User talk:Ppowers29

test

Hello

Hi,

• I'm bobrayner, and I'd like to help out with your course. If you have any questions, just ask...
• Please bear in mind that creating a new article can be a lot harder for new editors, compared to just improving an existing article.
• What's the schedule - when does work start? Do you have a list of students/accounts?
• I've tweaked the formatting of this page - hopefully it now looks a bit more like what you intended. Sorry - text formatting on wikipedia (bullets, lists, indents, etc.) can be a bit clunky and counterintuitive sometimes.

Have fun; bobrayner (talk) 16:22, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi - are you still around? Any more detail of schedule (and of students) would be helpful. (Please don't feel that I'm nagging you; if the course only starts a few weeks from now then there's no rush). If you need a hand with anything, just shout... bobrayner (talk) 01:29, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi,

It looks like quite a lot of students have set up accounts now, but I think there are two (Keosha Perris & Taya Eberle) who haven't set up accounts yet. Or if they have accounts, they haven't edited somewhere obvious so I don't know what their accountnames are. Could you check? Once the students page is complete, it will be very helpful. In the meantime I've sent a welcome message to everyone else and am watching their pages. bobrayner (talk) 14:01, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Hello

Hi Penny,

Mitkrow here. It says we are supposed to write on the other students pages but there are currently no links so I figured I would shoot you a message instead. I'm glad it seems we have some support from bobrayner. Looking forward to this tough but interesting project.Mitkrow (talk) 02:15, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi. I think there are other student pages you can add comments to now. Give it a try. Penny Powers (talk) 22:50, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Where to work

Hi,
There are lots of places where we could work on a new article(s), but I think the two best options are:

• Everybody works in separate sandbox;
• Everybody uses one sandbox (ie. yours).

The first one is best if everybody is working on different articles; the second is best if work is more collaborative, on one or two articles. What do you think? Feel free to use the course page for discussions &c too. There are already some existing articles which overlap a bit - it's fine to dive straight in and improve those (or maybe take a piece of a general article and use it as the nucleus of a new, more specialised article). bobrayner (talk) 23:08, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I see what you mean with these two options. I think the best would be if people try uploading stuff to their own sandbox to see if they can fiddle with the formatting, links and references, and then when they think they have a draft, they can upload it to a sandbox related to this course page. Then we can talk about it and refine it until we're set to go "public". How do we get a sandbox for our course? Penny Powers (talk) 22:27, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

OK; that sounds good. I'll make a "centralised" sandbox for the course.

By the way, this is great - citation templates, headings, categories &c all in one go! (but It's OK to build things in smaller steps in a sandbox - a lot of editors do it that way). bobrayner (talk) 15:47, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Bob, I'm having some second thoughts on this and not sleeping at night. Our last class is on November 30 and students have to present what they've written. Writing this article is only part of what they have to do in the class. I'm not sure I structured this class very well. I haven't made short assignments in learning wikipedia along the way, and so students are not doing anything, thinking they can do it all at the end. The formatting is going to be a huge learning curve and students are going to panic at the end. The class is on Fridays and students are beginning to take the quiz on the chapters in the textbook, and then leave because I have no tests in the class, no final exam, so they don't want to be here to listen to the guest speakers I have lined up. What do you think of changing the assignment from writing an article to adding to an existing article? There is an article called "The Effects of Climate Change on Humans" and it's not very good and hasn't been updated since 2011. Could each student pair upload their work to that article? Would it all get deleted immediately? I've got to back off here or everyone's going to fail the class.