WSU is Wayne State University - there are a couple of colleges where the professors set technical writing assignments asking the students to create something on wikiHow, and WSU is one of them. I don’t know if this is a WSU student or not, though - it might not be. You can always ask them - I often do!
To be clear, though, if you *want* to edit an article submitted by anyone (student or otherwise), you are very welcome to, of course. All topics are open to editing, and that’s no different for these guys, so if you want to fix it, go for it. Nothing holding you back - just also nothing obligating you
It’s not so much a matter of fairness, @Galactic-Radiance
- the professors know we’re a collaborative environment, and generally they know how to see who did what on an article. It is more a matter of avoiding a situation where our boosters/patrollers/editors/etc feel some obligation to fix someone else’s assignment. After tackling lots and lots of student articles in NAB over the last few semesters, and seeing some assignment articles that are aweeeesome and some that, well, aren’t, I’ve learned that some students take it seriously, while others really don’t. I guess that’ll always be the way, similar to the range we get with other new articles (although it can sometimes seem amplified by the numbers of college students who come in at once!). As a result, I’ve developed a habit of reaching out to them and having them do their own formatting/editing/etc if there are either very big errors in the writing or if it’s clear they haven’t read our guidelines (like, creating their own section order/labels, using a totally different format, etc). I give them the info they need, but I don’t hesitate to put an article into Quality Review for them to do the fine-tuning, if it’s clear they started out without reading our guidelines. On the flip side, when they’ve done their “homework” and have more or less done an awesome job, and the article just needs a few edits before it can go live, I usually do that for them - nobody is perfect, after all.
I’m not in touch with all of the professors who set this assignment, but for the ones I have been able to talk to, I know that they feel that figuring out our guidelines is part of the assignment. So the main point is that the obligation isn’t on anyone else to do it for them (to be fair, that’s just as with any editing around here - no obligations!). If they need help and you want to provide it, no problem. But if you do get any students prodding you to do editing for them or requesting promotion even though they haven’t met our guidelines, just let me know, and I can explain to them why that’s not okay, and try to follow up with their professors if needed. Their assignment shouldn’t put any pressure on you or anyone else around here.
On this topic in particular, I don’t think it really needs NFD; it’s a good start, but it could probably use some cleanup and expansion. Regardless of whether the author is a student or not, you can edit it if you want to, and not if you don’t want to
