles Join a WikiProject • Translating articles Cleaning up: General • Spam • Vandalism Miscellaneous Categories • Disambiguity • Stubs User pages • Talk pages Useful templates • Tools • User scripts

Talkback

Hello, CogPsyProf. You have new messages at Smallman12q's talk page.
Message added 22:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Smallman12q (talk) 22:19, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Psychology course

Hi, I have recently stumped on your course since I have been one of the main contributors to the stroop effect article. Regarding your course proposal I believe it is a sensible one in its aims are certanly in line with Wikipedia ways and objectives. I specially appreciate the effort of including secondary sources and improving already developed articles by adding content to specific sections instead of very low importance stubs. I will try to help with the stroo article, and maybe others, although I will not promise anything since I have been disconnected from wikipedia for a year and only recently come back.

Once said that, I have taken a look to your article proposals and I have some issues with (at least) two of them:

• Schema is a disambiguation page: a list page linking to several articles with similar names but different concepts. If you look through it you will find the link to schema (psychology). You might be or might not be interested in developing the latter, but you should certainly do not include psychology content in the disambiguation page.

• Autism: autism is a Wikipedia:featured article: This means that it is considered one of the best wikipedia articles and while not completely finished very mature. Featured articles are not a good assigments for beginners, since consensus and good knowledge of both the content of the article and wikipedia ways are specially required. A possibility would be that you created an specific secondary article (something like recognition of emotions in autism and then added a link to this secondary article in the main page. A probably better alternative is that you improved the autism section in the theory of mind article

Bests.--Garrondo (talk) 08:21, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. As a newbie to Wikipedia, I hope I am responding to you in the correct format, but if not, please help me llearn how to do this properly within Wikipedia culture. In terms of your topic concerns, please do not let the schema topic worry you; none of my students chose this particular option so we will not be addressing this one.

In terms of autism, the students are working on very specific pieces that are not covered in the overview article (e.g., work on face recognition and autism). They will NOT be doing overview pieces; they will be supplementing.

CogPsyProf (talk) 17:54, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Regarding if this is the best way to answer. This is what talk pages are for :-). Moreover I hope that my comments did not sound intimidating or agressive, and the intent is only to make things as easier and benifitial as possible to both students and wikipedia.

Regarding autism: I am not sure if I understant what do you mean with "supplementing": I am sure there are many other data out there not covered in the overview article at this point, but my question is if the idea of your students is to include this new info in the main article of autism or in a secondary article. I would certanly recommend the latter per reasons stated above.

On the other hand, as I told you I was one of the main contributors to the stroop article. At the time of writting I found several interesting scientific reviews on the issue. I integrated some info but there was much more. Do you think that it will be interesting if I pointed out those sources to the students that have taken the stroop article, or do you prefer if they searched for their own sources?

--Garrondo (talk) 20:06, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Great news that I am on the right track for these communications--with so much new I mess up regularly. For topics like those related to autism, I like the idea of a secondary article that links from the main summary article and will talk to the relevant students about that. RE Stroop, you are welcome to share with those students--that seems like a good Wikipedia community learning experience--but if you could hold off until AFTER next Monday (2/18) that would be very helpful. The students DO need to do their own research and after they post their plans (Monday), feedback like yours will be quite useful. Thank you so much for asking! There are lots of things to juggle when meeting course goals as well as Wikipedia goals, and I very much appreciate your sensitivity to that.CogPsyProf (talk) 15:21, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

You certainly are in the good track: most important thing is to ask and hear other editors. As minor commments on wiki-etiquette since you are new (I mainly tell you since your students are prone to make similar mistakes): 1try not to break other comments:-You inserted your comment between my comment and my signature so it was not clear who was "speaking". 2-Always sign your comments (even in your talk page) so it is clear who has said what, third botton on top of editing bar (pen-like) is for signing. 3-Try to indent comments so every time we speak it goes one level to the right to give a sense of "time". To do it so you have to include as many ":" before your paragraph as indents you want to make. Bests. --Garrondo (talk) 20:45, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks for the help! Habits from email (inserting replies after each issue raised) will be tough to break, but I've tried practicing by editing my prior mistakes. These will be good reminders for my students so again, thanks! CogPsyProf (talk) 15:21, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Importance of secondary sources

Re-reading the educational assigment I have just noticed that students were required to add 10 peer-reviewed sources, but no indication on the kind of sources was included. As you might now use of primary sources (and this includes most peer-reviewed scientific articles) is discouraged in wikipedia. Ideal sources would be secondary sources, mostly peer-reviewd review articles. This is so for all wikipedia, but specially so for "medical" articles (I know that psychology is not medicine but there is a clear overlap in wikipedia articles so take "medical" in a very broad sense). See Identifying_reliable_sources and Identifying reliable sources for medical articles

Your assigment would have a much better impact in wikipedia if students are asked to mainly base their improvements in secondary scientific sources (mainly reviews).

Bests.--Garrondo (talk) 12:06, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

@Garrondo, Most of the courses in Wikipedia:USEP use academic databases such as PsycINFO or Academic Search. Students are encouraged to use peer-reviewed secondary sources from these databases.Smallman12q (talk) 23:24, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Autism

Hi CogPsyProf,

I'm a very concerned about the choice of Autism for student homework. This is a featured article and generally considered to be comprehensive. It gets 10,000 page hits a day so is highly visible and read. Therefore it is less likely to benefit (and more likely to be harmed) by newbie student edits. I'm not at all sure that a whole section on "face recognition" is helpful for that article. I see several students have picked this for their homework. The article currently states "Older children and adults with ASD perform worse on tests of face and emotion recognition" but nothing more on the issue. I don't believe face recognition is recognised as a defining characteristic or symptom of autism, and we don't devote whole sections to any of those that are. Possibly a better approach would be to add information about autism (and what this teaches us about brain development and function) to the face perception article. Please avoid feature articles for homework assignments. Regards, Colin°^Talk 16:10, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, Colin, thanks for your note. Let me quote from a conversation on my online ambassador's talk page (where we were talking with a different user) as your concern "may raise an issue for the Wikipedia education initiative that could be helpful to raise with its directors. As some background information, when I asked for guidance about picking articles for students to work on, I was told by my area coordinator (distinct from my online ambassador) that I should just read articles and see what needed to be worked on because there are thousands of topics that need work. The vast majority of topics I listed for students had indications that they were pages that needed work (messages across the top of the pages to that effect). In the rare case that I listed a topic about a featured article, it was to add a missing subtopic....All of this is to say that perhaps the Wikipedia education inititive folks could give more guidance to instructors--particularly rookies--and your comments may have a broader impact if you took them up with the education initiative folks as opposed to one professor." My online ambassador is passing this suggestion along.

As for student work, it will be posted on new pages that link from the Autism page, none of them will be posting directly on the Autism page so there will be no "whole section" on the Autism page itself. I'd also like to note that my online ambassador, who is vastly more experienced with Wikipedia than I am, noted that the Autism page earned featured article status in 2007 and much has changed within Wikipedia since then. With knowledge advancing each year, adding links off of a very good Wikipedia page seems to me to be a useful service and I am glad that my students can combine their interest in autism with their skills in resesarch on this Wikepedia education initiative effort. All best wishes, CogPsyProf (talk) 18:13, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

The Advice for choosing articles handout lists Featured Articles in the "Don't" column. Your own education program page advises against picking FA or GA and specifically mentions Autism as one to circle around rather than tackle directly. So this is standard advice. I see now Smallman12q's comments on his talk page re Autism's FAQ. Well the Autism article is largely the work of User:Eubulides who was probably Wikipedia's finest medical editors and although he achieved the FA award in 2007, he continued to work on the article, almost daily, till March 2010. The sourcing is first class and it is fair to say Eubulides work set the standard for medical FAs and not at all fair to say this wouldn't pass today's standards. Sadly Eubulides isn't editing here any more. Since then the article has been well-tended by many editors in the Medicine wikiproject, though it could do with an update here and there. I came here because your program page had, as an assignment, the task of adding a section to the Autism article on face recognition. I'm glad to hear this is no longer the assignment. BTW, see Talk:Autism -- it is ironic that the sources the students have so-far gathered are no newer than 2007 and some considerably older and out-of-date. Colin°^Talk 20:46, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Hello again, Colin. Please note that some of the resources added to the course page were added after the list of articles was posted. Timing is everything! As for your response to Smallman12q's comments, I am newbie enough that I cannot comment. I do hope, however, that we can follow the fourth pillar of Wikipedia to "Act in good faith, and assume good faith on the part of others. Be open and welcoming." Wikipedia:Five_pillars. Both my students and I are new to Wikipedia and we are doing our best to learn the culture as we work on this project. We appreciate constructive comments. All best wishes, CogPsyProf (talk) 21:34, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Some notes

In response to User:Garrondo comments above, I've left a few notes at the course page.Smallman12q (talk) 15:25, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks to you both for your comments. CogPsyProf (talk) 17:54, 13 February 2013 (UTC)