I'm teaching an advanced experience course for senior college students called "Environmental Disruptors of Development". We've identified some stubs relevant to our course material, and over this semester students will work independently on these topics. I welcome any help that the wiki community can provide! You can learn about our wikipedia project guidelines at User:Hakeleh/BI513 Fall 2011.
Drmies! Your welcome message is great- thanks. Hopefully they will do the tutorial for students, and I'll put the education assignment banner on my pages too. Hakeleh ( talk) 03:14, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
The ambassador working with another BC class is User:GabrielF. Nice course page you've got! If you'd like to use one of our new semi-automated course pages (which have built-in tables for enrolled students and which articles they are working on, and also has some tools for following what your students are doing) it would be easy to port that over. Here's what our new course page system looks like: Education Program:Example University/Example Course (2013 Q1). (You can enroll in that if you like, to see how it works. Check out the "Summary and students" section at the bottom, which is the automated part.)-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 12:30, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Sage and Drmies- let me know what you think! I have a bit more polishing to do of the more detailed syllabus. Hakeleh ( talk) 02:24, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello. It looks like you don't have an online ambassador for your Developmental Biology (Spring 2013) course. If you need one, I'm available. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll sign myself up. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 19:03, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Hi Smallman12q! Would be super to have an online ambassador! Join us! I'm planning an in class wikipedia work session on Thursday the 14th. Hakeleh ( talk) 21:32, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello! So sorry for the delay posting to the main page. All three of us had all our information on three separate computers and didn't have a time to meet and put it all together until tonight. As you can see now (hopefully) our article is up and running! Claritycr ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:40, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
Hello,
I've started looking over some of the contributions and have a few suggestions. I'll do more thorough reviews later on.
Overall, the articles are pretty good for first time editors. A lot of the developmental biology and embryology are in rather lousy shape (many aren't even tagged with a wikiproject) so these contributions are an improvement.
I will nominate several of the articles for Did you know so they'll appear on the Main Page under the "Did you know...".
If you have any questions, feel free to let me know here, my talk page, or via email. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 23:34, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
I've nominated the articles that qualify (9 of them) for DYK...you can follow their progress at Education Program talk:Boston College/Developmental Biology (Spring 2013)/DYK. I don't really have specifics as to how best to wikify...it's akin to learning how to write journal papers...takes practice. Relevant terms should be wikilinked once in the intro, and once in the rest of the article. When wikilinking plural, do like so: [[transcription factor]]s putting the s outside the brackets which shows as " transcription factors". Some articles like Silencer (DNA) have almost no wikilinks...and they should. Paragraphs should be written clearly and succinctly. Every paragaph should have at least one citation (more inline citations, rather than one at the end are better, even if its the same one). The WikiProjects aren't very active as a whole anymore as there are so many articles now...rather, editors watch certain categories of those projects or certain articles via the WP:Watchlist. Regarding the tags, those are the messages you on the talk pages that state "This article is within the scope of Wikiproject so and so....". The messages come from wikiproject templates such as Biology, Genetics, Medicine...etc The templates appear at the top of the talk page in the form of
{{WikiProject Biology|class=C|importance=low}} {{WikiProject Genetics|class=C|importance=low}}
The class tells the article's quality according to their wikiproject's scales such as Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biology/Assessment#Quality_scale. The importance tells the article importance in that project from top to mid to low. The tags also add the article to relevant wikiproject categories/watchlists so they'll be watched. The tags and assesments are generally added by more experienced wikipedians...so you don't need to worry about them now. The lack of tags indicates a lack of activity.Also, don't worry about the citation reuse too much, there's a bot that can autofix that now=). If you need anything else, let me know. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 23:52, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
The histone methylation dyk is up. I've saved a screenshot at http://i.imgur.com/XfO0lXv.png in case you miss it. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 00:15, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
I didn't really provide much feedback, but overall, for new editors, the articles turned out quite good! Wikilinking, secondary sources for most of the content, proper layout, and images were well done=). Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 02:41, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for all of your support, Smallman12q! The feedback I've received so far from the students has been very positive (they save the negative stuff for the anonymous evaluations, of course!). I thought it went very well. Of course I am working on grading them now! I'll be doing this same project again in the Fall (teaching the same class). Do you have suggestions on tweaks for next time around? Want to be our ambassador again (or perhaps I should let you recover before asking....!). Have a great summer. AND- thanks so much for the DYK nominations. I think we ended up with 4 pages up there! Students were VERY stoked about this (although possible not more than I was!). Very fun to see the page views bounce up. Hakeleh ( talk) 15:23, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Hi Hakeleh! I was poking through the course list for Fall 2013 and saw you are teaching a Developmental Biology course that doesn't have an online ambassador. I would love to be an ambassador for your course if you still need one! Best, Keilana| Parlez ici 03:00, 7 August 2013 (UTC)
Hey Kay! I did it! And just moved the table to my course page. I had made the table in excel, then saved it this time around in a tab delimited instead of csv delimited file. Then copy pasted and polished up some of the wikitext in the edit source box. Didn't even mess with the beta editor. Thanks very much for offering to fix it up for me- I was quite tied to the task, and once I fiddle a little this morning I realized I had it figured out. Don't worry- I'll use you A LOT in the coming months! AND- So far I have 22 students in the class, which means 7 groups working on 7 different wikipedia pages. I'll get in touch with klortho and see if he wants to join the party. If you two think that just one OA is enough for this course, then maybe we don't need klortho. You two can decide. Enjoy Hong Kong and the last days of summer! Hakeleh ( talk) 15:05, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
Keilana| Parlez ici 18:53, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia chemistry has had an uneven experience with these homework assignments. See this discussion Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemistry#New_articles_from_a_class_project. Some suggestions:
Best wishes, -- Smokefoot ( talk) 00:06, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
I noticed in a couple threads you expressed concerns about students' access to certain sources. Have you heard of the Wikipedia Library? Its purpose is, more or less, to facilitate good research and to get good sources in the hands of Wikipedia editors. To that end it has partnered with a number of databases/journals to provide free access to Wikipedians. But to address the matter of access to specific sources e.g. Smokefoot recommends, there's the Resource Exchange. Basically the idea is that you request a particular article and if someone there has access to it -- and if it's through a database that allows sharing for educational purposes -- they will send it to you. I would advise taking a look at the Exchange policy though, as it does sometimes wade into the murky areas of fair use. Just an idea. If you use it, I'd be curious to hear about your experience. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 15:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)
I'm teaching an advanced experience course for senior college students called "Environmental Disruptors of Development". We've identified some stubs relevant to our course material, and over this semester students will work independently on these topics. I welcome any help that the wiki community can provide! You can learn about our wikipedia project guidelines at User:Hakeleh/BI513 Fall 2011.
Drmies! Your welcome message is great- thanks. Hopefully they will do the tutorial for students, and I'll put the education assignment banner on my pages too. Hakeleh ( talk) 03:14, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
The ambassador working with another BC class is User:GabrielF. Nice course page you've got! If you'd like to use one of our new semi-automated course pages (which have built-in tables for enrolled students and which articles they are working on, and also has some tools for following what your students are doing) it would be easy to port that over. Here's what our new course page system looks like: Education Program:Example University/Example Course (2013 Q1). (You can enroll in that if you like, to see how it works. Check out the "Summary and students" section at the bottom, which is the automated part.)-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 12:30, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
Sage and Drmies- let me know what you think! I have a bit more polishing to do of the more detailed syllabus. Hakeleh ( talk) 02:24, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello. It looks like you don't have an online ambassador for your Developmental Biology (Spring 2013) course. If you need one, I'm available. If you're interested, let me know, and I'll sign myself up. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 19:03, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Hi Smallman12q! Would be super to have an online ambassador! Join us! I'm planning an in class wikipedia work session on Thursday the 14th. Hakeleh ( talk) 21:32, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello! So sorry for the delay posting to the main page. All three of us had all our information on three separate computers and didn't have a time to meet and put it all together until tonight. As you can see now (hopefully) our article is up and running! Claritycr ( talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:40, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
Hello,
I've started looking over some of the contributions and have a few suggestions. I'll do more thorough reviews later on.
Overall, the articles are pretty good for first time editors. A lot of the developmental biology and embryology are in rather lousy shape (many aren't even tagged with a wikiproject) so these contributions are an improvement.
I will nominate several of the articles for Did you know so they'll appear on the Main Page under the "Did you know...".
If you have any questions, feel free to let me know here, my talk page, or via email. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 23:34, 4 April 2013 (UTC)
I've nominated the articles that qualify (9 of them) for DYK...you can follow their progress at Education Program talk:Boston College/Developmental Biology (Spring 2013)/DYK. I don't really have specifics as to how best to wikify...it's akin to learning how to write journal papers...takes practice. Relevant terms should be wikilinked once in the intro, and once in the rest of the article. When wikilinking plural, do like so: [[transcription factor]]s putting the s outside the brackets which shows as " transcription factors". Some articles like Silencer (DNA) have almost no wikilinks...and they should. Paragraphs should be written clearly and succinctly. Every paragaph should have at least one citation (more inline citations, rather than one at the end are better, even if its the same one). The WikiProjects aren't very active as a whole anymore as there are so many articles now...rather, editors watch certain categories of those projects or certain articles via the WP:Watchlist. Regarding the tags, those are the messages you on the talk pages that state "This article is within the scope of Wikiproject so and so....". The messages come from wikiproject templates such as Biology, Genetics, Medicine...etc The templates appear at the top of the talk page in the form of
{{WikiProject Biology|class=C|importance=low}} {{WikiProject Genetics|class=C|importance=low}}
The class tells the article's quality according to their wikiproject's scales such as Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biology/Assessment#Quality_scale. The importance tells the article importance in that project from top to mid to low. The tags also add the article to relevant wikiproject categories/watchlists so they'll be watched. The tags and assesments are generally added by more experienced wikipedians...so you don't need to worry about them now. The lack of tags indicates a lack of activity.Also, don't worry about the citation reuse too much, there's a bot that can autofix that now=). If you need anything else, let me know. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 23:52, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
The histone methylation dyk is up. I've saved a screenshot at http://i.imgur.com/XfO0lXv.png in case you miss it. Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 00:15, 11 April 2013 (UTC)
I didn't really provide much feedback, but overall, for new editors, the articles turned out quite good! Wikilinking, secondary sources for most of the content, proper layout, and images were well done=). Cheers. Smallman12q ( talk) 02:41, 3 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for all of your support, Smallman12q! The feedback I've received so far from the students has been very positive (they save the negative stuff for the anonymous evaluations, of course!). I thought it went very well. Of course I am working on grading them now! I'll be doing this same project again in the Fall (teaching the same class). Do you have suggestions on tweaks for next time around? Want to be our ambassador again (or perhaps I should let you recover before asking....!). Have a great summer. AND- thanks so much for the DYK nominations. I think we ended up with 4 pages up there! Students were VERY stoked about this (although possible not more than I was!). Very fun to see the page views bounce up. Hakeleh ( talk) 15:23, 10 May 2013 (UTC)
Hi Hakeleh! I was poking through the course list for Fall 2013 and saw you are teaching a Developmental Biology course that doesn't have an online ambassador. I would love to be an ambassador for your course if you still need one! Best, Keilana| Parlez ici 03:00, 7 August 2013 (UTC)
Hey Kay! I did it! And just moved the table to my course page. I had made the table in excel, then saved it this time around in a tab delimited instead of csv delimited file. Then copy pasted and polished up some of the wikitext in the edit source box. Didn't even mess with the beta editor. Thanks very much for offering to fix it up for me- I was quite tied to the task, and once I fiddle a little this morning I realized I had it figured out. Don't worry- I'll use you A LOT in the coming months! AND- So far I have 22 students in the class, which means 7 groups working on 7 different wikipedia pages. I'll get in touch with klortho and see if he wants to join the party. If you two think that just one OA is enough for this course, then maybe we don't need klortho. You two can decide. Enjoy Hong Kong and the last days of summer! Hakeleh ( talk) 15:05, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
Keilana| Parlez ici 18:53, 20 August 2013 (UTC)
Wikipedia chemistry has had an uneven experience with these homework assignments. See this discussion Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Chemistry#New_articles_from_a_class_project. Some suggestions:
Best wishes, -- Smokefoot ( talk) 00:06, 3 February 2015 (UTC)
I noticed in a couple threads you expressed concerns about students' access to certain sources. Have you heard of the Wikipedia Library? Its purpose is, more or less, to facilitate good research and to get good sources in the hands of Wikipedia editors. To that end it has partnered with a number of databases/journals to provide free access to Wikipedians. But to address the matter of access to specific sources e.g. Smokefoot recommends, there's the Resource Exchange. Basically the idea is that you request a particular article and if someone there has access to it -- and if it's through a database that allows sharing for educational purposes -- they will send it to you. I would advise taking a look at the Exchange policy though, as it does sometimes wade into the murky areas of fair use. Just an idea. If you use it, I'd be curious to hear about your experience. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 15:35, 3 March 2015 (UTC)