RS UBC800

Student homework

Be cautious with the Wikipedia homework project. Most of the pages are patrolled by PhD (or more) folk who have high standards and sometimes only moderate patience. It is helpful if the faculty supervisor is directly involved and has some experience editing Wikipedia. Please get the student to rely on textbook information. Undergraduates are rarely capable of selecting suitable journal literature, and most of what they select will be generic safety advice, which is not what is needed for article improvement. See WP:TERTIARY. My apologies for the grim message, but we have seen a lot of undergrad projects dumped here over the years. One possible approach is for the students to disclose their plans on the talk pages of their assigned topic. --Smokefoot (talk) 21:42, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice. Students have recently been working on deciding what improvements their chosen article needs and have been tasked with summarizing those needs on the article's talk page. Hopefully that generates helpful discussion before the student starts editing in their sandbox.

Was your point about generic safety advice geared to a particular article?

Stoodley UBC (talk) 22:54, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Incidentally, I see that you're a fan of Ullmann's Encyclopedia. That, along with the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia, was highlighted in-class today as a potential information source.

Stoodley UBC (talk) 22:57, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I have taught often with Wikipedia and learned that (US) juniors and seniors are barely able to contribute useful information because they just lack knowledge. I mean your dueling with high-level folk here. It eventually dawned on me that I needed to push students to basically recite textbook info where it was missing. So I gave them reviews or books to reprocess. The ultimate sources (in my opinion) are Ullmann's and Kirk-Othmer because they meet the WP:TERTIARY standard (review of a review). These sources show student what is really useful vs "applications" that are often hyped by my academic colleagues. The main problem with these encyclopedias is that they are behind a paywall, which prevents the public from consulting them or checking on the claims based on them.

Students will Google their assigned topic, naturally. Most of the hits will be about safety issued by many govt agencies. The verbage all looks very important and is understandable to the students. Since the students are under the impression that they are being graded per word, they will expound upon safety, LD50's, pollution incidents, biodegradation, on and on. Only a fraction of that material is high quality. The kids think they have done good, but they have actually veered off from the prof's goal that they learn and propagate technical knowledge. And Wikipedia-Chem is about hard core technical knowledge.--Smokefoot (talk) 00:59, 11 March 2023 (UTC)