User talk:Educlive

Welcome!

Hello, Educlive, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask for help on your talk page, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Blythwood (talk) 20:28, 25 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Society, Ethics, and Technology course

Greetings, and thanks for leading your college project on improving Wikipedia! I hope this is going well, and I'm always keen to see more coverage of science and technology issues on Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, I've become a little concerned about some of the work done by your students. Several of the articles they have worked on seem to have become duplicates of pre-existing articles: so for instance a Harmful influence of technology which duplicates criticism of technology, Alternative Energies which duplicates the alternative energy article, Human Enhancement( Technological Enhancement) which duplicates human enhancement. Creating new articles on Wikipedia is quite hard to do (especially ones on gigantic themes like "harmful influence of technology"), and basically I'm worried that your students have ended up biting off a bit more than they can chew.

Wikipedia has a policy of one article, one topic, just like in a paper encyclopedia, since it's extremely confusing to our readers if Wikipedia has two articles on the same topic, and so I suspect that some or most of these articles are likely to be deleted within the next few days (you can see discussion of this here). This may end up feeling depressing and frustrating to your students and lead to them feeling that Wikipedia isn't welcoming to new contributors, a feeling I'm keen to avoid.

There is definitely room for them to contribute though: coming up with a subject for a new article is hard and it's far more beneficial for readers to get improvements to pre-existing articles that many people read than new articles on incredibly obscure topics. Let me know if you'd like to discuss this. Blythwood (talk) 20:43, 25 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]