User talk:Schapos

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// Timothy :: talk 03:51, 5 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Insufficiently notable topics for course projects

Hi, Schapos (and cc: @Helaine (Wiki Ed): and @Ian (Wiki Ed): — you appear to be in charge of UIC Math 300, a course that has come to my attention for its production of Draft:Nina Zubrilina and Draft:Sarah Brodsky, two young mathematicians who are on promising career tracks but appear to be far from meeting Wikipedia's standards for academic notability. I am concerned that either you have been setting your students up for failure, or that they have not paid attention when you covered Wikipedia's notability requirements for the selection of their course topics. Can you please remind your students to make sure that the people they have selected for their projects are adequately notable? For academics, that generally means that they are at least full professors (some associate professors and the very rare assistant professor can be notable but discerning that is not always easy) and that they have some accomplishment that can be documented in reliable sources that makes them stand out from the ordinary full professor. For more details see WP:PROF and WP:AUTHOR, which detail several of these possible ways of standing out (having highly cited publications or well-reviewed books, being the head editor of a journal, head of a major society, or head of a whole university, having some special professorial title beyond full professor, etc). As it is, your students are creating work for other volunteers with these submissions that is likely to end up in article deletion, no improvement to the encyclopedia, and frustration for your students. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:21, 13 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

PS also this generally means professors at research universities, not community colleges — Marta Hidegkuti is very likely to be deleted for similar reasons. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:28, 13 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Article selection

I notice that one of your students is working on Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and wish to express my unease at this choice. The timeline of your project makes it clear that it is best suited to either new articles or those existing articles which are either stubs, or have very little existing content.

The version currently in your student's sandbox is currently just a paraphrase of part of the existing article. More importantly though, is that I can see little prospect that your student's efforts will add anything significant or worthwhile to the article. This is not a reflection on your student; rather that the existing article, although far from perfect, already covers most of what needs to be said about the topic. I am uneasy because I don't want to dishearten or demoralise your student by having to revert his or her work. It would be much better if your student would chose either to write a brand-new article (provided, of course, that it meets notability requirements), or to expand a small existing article. I think it is too much to ask a raw beginner to completely re-write a substantial existing article.

Pedagogically, one of the most valuable lessons of this course is getting your students to find and use good sources. Your student won't benefit in this way from editing an article which already has all or most of the sources needed, another reason to choose a different article!

Congratulations, by the way, to the student who wrote Jenna Carpenter – good work from a beginner.

--NSH001 (talk) 12:03, 14 February 2020 (UTC)[reply]

P.S. A few points:

The article is written in British English – see WP:ENGVAR. So we would never write, for example, "graduated with a bachelor's in physics".
The article is written using short-form referencing – see WP:CITEVAR. I'm aware this takes extra effort to learn, but once your students understand it, they will find it makes articles easier to write and to edit, not least because it gets rid of all the horrible citation clutter.
Quite a few other points (both factual errors and style problems), but I'm sure your resident expert will point them out!
The main point remains: choose a different article!

Follow-up

Not sure whether or not either you or your student have even seen my message above, but here's a suggestion for what I think might be an interesting and appropriate article to work on: Carmen Magallón.

Kind regards, NSH001 (talk) 14:16, 1 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]