It seems that those running this course did not give (or did not succeed in conveying) to the students a proper grounding in WP:V, WP:RS and WP:GNG.Sometimes there's a gap between what's written and what people take away from what's written, but we do communicate these concepts to thousands of students each term. We could say more in our trainings, but longer, more detailed instructions don't equal better retention (cf the existence of "tldr").
Those policies are absolutely fundamental to writing any article on en.wp, yet the students who have commented seems to be woefully lacking in that understanding; one even suggested dding refs to press releases as evidence of notability. I count that as grave failing by the course director, and more broadly by WikiEd.Yes, something didn't connect here. In a conversation with Mkibona after the blow-up, she mentioned that the students why they didn't use the sources she supplied in class, for some reason. Sometimes people don't get it. But there were almost 6,000 students last term, who worked on over 6,000 articles. The vast majority did much, much better than the average brand new editor - because of the training and support we provide.
I remain concerned at the lack of expertise and experienceI suspect there aren't more than 100 people who have more expertise with article creation or policy than I do. And after supporting tens of thousands of new editors over the last 7+ years, I don't believe there's anyone who has more experience working with new editors. I did my best working with the students who wrote the BWR article, I exchanged many messages with them trying to help them understand the issues of V, N and RS. That I failed goes without saying. But it wasn't for lack of either experience or expertise. Guettarda (talk) 00:22, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
very unlikely that a 15yo is suitably experienced to be able to assess the significance and availability of sources related to a politically-contentious topic which is not well-covered in mainstream media: I do not really see the concern here? If the nominator's assessment is wrong, the AfD process would typically result in the article being kept. Also, even in the case where there are sources out there somewhere that would show notability but they are not found during the AfD and the article ends up deleted... later, any editor who knows of or finds those sources can recreate the article, and the article they create would likely be better for using those sources than the deleted one was. Kind regards from PJvanMill)talk( 21:11, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
There is a desire to increase coverage of under-represented topic areas and to increase involvement of editors from under-represented demographics. However, combining the two isn't the ideal solution.- But there's a reason these two are connected, and combining the two is unavoidable without telling people "please stop writing about the things that are relevant to you -- let people of other demographics write about them instead". Dealing with systemic bias, both on and off-wiki, can be high-risk (at least in the sense of the weight of context), and just the fact of being underrepresented (subjects or people) makes them a bit trickier and weightier in some ways. If we actually want to bring more people to Wikipedia and cover more topics, we have to be ready to face some of that risk and potential challenges. I do want to be clear, though, that my response, at least, is a bit of an abstract tangent in that I'm not saying any Wikipedian should have to deal with the kinds of Tweets mentioned above. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 23:06, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
increase coverage of under-represented topic areas and to increase involvement of editors from under-represented demographics. However, combining the two isn't the ideal solution.
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