Comments
Hi there! User philipb indicated that you are a teacher and that you're working with your students to add content to the wiki. That's great! However, I've noticed from the activity feed that some of the pages your students are trying to make are getting deleted. There are a number of Oakland Wiki contributors who hang out on the Activity feed and keep spam off the wiki, etc. We would be happy to work with you to make your students' interactions with the wiki educational and productive (instead of frustrating and demoralizing). Please feel free to respond to this comment here or comment on my user page. - Marina
Hi Marina,
Yes, I've seen that user NAParish has actually deleted two of my students' pages. My student naiamah wanted to create a page about "bay street" and since Emeryville doesn't have a LocalWiki we decided to put it under Oakland. My other student philipb wanted to create a page about "weather" for the Oakland Wiki. They've been frustrated with the exercise and I don't know if I'll be assigning this project again in the future because of these issues. I think it would be more useful for my students if they had more constructive feedback. Perhaps instead of deleting their pages users should revise them to make them better. Have you had these sorts of issues before? If so, how did you address them?
OaklandWiki strove for a high quality standard early on, and NAParish is a long time, content-focused user. As the wiki has grown, it’s had to get more defensive against vandalism, spam and obvious commercial plugs – which are constantly coming in. Your material that was deleted was likely mistaken for this sort of thing, but if the student work could be flagged as such somehow, I’m sure folks would be happy to let it be while it was “under construction” …
Hi -- sorry about making it frustrating, but the initial drafts seemed inappropriate, and I (mistakenly) thought they were spammy. The issue with the Weather page was the text that was completely unrelated to weather -- especially the directions to Middle Harbor park. Once the student mentioned the purpose, I backed off. NAParish.
hi! i think this is a great project and did something similar myself in library school. i wonder if it would work to tag a page with something like "class project" while the page was in process, or even title it "title-project" while the page was in progress? Another idea that might work would be to have a simple sentence at the top (or in the "Please describe this change" box at the bottom) explaining the purpose of the page. Anyway, i think we can work something out! -greenkozi
Thanks for your input everyone. If I decide to do this assignment again I will definitely have students add a "class project" tag in the future and include a sentence at the top about how this is a page in progress for a class project. I don't think my student completely understood the issue with the weather page. He had seen other cities with "weather" pages before and didn't understand why his was being deleted. I think he would have understood why if there was a bit more explanation. --jlib
