Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! We appreciate encyclopedic contributions, but your recent article was not a good idea: please do not introduce articles about things which have no references to even verify their existence.
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discussion from my talk page
editHi, my article Homo sapiens morlandius has been deleted by you. I commend your quick detection that this is a bad article. However I am a science teacher and have been having difficulty getting my year 10 class to understand how to use the internet to do research. They frequently print of articles they have not read, or use articles with only slightly relevant and over-technical language. I wrote this article to set them a homework in order to catch them out, effectively to show them up i.e. as a joke. I would like the article restored for 24 hours, and I hope they learn from it. Billiehenton (talk) 11:50, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
- (talk page stalker)This is actually a great way to show them that Wikipedia, can, in fact, be used as a serious reference source, so long as they check the sources used in articles. A good approach would be, rather than just showing them "Stuff on the internet can be wrong," show them how to differentiate between what is good and what is bad on the internet (or specifically on Wikipedia). If you're interested in setting up a project, we actually have a group of editors who help coordinate with classroom teachers in reading, understanding, and even editing Wikipedia with their students. You can see information general information about currently running programs at Wikipedia:School and university projects. There's a list of people willing to help coordinate projects at Wikipedia:WikiProject Classroom coordination, and, if you have questions, you can post them on Wikipedia:WikiProject Classroom coordination. Qwyrxian (talk) 12:38, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
- I'm sorry, but I can not restore it as an article. Wikipedia is a source of information used by many millions of people over the world. The possibilities of confusion are simply too great. And even before I deleted it, it had a tag suggesting deletion, because another editor had spotted it as a problem in 1h 29m after it had been submitted; I deleted it 5h later in checking the list of articles proposed for deletion. As Qwyrxian suggests, perhaps you can use this story to show them that, although Wikipedia may contain bad material for a while, and can therefore not be absolutely trusted, it is better than the wild internet, because the worst material does usually get removed quickly. At least it gets removed quickly if it sounds implausible -- we have been known to have trouble spotting plausible fake articles which have apparently good but obscure references that do not show what they are supposed to. (Looking at the last paragraph of the article, this one seemed to me like the common schoolboy game of putting in something ridiculous about one's school or one's town--we watch out for these quite carefully). In order that you have something concrete to show them, I've moved the material into your user space as User:Billiehenton/Homo sapiens morlandius; I shall delete it at the end of the week. DGG ( talk ) 15:55, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
- Thankyou for the responses. My pupils were unable to find the article before you moved it, so I had to let the cat out of the bag. We do have great difficulty getting pupils to understand how to verify information found on the internet, so this has been useful. The GCSE science courses do require students to carry out research and assess their sources, and only the brightest childern seem to be able to understand this properly. I have in the past had two instances where pupils found bad information on wikipedia and were penalised in their coursework grade as a result. I just chided them for not checking. So I will make an effort to find these articles and edit them myself. Billiehenton (talk) 12:02, 24 March 2011 (UTC)