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User talk:Dr.renMueller

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Francis Schonken (talk | contribs) at 04:30, 29 January 2016 (Some suggestions...). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Nice work!

The WikiCookie
You've learned how to use basic wikicode in your sandbox. You can always return there to experiment more.

Posted automatically via sandbox guided tour. Dr.renMueller (talk) 18:45, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Some suggestions...

Hello Dr. Mueller. I just wanted to make a few suggestions re your class assignment this semester. Much of the students' work has been very good indeed. However, there have been a few problems.

Duplicate articles like these require a lot of work from other editors to carefully merge the material into the existing article, redirect the duplicate, and add the necessary attribution templates. I'm not sure if this is because the students didn't know how to paste their work into the existing article and created a new article instead, or if they were completely unaware of the existing article. If it's the latter, before they start their drafts, they need to do a thorough search on Misplaced Pages (using the search box and relevant Category pages) to find out if their topic already has an article, albeit with a slightly different name.
  • Overwriting existing articles
The students need to take care that when expanding an existing article, they do not simply do a blanket overwrite. They need to integrate their work carefully and preferably gradually. Quite a few of the overwrite articles resulted in the loss of valuable information, references, templates, categories, and formatting, all of which had to be restored by other editors. Sometimes they simply replaced the existing text with their own version of it which unfortunately was not an improvement—introducing grammar errors, confusing phrasing, misspellings, unencyclopedic style, etc.
  • Adding inappropriate external links
I suggest pointing your students to the guidelines at Misplaced Pages:External links. YouTube videos are very problematic as many of them are copyright violations and will be removed from the article. The only acceptable ones are those on the official YouTube channels of the recording companies or the artists involved.
  • Using inappropriate references
Related to the above, YouTube videos are not a reference and should not be used as such. Ditto links to Amazon and other commercial retailers. If the students wish to discuss a recording in depth, i.e. at least listing the artists, record company, ensemble, conductor and date, then they should reference it to a published review in the mainstream press, music journals, or books (not blogs or self-published websites) and/or minimally provide the OCLC number. If they just want to link to to a YouTube recording of a work (providing it is copyright compliant), then it belongs in an External links section, not the body of the article. Likewise, Misplaced Pages articles can never be used as references. The students should all become familiar with the guidelines and policies at Misplaced Pages:Verifiability and Misplaced Pages:Identifying reliable sources.

In future, you might also want to direct your students to the WikiProjects related to their topics. WikiProject Classical Music, WikiProject Opera, and WikiProject Composers all have very useful and valuable guides on how to title, write, reference, and format articles in those areas. This can save all your students a lot of valuable time trying to reinvent the wheel, especially for those creating completely new articles.

Best wishes, Voceditenore (talk) 19:01, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Additional suggestions:
--Francis Schonken (talk) 11:56, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

Warning

Stop icon This is your only warning; if you vandalize Misplaced Pages again, as you did at Misplaced Pages:Wiki Ed/University of North Carolina School of the Arts/History of Musical Styles I and II (Fall 2015, Spring 2016), you may be blocked from editing without further notice. --Francis Schonken (talk) 17:39, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

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