Talk:Benjamin D. Wood

Benjamin D. Wood was one of the Social sciences and society good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
August 12, 2022	Good article nominee	Listed
February 25, 2023	Good article reassessment	Delisted

A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on April 2, 2016.

The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that Benjamin D. Wood produced the first multiple choice test?

Current status: Delisted good article

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Strange discrepancies

Something strange is going on with the infobox here: the article says he was born and died in Texas, but the infobox says he was born in Massachusetts and dies in New York; the article says he attended Brownsville public schools, but the infobox says he attended "Roxbury Latin, Wesleyan, Harvard," none of which is mentioned anywhere in the text. Is the infobox a piece of subtle vandalism? What's going on? -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 13:20, 16 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

He was born in Brownsville, Texas, according to his U.S. World War II draft registration card.

The U.S. Social Security Death Index shows his birth was 10 Nov 1894 and death place as Westchester, New York. Corrected infobox accordingly.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 13:40, 16 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Corrected infoBox to reflect Brownsville Area Schools.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 13:55, 16 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Citations not needed in lead paragraph

The citations needed tag is not necessary for the lead, as the reference is covered in the body of the text. Since the material is covered in the body and referenced, then a reference is not needed in the lead paragraph. It is customary not to have inline references in the lead.--Doug Coldwell (talk) 19:25, 25 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Contributor copyright investigation and DC Good Article Reassessment

DC Good article reassessment

Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210315

Cut-and paste from Baker 2006, "He believed in the idea that a person's ability to think was innate, rather than acquired" and more.
Too close paraphrasing from Brownsville Herald August 20, 1950
Complete misrepresentation from Gettysburg Times, August 19, 1954.
Another misrepresentation from Schwartz 2013

Marking Y at CCI; more than I can clean up. Removed most of Baker, which needs to be rewritten to avoid both cut-and-paste the too-close paraphrasing. Article should be nuked or re-written, everything else needs to be checked, I stopped there. There is surely more. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:34, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sammi Brie I'm not sure how much effort you want to spend in tracking down newspaper.com sources, when the others already in the article are plagiarized; unless the GAR reviewer intends to rewrite the whole article, it's kinda hopeless. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:35, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@SandyGeorgia I only did it this one time to help you out. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 20:40, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I know; I appreciate that. It's just so hard to figure out how to best allocate our resources. MER-C when you have a chance to look in here, see my summary above based on only four sources. This article is 87% written by Coldwell, and here we have two editors putting in hours to clean it up. What is the cutoff for deciding to just stub an article rather than have to go through 22 diffs on the CCI and a couple dozen more sources? When do we give up? Surely we don't think we can rewrite all the hundreds of Coldwell articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:47, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If they're the only substantial—as in this case—just revert it (if you can), else stub it or list it for presumptive deletion. No need to go through the individual diffs. MER-C 21:00, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I will wait to stub, then, according to the instructions per the AN consensus (that is, after the GAR process). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:08, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sammi Brie so perhaps we first check authorship, and if DC is the only substantial editor, our efforts are better spent elsewhere, as those that already have issues in the sources given can be stubbed after the GAR process. That will save you all the time in newspapers.com on those that appear headed for stubbing anyway. And I really do appreciate the help. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:14, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This article had issues from its first creation, was 87% written by Coldwell, and should be probably be reduced to a stub. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:23, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I can't see where the sources actually state he invented the multiple choice test at all, the content here seems to be over-interpreting what the sources do say, and there are scores of alternate descriptions to be found in scholarly sources, none of whom mention Wood. For example, National Social Science Journal says:

French psychologist Alfred Binet developed an early Intelligence Test around 1905, and in 1910, the first widely used standardized test, the Thorndike Handwriting Scale, was introduced in the U.S. public schools. This was followed in 1914 by the design of a multiple choice test by Frederick J. Kelly of the University of Kansas. In 1915, Lewis Terman of Stanford University developed the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test in an attempt to quantify intelligence (Pannkuk, 2004). In 1926, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) made its debut.

So, there was a multiple choice test in use in 1914, but this article claims Wood invented it in 1919. This article is a sham and I'm going to go ahead and stub it now. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:53, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Partial removal. The rest is still suspect, but can wait for the GAR reorganization. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:17, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

From this version, the sections I haven't yet checked/stubbed are Mid-life and Teaching (the other sections should be good). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:06, 3 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

More excessive close paraphrasing from here, and almost every source I look at is misrepresented-- subtle, but enough to change the entire meaning of sources. Oddities like " He recommended that all college instructors teach some sort of course in aviation", when the source is specifically mentioning elementary school. And "He pointed out how medical techniques had improved over the last 100 years"; he "pointed out" nothing, he posed a hypothetical. Similar found throughout: an inability to paraphrase at all, interspersed with an inability to get it right when attempting to paraphrase. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:21, 4 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

Downey, Matthew T. (1965). Ben D. Wood, Educational Reformer. Educational Testing Service. OCLC 187479042.

Copyright contributor investigation and Good article reassessment

This article is part of Wikipedia:Contributor copyright investigations/20210315 and the Good article (GA) drive to reassess and potentially delist over 200 GAs that might contain copyright and other problems. An AN discussion closed with consensus to delist this group of articles en masse, unless a reviewer opens an independent review and can vouch for/verify content of all sources. Please review Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/February 2023 for further information about the GA status of this article, the timeline and process for delisting, and suggestions for improvements. Questions or comments can be made at the project talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 09:36, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Possible copyright problem

This article has been revised as part of a large-scale clean-up project of multiple article copyright infringement. (See the investigation subpage) Earlier text must not be restored, unless it can be verified to be free of infringement. For legal reasons, Wikipedia cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material; such additions must be deleted. Contributors may use sources as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences or phrases. Accordingly, the material may be rewritten, but only if it does not infringe on the copyright of the original or plagiarize from that source. Please see our guideline on non-free text for how to properly implement limited quotations of copyrighted text. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:22, 29 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]