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Are the Phase II and Phase III finance plans done? I believe the due date for both of them was November 15 and that the date for WMF to provide money for Phase II was December 1st. I am interested in seeing the plans. Thanks! -- Pine ✉ 00:00, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
I've started a student source assessment page. I've included instructions for how to add assessments, and done a few to make it clear what the approach is. I plan to work on this as I have time but would appreciate any feedback on the format and approach, and would also appreciate any help -- this is going to take me weeks if I do it on my own.
I'm including an analysis of all the sources in the given articles, regardless of who added each source. This is to avoid a subsequent debate along the lines of "well, the students only copied text from 2% of sources, and I bet that's better than the existing ratio". I'm only going to be checking sources available online, but I think this will constitute a large fraction of the work done. If anyone is able to check any of the offline sources, of course that would be very helpful.
So far I have found two errors, one by a student and one by an experienced Wikipedian. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 13:41, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
It appears there is a class editing from SUNY Fredonia (see Talk:Dementia). I didn't see it listed at Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Present. Does anyone have details on the class/professor? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:51, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
We recently got flooded with biology related Good article nominations, most of which seemed reasonable I will admit. I was just wondering if we can expect anymore anytime soon. We are already overburdened with nominations from regular editors and like many other projects lack reviewers so wont be able to handle multiple courses at once, especially if reviews are expected in a couple of weeks. I recall a discussion some time ago (not sure where) about a pre-screening process for student articles that they should go through before nomination. I have done a very superficial review of some of the recent articles that have been submitted and left a few tags. I am thinking that if the tags are not addressed in a timely fashion (say a week) it can safely be assumed that the nominators won't respond to a review so the articles can be quickfailed. Would there be any objections to this approach? AIRcorn (talk) 23:02, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I wonder if Mike Cline, or someone else from the program, could say more about the draft strategic plan. It talks a lot about stakeholders, so I suppose the obvious question is whether Wikipedians are regarded as stakeholders. I was also wondering about the status of the plan to become a separate thematic organization since the RfC ended with an unclear consensus.
I'm also curious about this: "The availability of a qualified volunteer workforce exceeds project requirements." What is the volunteer workforce?
Final question. The draft says: "The program's operating budget is robust and enables the program to deliver quality services to all its stakeholders/partners as well as grow its volunteer resources." Elsewhere it says: "Benefactors value the program as a professional, innovative way to improve education and are providing high-levels of financial and marketing support." Are more details available about the operating budget and who the benefactors are? SlimVirgin (talk) 19:26, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Please don't kid yourself that there is an "excess" of volunteer labour of this sort, or that the workforce is "happy".This response is not unexpected but does represent a misunderstanding of the statement. What is being described is a future desired end-state, not a statement or assumption of fact about the current state. It is a measure of future success. In 2015, if indeed the new EP has created an environment where we have sufficent willing, able and content volunteers from the WP community supporting the program, would anyone be disappointed? I think not! -- Mike Cline ( talk) 04:51, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
My concern is that everyone who is being consulted is involved and wanting to move forward with the program in its current form, including the people from the Foundation who are overseeing it. Some disinterested professional input is needed to identify and resolve the ethical issues, which are significant. For example, there have to be guarantees that all students are told they can work in a sandbox and have their essays deleted once the course is over, so that they are not required to release their work or interact with strangers on the Internet. There have to be guarantees that they are not being forced to use their real names. And Wikipedians need to know that we're not expected to act as unpaid teaching assistants, identify plagiarism and determine who fails a course. SlimVirgin (talk) 02:56, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
And Wikipedians need to know that we're not expected to act as unpaid teaching assistants, identify plagiarism and determine who fails a course.These kinds of phrases that come across as demands are troubling because everyday editors make unreasonable, ill-informed and selfish demands on other editors. The community deals with those demands in a variety of ways, but it all boils down to the ultimate set of sanctioned expectations: Wikipedia:Five pillars. I am fairly confident that the new EP has no intention to encourage, sanction or enable the kind of expectations you seek to avoid. Can the EP prevent them absolutely, NO. Just as the WP community can't prevent all the unreasonable, ill-informed and selfish demand editors place on members of the community every day 24/7. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 04:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
One thing I'd like to stress is that although it is my firm belief that we should strive to create a model set of guidelines that are both ethically and pedagogically sound, decisions about what is ethical or pedagogically sound can and must be handled at the level of the individual university, not centrally. University instructors assess these issues as part of their jobs and in accordance with the policies of their universities. We can provide guidance in these areas, we can't provide mandates. If a university instructor decides that requiring their students to edit in the main space of the encyclopedia and actively engage in the community of practice that Wikipedia presents represents a meaningful pedagogical benefit and doesn't see any ethical issues with it - and their university doesn't see any ethical issues with it - then we cannot and should not try to dictate otherwise to them. They are the people most qualified to make these decisions, and it's (literally) their job to make them. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 04:40, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
SlimVirgin has raised a really important point, and I'd like to expand on it because I am not sure that everyone is recognising the significance. As we all know, all WP contributions must be irrevocably released under license. However, for that release to be valid there must be informed consent on the part of the contributor. We all have a choice - to contribute or not - and links are provided to make clear the terms under which we contribute. But, if a student is required to contribute, and to mainspace, as a requirement of their studies then the consent under which the release is made is coerced. SlimVirgin has point out this is an ethical issue, and she is 100% correct - such behaviour from an academic would not be seen as ethically acceptable by the ethics rules governing any institution with which I am familiar. (For the record, I have held academic positions and been required to gain ethical clearance for my research. Generally formal clearances do not arise for teaching situations, but the principles are applicable.) The ethical problem is an issue for the EP programme - I would advise providing guidelines for consideration by educators contemplating wikipedia-connected assignments - but the more important issue for us and the foundation is the invalidation of the release under which the contributions were granted. It might be necessary in such a case to remove and oversight improperly released contributions, frustrating the aim of improving article content. Student editors must be free to not release their work into article space, and to have sandbox contributions deleted if that is their wish. The rigorous protection of such options goes a long way to ensuring that any contributions that are added to article space come with a release granted by free and informed consent. They must also be free to pseudonymity, in line with standard policy. These issues may not have been considered before now, but they are important and deserve proper attention now. EdChem ( talk) 10:35, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
@Colin, EdChem, Malleus-Those of us associated with the EP are always on the lookout for best practices that will benefit WP. The concerns raised here will help us do that. That's why this noticeboard is here. However, I don’t think this is a fair statement. You might be able to communicate more clearly if you took your blinkers off and saw what's actually happening, or think is happening, as opposed to what you'd like to see happening
To a certain extent, we all are operating with blinkers on because we can only comment on what we know from our experiences and through validations of what others have said-positive or negative. The fact that I’ve had very positive experiences with the EP without any consternation from the WP community does not mean the negative experiences didn’t happen elsewhere. Conversely, because there have been negative experiences doesn’t invalidate the efficacy of the positive experiences. Additionally, I challenge the notion that anyone associated with the EP is denying or downplaying the impacts of the negative experiences. We sincerely want to mitigate the negative and encourage the positive impacts moving forward. Where I do think that there is some serious denial going is in recognizing the changing tide within Academia about the use of Wikipedia in the classroom that will continue unabated whether there is a formal EP or not. I have read literally dozens of professional journal articles completely independent of the EP that are touting the efficacy of WP in the classroom. This abstract for just one article provides a good summary of what’s going on out there in Education land.
ABSTRACT: It seems improbable that Wikipedia could be considered a valid resource for education like schools and universities because of the risks of incurring mistakes, inaccuracies, and plagiarism. The bad reputation of the free encyclopedia is false. Wikipedia is reliable and can be used in the curriculum as a new approach for the social and collaborative construction of knowledge. It will enter fully into educational contexts, which will represent an opportunity to reflect on the verification of information, the ethical use of technology, and the role of democratic participation of people that use social software. In fact the creation and maintenance of articles as classroom activities offer higher processes of cognitive development and on-line relationships, allowing development of essential digital competencies for life-long learn, like information literacy , participation literacy and ethical literacy.
— Wikipedia as a Training Resource for Digital Competencies [1]
As I said above we can chose to ride the tide and leverage this in ways that result in significant benefit WP or we can chose to fight the tide, but we can’t stop it. University students and professors are going to be participating in the WP experience regardless. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 12:30, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
If desired, it would be trivially easy to ban universities from running courses on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia decided student-assignment editing was harmful (or, for example, such editing from establishments that don't join the program) then a block and a letter to the management would swiftly end things.might be technically true, but wouldn’t that be totally contrary to the strategic goals of the movement. Goals by the way that represent the collaborative efforts of a very large and diverse population of Wikipedia editors as well as outside experts and advisors. You may personally disagree with the strategic outreach goals, but those goals represent broad community consensus about the future of the movement. In light of those goals and the broad consensus around them, I doubt seriously that implementing your trivially easy solution would be trivially easy at all. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 14:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
You don't need to grovel and promise we're right about everything, but you do need to at least make an attempt to respect and address the opinions people are offering. Kevin is doing it. Sage is doing it. Most of the other EP-involved voices we're seeing here are doing it. But you appear to be working very hard to not do it, and that's torpedoing everyone else's efforts. Wikipedians are, in the main, a blunt bunch. We rely on straightforward, written text to get our work done. Platitudes and buzzwords get in the way, so we expect people to say what they intend to communicate because otherwise it's a waste of our time, and we have better things to be doing on wikipedia than having our time wasted. The more we see you attempting to gloss over every complaint or comment anyone makes with meaningless handwaving, essentially nodding while giving us the finger behind your back, you're hurting our perception of EP. It is not considered clever or skillful here on Wikipedia to use deliberately obfuscatory language to evade actual conversation; it's just considered unconstructive. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 16:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
by June 2015 you hope "[t]he ..Hope is not part of the plan. These are desirable goals, that if the new EP is approved, a lot of people are going to work hard to achieve. It may seem like a trival bit of language, but its not. To achieve the goals, the new EP has to address the the mistakes of the past, but until then the EP is in the hands of the WMF and those volunteer Wikipedians that willingly support it, and even those volunteers, including me, can only do so much with the scope of our involvement. As a Campus Ambassador at MSU I and my fellow ambassadors can significantly influence how Wikipedia is used there, but beyond that, I can only provide advice and counsel based on my own experiences. What happens at PPodunk U. is effectively out of my personal control? I, as are many others are awaiting important decisions at the WMF because we think this can work? Keep asking questions as long as you are willing to accept my good faith personal opinion and factual knowledge in response. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 17:19, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
By the way, it's worth adding that I know it must be difficult to listen to criticism of a project you care about and have put a lot of work into, so I just want to say thank you to the people who are listening and absorbing it. I think it will end up being constructive, even if the process is a bit painful. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:32, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
I think almost no editors on wikipedia realize what EP is up to and what they are planning for the future. Wikipedians are almost (an understatement) completely uninformed about what is going on, due to the lack of transparency of these educational programs.
I don't see how wikipedians could possibly vote for a "member of the board" to represent them, or whatever it is you are suggesting. From my point of view, that is no where near sufficient representation for wikipedians over this massive education program that is so disruptive to wikipedia. And regarding the university "writing centers" [2] someone provided a link to me above, that in no way prepares students to edit wikipedia, IMO. MathewTownsend ( talk) 23:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
And Wikipedians need to know that we're not expected to act as unpaid teaching assistants, identify plagiarism and determine who fails a course.Amen to that! I think that, as time goes on, the English Wikipedia may actually want to make those things a matter of policy. I'm sensitive to the argument that we don't want to tell instructors how to teach their classes, but the flip side of that is that we don't want instructors to tell us how to operate Wikipedia, beyond what they can contribute to consensus like any other editor. We have every right to set policy about Wikipedia. It's fine if an editor choses to ferret out plagiarism (indeed, commendable), and it's fine if they choose to help the instructor in some other way, but that's a matter of choice, not an implied obligation. (And I strongly agree with what MatthewTownsend just said about, in effect, classes not WP:OWNing anything.) -- Tryptofish ( talk) 00:19, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
OK, so what is emerging here is that there seems to be a WMF staffing problem, and that is impacting established editors and article quality. It's looking like that staffing problem's name is Frank, based on Jbmurray's feedback. What can we do about this? And I have another question: why the sudden change? We were always told that editor retention was an important goal, and now we're seeing some backtracking on that, as if it was never a goal. It was: [3] This whole thing is beginning to look like a run-around so folks can keep their jobs. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 18:56, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for all the comments that have been posted here. I think there are a few points that we, as WMF, should clarify.
1. Please keep in mind that the Education Program is global. Annie Lin, LiAnna Davis, and Frank Schulenburg all work on the strategy and global levels of the program — the reason you see only Sage and me responding here is that Sage and I are the only two staff people working on the U.S. and Canada programs. Frank, Annie, and LiAnna are all focused primarily on supporting the Education Program in the other countries where the program is in operation. Sage and I are keeping the rest of the team updated about the discussion, but Sage and I are the ones who work directly to support the U.S. and Canada programs.
2. Please also keep in mind that there are two times a year that we can make significant changes to the program: before the start of the fall term and before the start of the spring term. I'll talk a bit about the spring 2013 term later, but I want to make it clear that major changes to the future of the program will be something decided upon by the organization that comes out of the Working Group. I want to thank Mike Christie and Mike Cline, who are both members of the Working Group and who have participated in this discussion in that role. One key responsibility of the new organization will be to address many of the concerns raised here — and as someone who has been part of the Working Group, I will say we have definitely been discussing these issues.
3. In terms of the upcoming term:
Please let me know if there are specific questions asked somewhere above that I have missed. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 00:51, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
If they did, there wouldn't be all this worry about biting students, alienating professors etc. The students and professors could be treated as are other wikipedia editors and would not require kid glove handling. Many of the articles that passed the "burden" test and were rated in another evaluation as a net plus to wikipedia are a mess. The EP is using faulty data to rate its impact on wikipedia. And what about all those articles in sandboxes that an online ambassador (above) said she felt uncomfortable moving to main space because she didn't know enough about the subject matter - and the one that she did move took her hours of cleanup and resulted in a very mediocre article? And if you check the professors and student's contributions, they flee wikipedia when finished. Whose going to clean up the mess that already exists? One of the courses from the initiative Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/Cognitive Psychology (Greta Munger) has already been noted above as offering a faulty assignment to students, and is still assigning students to 'compose a one-sentence "hook," nominate it for "Did you know," ' and to "Nominate your article for Good Article status".
And the last assignment is "Try to address issues from Good Article reviews"! So that means some poor wikipedian completes a GA review (which is a bloody pain) and maybe the editor will try to address the issues? MathewTownsend ( talk) 18:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I think editing wikipedia taking time and dedication to learn. I don't think editors can pop in with a few hundred edits and expect to understand how to edit here. I just don't think it can be done. It makes a mockery of those editors here who have spent years and thousands of edits to learn how to contribute constructively on wikipedia. I think the EP articles should all be sandboxed until they are vetted by an experienced editor, if one wants to take the time and energy to do it. What do you suggest? (You seem to be asking the wikipedia community to step in and do the work that these professors and the APS can't do. I've looked at the APS page and there's nothing useful there - just a list of old courses and for the most part messy articles.) I'm not understanding what you expect me to do. MathewTownsend ( talk) 19:47, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Recently, some experienced editors noticed copyright violations from editors participating in the Wikipedia Education Program and notified the instructor who created the assignment. Off-wiki, the professor reminded the editors of the plagiarism guidelines on both Wikipedia and at their academic institution and gave them a short timeline to fix their contributions, as he was hoping to turn this into a learning experience for them. Since many of them have not yet reverted the close paraphrasing and plagiarism themselves, the professor is now working with his Regional Ambassadors to remove the copyvios while preserving all of the other positive contributions his students made.
Since on-wiki time runs a bit more quickly than off-wiki time, I ask that we all assume good faith and know that this professor, who of course opposes plagiarism and negatively impacting Wikipedia, is trying to hold himself accountable for the burden these copyvios place on the community.
That being said, I'd really like any interested editors to work closely with the initial board of the (hopefully) new thematic organization for the Education Program over the next month or so to develop a proactive plan for future issues with our program's participants. Of course there will always be some issues (these are new editors in a very complex world of unknown policies and guidelines), and of course professors will try to prevent them in the first place, but I think we owe it to the community to create a trustworthy system to handle these issues, as our program is supposed to be a positive experience for everyone involved. I know many of our program participants are hoping to move the program in the direction of integrating more closely with the already-existing infrastructure on Wikipedia, but it's perfectly reasonable that our members should help alleviate any negative burden we inadvertently add to other editors. Perhaps you guys can "sign up" here (just place your name below?) if you're interested in working with the initial Board to develop a promising accountability plan for the future of the program. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 01:49, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Can we get a notification at WikiProject Medicine (and here) on the classes that will be starting for Spring 2013 and will (or are likely to) fall under the scope of that project? Productive communication with those professors now, before the assignments are ossified, could have tremendous payouts in reduced headaches for next semester. Best. Biosthmors ( talk) 19:30, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Forgive me if this is addressed above - there is so much to read here. I encounter a bit of student editing in these categories. Are they subject to more student editing projects than other categories? (A lot of the feedback above seems to be coming from editors involved in those areas.) That is, is Wikipedia's health-related content a particular focus of this project? -- Anthonyhcole ( talk) 04:23, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Something like "Editing Wikipedia is a form of live publishing. The long term editors of Wikipedia are very experienced at finding plagiarism. If either you or your class do not know what "plagarism" is, we advice against editing the online encyclopedia or first learning about how to avoid it. If you are caught involved in this sort of activity this could result in you being expelled from university and negative press for your school. We at Wikipedia have caught other sources plagiarizing from us and take these activities very seriously [5]. Sincerely The Wikipedia Community. Thoughts? Than no one can say we did not warm them. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:08, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
This is something I've been doing with every class I've been involved with so far, and I think it would be a good idea to try to make sure it's something stressed to all classes. Amusingly, I think I've even used that exact same article as an example before. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 22:52, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
The simplest way to convey the plagiarism issue is by telling the students that there will be a lot more pair of eyes watching the article than just a regular assignment where only the TAs and the prof could read it so any attempts will be easily caught and reverted. Also tell them that the evidence will be kept forever in the history. That should persuade them not to do it. OhanaUnited Talk page 08:28, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Several people have made the point that we're all drawing conclusions from the particular experiences we've had, which is a fair point; the people involved with the education program are doing the same, of course. Could someone post examples of articles that were definitely improved by the program (apart from Brianwc's classes, which have already been mentioned)? Mike Cline said he would post some. If anyone else could do the same, it would help to put things in perspective. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:42, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Much of the result of the following is documented in part here: MSU Education Program Work
Our experiences at Montana State University started when the US Public Policy project recruited a professor in Native American Studies. The course we would work on was Federal Indian Law and Policy a graduate level course. The professor’s interest in involving WP in the curriculum was twofold. First, she felt that Federal Indian Law was poorly represented in WP and that maybe there was a way to use her class to help expand free knowledge on the subject. The second motivation, I the one that I found most profound and challenging was this. A large percentage of her students were of Native American heritage. They had a tendency to be very biased and emotional when thinking and writing about Native American issues, especially issues of rights and law. The Professor believed the WP tenant of NPOV would make a great teaching tool that would enable her students to be much more effective advocates in the world of Native American issues if they could learn to think and write in unbiased, unemotional ways. So my fellow ambassador (an MSU Library archivist) and I (an experienced Wikipedian and instructional designer) worked with the Professor to map out a curriculum involving WP that would meet her desired learning objectives. To meet the first learning objective, a collaborative of students would conduct a comprehensive literature review on the subject of Federal Indian Law and survey WP content to see what needed more work or where there were missing topics. The second objective was met by several students who chose to research, expand or write about a few of the missing topics or topics needing work using basic WP guidelines for verifiability, NPOV, etc. About mid-way through the term we organized a formal computer lab session and tutored students in the basic WP landscape so they knew what they were writing for. When the assignments were complete (this amounted to about ¼ the total grade), they were submitted to the professor for review/grading/comments etc. in whatever format she desired. Very near the end of the term, we organized another computer lab session for those students who wanted to contribute their work to WP. There was no obligation to do so. Under the tutelage of the ambassadors, a number of articles were edited/created, to include the Outline of United States federal Indian law and policy which flowed out of the comprehensive literature review. Even after the term ended, as an ambassador I continued to make improvements to some articles as time permitted.
The second experience involved completely different learning objectives. The Freshman Writing Course (101) taught three styles of basic written communication in three separate segments. Segment 3 involved encyclopedic writing and WP was the desired model to teach to. By this time we had recruited a third ambassador, a tenured reference librarian. These were classes of 3 sections of 25 students all held on the same day each week. We worked with the instructor to craft a lesson plan to meet the learning objectives. In this course the emphasis was on good prose, good sourcing, and good written organization. The topic of the writing wasn’t relevant so we incorporated WP into the lesson by allowing student to select stubs on anything they felt comfortable sourcing and writing about. I think the requirement was ~2500 words of new prose written in encyclopedic style that would meet WP guidelines. When the assignment was complete, it was submitted to the instructor along with copies of the source material used where it was graded by instructor and returned to the student. We then organized computer lab sessions to allow those students that wanted to contribute their work, to do so under the tutelage of three ambassadors to ensure it met WP guidelines. We repeated this process significantly more efficiently for a second term and another 75 students. Not all students finished these courses, but those that did, did so in a way that met the instructors learning objectives while producing content that helped grow WP. Nothing in either of these courses was about editing WP as the learning objectives were all about teaching better writing skills. We just designed those objectives so that the product of the learning would be of benefit to WP.
One of the innovative things the instructor allowed us to try was a very fast paced, standup collaborative team exercise at the whiteboard where a team of -4-6 students with three journal sources on a topic in-hand (pre-read) had to right a four sentence lead paragraph using WP guidelines on leads. We would run 4 teams at a time. Each team had one source that was different from all the other groups. We gave them about 10 minutes to write the lead paragraph based on their sources. The groups would then openly critique each other’s prose and challenge the paraphrasing, differing information (different sources) and overall comprehensive of the lead paragraph. This was not a graded exercise and there was no right or wrong answers, but one that was designed to reinforce good sourcing, paraphrasing , construction and collaborative writing. In other words, we created a scenario using WP norms to allow the instructor to recognize and capitalize on teaching moments. The instructor loved it, the students loved it, and Wikipedia got credit for some fun in the classroom.
As we move forward at MSU we will continue to jointly establish curriculum with willing instructors around WP designed to meet whatever learning objectives are on the table. It may involve editing, it may not, but whatever curriculum we employ we will ensure any content contributed to WP meets WP norms. We have another proposed WP exercise in the works that doesn’t involve editing but will be of great benefit to the encyclopedia. Research skills receive a lot of interest at MSU in the freshman/sophomore years and the MSU library has a variety of programs related to improving those skills. WP has ~ 250,000 un-sourced articles and god knows how much unverified content. We are crafting a curriculum where students conduct the necessary research to find sources for un-sourced WP material. If we are successful, all that work can then be made available to WP where other editors can use those sources to improve articles and verify content. We are excited about this idea.
I am proud of what we’ve accomplished at MSU for several reasons. We’ve helped professors use WP to achieve learning objectives and we’ve helped students create some work that has improved WP. All without any adverse or negative burden on WP. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 03:25, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
BLP was being done before it was a policy...we just didn't know it yet. How about we find a way to force the students to comment at talkpages before they make substantive edits? Can the EP set this as a guideline for editing especially anything that might require the expenditure of monies ot doublecheck their work? Then, after its reviewed, they can post it in article space. I don't know if that is feasible...just trying to find a happy middle ground. I am just a -- MONGO 01:02, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Here are some articles that appear to me to be good examples of student work, though I haven't checked how the student used sources in these cases. I agree with Brian Carver's post, above, that it would be better not to generalize about the students and professors. I also think that Jon Murray's classes are an excellent example of what students can accomplish; they are not a product of the EP, but then no articles are "products" of the EP -- they're all done by students, Jon's classes included. There are two separate questions. The first is what level of work are students doing on Wikipedia, and what problems and benefits are they bringing with them? The second is what shall we do about it? My answers are "a mixture of good and bad", and "train professors and institutions so they can do better". Anyway, here are three articles that seem worthwhile additions to the encyclopedia to me, from three different classes.
If these examples are not enough to convince anyone that students are capable of doing good work, please say so and I will find more. -- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:32, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
The psych class run in 2012 by Marentettte here is given as an example of a class that did well. I'll admit this is also an undergrad class (if I'm reading correctly) but the students appear to be year 3 or 4. So they've chosen their speciality and are taking a focussed class. The terrible psych edits I've seen are in 1st year "Introduction to Psychology" classes and such like. From my ancient memories of uni, such classes were chosen by students who had to add another science module to their course and chose it as a soft option on something interesting, rather than e.g. Statistics, which sounds boring and hard. Can anyone give examples of 1st-year students doing some good? Or students doing "Introduction to.." basic classes doing some good? Otherwise, I propose we ban such classes, in the nicest possible way, as their students really don't know what they are writing about and have no intrinsic motivation in the subject.
This is the second class Marentettte has done and two of the students are from the previous assignment. There was one before in 2011. Also, both times the online ambassadors were greatly experienced Wikipedians. Neelix has 131,000 edits and Nikkimaria has 30,000 edits.
The class was very small and focussed on a couple of articles. The students gave an outline of their intentions and used drafts. The prof gave excellent advice here about the audience and the importance of not trashing the existing text with 100% new material; more good avice here about outlines and review before diving in and making a mess; she states she will be doing an expert review here.
Looking at the prof's contributions I see her spending long evenings for many days working with the students and on the articles. Reviewing and copyediting the final work, not just commenting on drafts. And that's just for a handful of articles the first time and only two articles the second time. What an investment.
In contrast with this class it seems the prof was much less capable wrt editing Wikipedia, much less involved in reviewing/copyediting the work, the class was much bigger (40 students) and some of them chose subjects that the prof was not an expert in, so couldn't comment on them or fix them. Although the students were reminded to use secondary sources (and some of the sources I saw were good), it didn't appear all understood plagiarism or researched the appropriateness of their content to the page. Colin° Talk 17:52, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Someone suggested above: "perhaps recruiting ambassadors who are willing to monitor and clean up their classes' messes (it seems like this ought to already be part of the job description, but it doesn't seem to be)".
I've never seen much action by online ambassadors. (Maybe it's all by email and chat.) Perhaps recruiting online ambassadors who are experienced wikipedians, who are also familiar with the subject matter of education course articles and who are willing to "monitor and clean up their classes' messes" would be the way to go. (And that would probably be more than one online ambassador for every 15 students, the ideal now but not always achieved.) MathewTownsend ( talk) 01:04, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
I've been following this discussion (and over the past several months others previous, including the RFC and the various scattered fallout over the Pune program etc.). I've also had quite a bit to do with the various incarnations of the EP, from an informal meeting in San Francisco, to seeing members of the team in Barcelona, to being part of the Jamboree in Boston. (These guys get around, I tell you... I mean, I obviously do, too, but mostly on my own dime and nowhere near as much as they do.)
Most of the WMF folk are well-intentioned (and they're better than some of the people who went before... Rod, for instance), but with few exceptions (Sage is one) they have not much idea about how Wikipedia actually works, and have never been active Wikipedians. Moreover, as an institution the WMF is much better at promotion and spin, but has little investment in following up on what they have started. This whole business of handing off the program, as though it were a hot potato that they no longer want to touch, is a very poor show indeed.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of people in academia who, in part encouraged by the WMF (but in part spurred by examples such as my own), have become very excited about the possibilities of using Wikipedia in the classroom. I met Steve Joordens, for instance, in Boston. He's a good guy but even at the time I was wondering how on earth he could pull off something with a class of 1500 students. Sadly, in the celebratory atmosphere of that meeting, it was hard to raise any doubts, cautions, or caveats. At the same meeting there was also much excitement about the Pune program, and we all know what happened there...
In short, for a variety of reasons a lot of hopes have been raised around this program. And a lot of good material has been produced. Sometimes things have gone well. But when things have gone wrong, they have gone badly wrong, and the WMF hasn't wanted to hear any doubts, and hasn't wanted to pick up the pieces.
Frankly, it's a crying shame because the WMF has had oodles of money and resources passing through its hands, and masses of goodwill, especially but not only from academics. It's been a shame to see that money and those resources too often wasted, in almost every way conceivable. (The Barcelona junket was a particular disaster, but it was one I saw only by accident, as I happened to be at the Mozilla Fest there in any case. The Wikimedia folk there had scarcely a clue as to what they were doing, and yet they had a golden opportunity to make connections and to talk to people, both to learn and to gain allies.)
Anyhow, beyond the waste it's also a shame because I strongly believe that there needs to be more thought and more effort devoted to thinking through (and doing something about) the relationship between Wikipedia and academia, which at present is frankly a broken relationship, with massive misunderstandings on both sides. The dialogue of the deaf that results would be amusing if it weren't also almost tragic. To take one example: academics fear Wikipedia because of the rampant plagiarism that (they think) creates it and that it in turn creates; yet here we have ongoing denunciation of student projects, for almost precisely the same reason. You'd have thought we'd have here the basis of a common conversation, common goals, and perhaps a shared set of tragedies. Instead we have mutual recriminations and allegations.
I think that the relationship between Wikipedia and the University (also, more broadly, the university and the intellectual commons) is a vital one, for a number of reasons. In reality, Wikipedia and the university are (or should be) in this together: they are both ultimately utopian enterprises, dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge to all, without commercial or ideological restraints. They are both, frankly, embattled, and their enemies are similar: rampant commercialization and privatization, for instance; or, in brief, an extraordinary attempt to enclose and profit from the digital commons.
This is why, beyond the basic obfuscation and evasions that it carries with it, I'm so against the management-speak that seems to come with the Education Project in its new incarnation. It is precisely this sort of shallow rationalization, short-termism, and unthinking belief in modish rhetoric that is killing the university and has the potential to kill Wikipedia. No wonder Wikipedians react so strongly against it! It is precisely the opposite of any solution to heal the rift between Wikipedia and the University. For it is the death-rattle of both.
Anyhow, all this may sound too high-falutin' or something. But there should be a forum for an honest and productive conversation between academics and Wikipedians (which is also a conversation among academics and Wikipedians, because of course there are plenty of people who are both, and in the end the divide is a false one). This should deal with pragmatic considerations such as plagiarism as well as the less-pragmatic ones about ethics. (By the way, there are also legalities at issue: strictly speaking when I tell my students to edit on Wikipedia I am also breaking the law of my home province; but that's another matter.)
We could ask why students, even good students, decide to plagiarize on Wikipedia, even those who wouldn't necessarily plagiarize elsewhere. (The other semester I had a grad class work on the Spanish Wikipedia and it turned out that two of the articles they wrote were massively plagiarized... No, I hadn't checked initially, because it honestly didn't occur to me that grad students would plagiarize in such a stupid manner. But they did.) We could think about ways to combat this. Incidentally, I find that Wikipedia assignments ultimately work well as a way to teach students not to plagiarize, just as they teach them about the perils of using poor sources. But it takes a while to get to that point; these are difficult lessons to learn, especially perhaps among this generation of students.
But more importantly we should also be thinking harder (and doing more) about the role that Wikipedia can and should play in the education sector, and vice versa. This should be a positive and productive relationship. I salute the WMF for realizing the potential of the two "sides" working together. This is why ultimately I support the Education Project. Indeed, I think it is vital. But this is also why (again) I think it's a huge shame that it has gone through such difficulties, and that it looks nowhere near resolving them anytime soon.
OK, I know: in the classic Wikipedia idiom, your response should probably be TLDNR. Shorter version: the Education Program (or something like it) is essential, but we can't let it be blighted by short-termism, blinkered vision, unthinking celebration, and shallow rhetoric. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 06:57, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Ach, and immediately after writing this, I move to the next page on my watchlist and have to remove some massive plagiarism from Sparknotes, of all places. Sigh. We do need to get together on this stuff. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 07:01, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Having done a fair bit of outreach, I must say that most of my efforts have resulted in little concrete success within Wikipedia itself. This includes giving talks at 5 universities, offering a scholarship, and encouraging my own students to become involved. The only exception has been the medical translation efforts where I managed to find a very professional NGO which deeply shares our goal. [8] Finding new good editors is very hard and there is much that does not work. Thus I see this projects goal as figuring out what works and what dose not. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:51, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Two things are emerging from this discussion: Sage Ross and Moonriddengirl are possibly the only "real" Wikipedians on staff (editors who know how to build content and previously engaged Wikipedia at the article level), such that poor staffing has been a big part of the failed programs; and the WMF has liability concerns, causing it to ditch the programs rather than disclaim them.
On the Section 230 and liability issues, it is no surprise that the Wikimedia Foundation wants to offload responsibility for student projects to other groups. WMF already knows that student projects lead to rampant copyright violation. It should now be on notice that they also lead to errors in medical articles, which can have real-world consequences. But regardless of the legalities, there is a moral issue here: should the foundation or any of its offshoots actively support poorly-supervised projects which can lead to unrealistic expectations or real harm to those who suffer from physical or psychological conditions which are the subject of articles edited by entry-level students without professional expertise?
The answer to this question is clear: the Foundation should immediately cease funding or any other support for any student editing projects in the realms of introductory courses on psychology, psychiatry, and medicine.
Should the WMF be publicly disclaiming these programs, given the known consequences, or pushing the liability off to non-WMF entities? And what can we "real" Wikipedians do about the consequences of what are obvious gaps in staffing decisions? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 19:22, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
WMF staff (mostly comprised of people who don't edit and don't know day-to-day editing issues) have promoted programs (without consulting the regular folk out here in the trenches) that are largely utilized and populated by people who don't know Wikipedia policies (some exceptions like Jbmurray, who are underutilized, and Sage Ross who is probably overworked), leading to big problems, leading WMF attorneys to realize there are potential legal concerns (well, let's hope they realize it, because if they don't, the problem is even bigger), leading WMF staff to offload the programs to someone else to (attempt to) eliminate the WMF liability.
But the regular editors will still have to deal with the issues whether they are coming from offloaded programs or WMF-supported programs. All points to: WMF staff don't understand regular editors or the consequences of these decisions. If the WMF hired *editors* who knew something about editing, we might not have these issues (I wonder what might have happened differently if someone like Jbmurray had been on board). At any rate, offloading the program to avoid potential liability won't make things any better for the regular editor who has to deal with the cleanup. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 23:16, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
The sandbox issue is one that the education program has continually adjusted, to get a good balance between new editors learning the basics before jumping into a well-kept article and doing a whole re-write or new article in a sandbox without the editor realizing that they've gone off in a bad direction (resulting in either a huge dump of new work that needs cleanup, or the work never being used at all). In general, if students get into mainspace early, they are much more likely to interact with experienced editors and do better (and more) work that is solid, which is why we've advised limited use of sandboxes.
Here is the current "best practices" advice from the new student and educator trainings:
(Those are from the educators training, but they are also in the Ambassadors training and the last three are in the student training.)
Please feel free to edit those (and I'll try update the other trainings to reflect the consensus recommendations, based on those ones). The intended audience is both professors working with (or wanting to work with) the US and Canada Education Programs and teachers doing Wikipedia assignments independently.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 12:34, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
I have seen somewhere (but can't now locate it) a suggestion that students should copy an existing article into a sandbox, work on it there and eventually paste it back. I'm glad to see the guidance above doesn't suggest that, and it's important they shouldn't do it. Parallel versions are highly undesirable, because:
JohnCD ( talk) 16:09, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
OK, let's take a sample case I just encountered, so we can use this to understand how professors, students, WMF staff, ambassadors, and the community can or should use this board. I will notify all involved parties next. My apologies to Mike Christie for just now encountering this, as I was reviewing old links he left on my page while I was mostly not editing (and my extra apologies to him for not being available all spring, summer and fall, as he repeatedly queried my talk). [9] I found this article by reviewing that course page for topics I'm familiar with.
One of the student's first edits to the article was to remove a large chunk of sourced text. Every single article edit was made in one day, just before the course ended. Within minutes of finishing the work, in one session, the (clearly unprepared) article was simultaneously nominated at both DYK and GAN, adding to the drain on resources at those pages; an established editor would have likely known the article was not GA quality, and we don't know if the course required her to submit these nominations.
The article contains blatant, easily spotted, outright cut-and-paste plagiarism from at least the online sources, meaning certainly the offline sources will need checking as well. Since the student plagiarized online sources, someone will need to access and check offline sources. Samples:
I stopped there; since the first three edits contain plagiarism, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the entire article does. Nor does it seem unreasonable to assume that neither the professor nor the ambassador (sorry, Mike, you know I adore you and value your work!) checked.
There are other style issues: grammatical, MOS, information and sections that should be eliminated-- in other words, a lot of cleanup needed. A good deal of the portions that need cleanup were in the article before the student started editing, but what the student did was 1) not fix faulty text or sections, while 2) deleting sourced information to 3) replace it with plagiarized text.
Cleanup will be easier once the plagiarism is removed, but since it wasn't detected on time, the article has been edited since. This article "looks" good, but it was not an improvement; it was a net negative to Wikipedia, and a drain on editor time.
Many courses require students to do a few edits before they start writing; Lcannaday's only other edits to Wikipedia were to:
SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 18:21, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
So, what admin is going to revert to pre-plagiarism, revdel or whatever adminly thing has to be done to remove the plagiarism, check the offline sources I can't access, etc? Once all that is done, I can cleanup the issues that were in the article pre-student editing. I'm more interested in using this example as a guide to how we should approach the hundreds or thousands of same that are out there. For starters, the professor should be uninvited, since he clearly wasn't engaging the project adequately. Since we know this professor wasn't checking for plagiarism, I suggest every article his course touched is suspect. Should we revert them all? Who is going to be responsbible for checking all of them? Is someone going to submit a copyvio investigation on the entire course? If these were not students, that is what we would be doing. So, how does this board plan to address this and similar situations? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:08, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
@ SandyGeorgia: Nice example. Having gone through the available information on the course page, I have some questions that I would need answered before I could come to all the conclusions you’ve come too. The fact that the article you cite has been edited in a manner that is a bad for WP is undeniable and unfortunate. The questions I have (and these have to be mostly rhetorical because I don’t think we can know the answers accurately after the fact):
Again Sandy, good example which indeed demonstrates the potential adverse burden on the community if these types of activity aren’t avoided. But avoided they can be through good instructional design, good training, good resources outlining best practices, and collaborative activities between the Wikipedia community and academia. We have ample evidence that this can be done right? -- Mike Cline ( talk) 18:28, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
good example which indeed demonstrates the potential adverse burden on the community if these types of activity aren’t avoided.was a summary in a global context. It actually reinforces what you are saying--we've got to fix the issues or the problems will get worse. I get it, but what I don't understand is why everyone is looking for a scapegoat and cherry picking language to reinforce that search. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 21:17, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
We should IMO spend some time discussing solutions. We have fairly clearly identified a problem. I propose getting press for these concerns using concrete cases. We can than point profs who are interested in being involved to these articles so that they see involvement as requiring supervision not simply a free source of TAs. Do others have comments on this idea or other ideas? Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:11, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm very confused by the plagarism issue. If the sources are cited then how it is plagarism? Some of parts of the article was 100% copied from a book but I thought that didn't matter as long as it was cited where we got the information from.
Colin° Talk 16:03, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Keep Don't care if it stays up. Just need it up until December 18th to get credit for a into to neuroscience class.
When we find plagiarism, indicating that the prof didn't check the work, what should we do?
etcetera ... SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 05:09, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I've been trying to work through some of the massive backlog at WP:CCI (largely not to blame on students btw!) and have a proposal to help speed things up. As I'm sure you all know, the IEP yielded a lot of garbage including a ton of copyright violations. This happened both in mainspace and in sandboxes. I'd like to nuke all of the sandbox pages of users who did not continue to be active after the course ended, without evaluating them further. Right now there are thousands upon thousands of articles at CCI waiting to be evaluated, with the backlog growing by the day, and I don't think checking this for copyvio is a good use of anyone's time. Any thoughts/opposition/support? Calliopejen1 ( talk) 01:04, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
here and here. Beyond My Ken ( talk) 21:47, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Background: I have edited WP on-and-off for many years and consider myself reasonable knowledgable on wiki-policy, editing, and on chemistry. I have an FA, a couple of GAs, and a bunch of DYKs, as well as a PhD in chemistry. I also have an academic background, being a published researcher and having taught undergraduate chemistry. I have never used WP for teaching or assessment, but have worked on articles that have been edited (poorly and well) by student editors. Obviously, all opinions are my own and do not represent the chemistry or chemicals WikiProjects, the FAC, GA, or DYK communities, or the instructors or students with whom I have interacted. The Chemistry WikiProject, FYI, has a considerable number of student-related articles being edited.
Comments: One very positive example from my experience comes from the oxaziridine article which DMelvinKaphan ( talk · contribs) built to this point in December 2010 (there were a few small edits from others, but the work was almost exclusively DMelvinKaphan's). I classify this as a "student editor"'s work because s/he describes him- or her-self as "an undergraduate chemistry major at the University of Rochester. The impetus for creation of this account was to publish a wikipedia page on the chemistry of oxaziridines, a subject that has heretofore been neglected from the Wikipedia" on her or his user page. I don't know if it was an assignment. DMelvinKaphan nominated the article for GA, which it passed on 29 December 2010, and I nominated it for DYK, the article making its front page appearance on 14 December 2010 (1332 views). The article has deteriorated recently, now being tagged as having a lead problem, though a request at WT:CHEMISTRY#Oxaziridine seeks help in this area. The article has received more than 3600 views in the last 90 days. Unfortunately, DMelvinKaphan has not edited since April 2011.
Around the same time, I had positive interactions with MichChemGSI ( talk · contribs), working with a group of students. On the article isolobal principle, this single edit addition added 12000 bytes of material. Now, I'm not wild about the dump-a-huge-change-and-vanish approach by (like Chem507f10grp5 ( talk · contribs)) (all of this editor's other edits were in a sandbox, but looking at the diff between that addition and the current version, covering 31 edits, shows that the addition has remained largely intact. The article's topic relates to Hoffman's work that earned him the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I nominated the article for DYK, and it was viewed 2368 times when it appeared on the main page on 23 December 2010. The article has been viewed 3372 times in the last 90 days.
A more difficult case from that group of students concerned the insertion reaction article. The history is harder to follow as the sandbox-to-mainspace move was made by MichChemGSI as a cut-and-paste move. As he was not the student(s), a history merge and cleanup was required - see discussions on his talk page - and the cessation of the strudents sharing a single account (like Chem507f10grp3 ( talk · contribs)) was also done around this time. In short, this was what the students contributed, much of it good, but also very unbalanced. There are many other insertion reactions that are not covered in this article, as my 14000 byte addition to their 19000 byte draft shows. Most of the follow-up clean-up was done by Smokefoot ( talk · contribs) who removed much material that belonged in the migratory insertion article. I nominated the article for DYK, at it received 454 views, likely partly due to it appearance being on 26 December 2010. There was a lot of work needed on the article following the student editing, but the article is a definite improvement of the 'pedia, in my opinion.
More recent experiences have been more problematic. The article on niobium(V) ethoxide was started by Kolmodi2 ( talk · contribs), likely by "borrowing" the ethanol article then blanking it. The student's completed version might be best described as chemically flawed. For the non-chemists, that compound is not an organometallic compound, so the lead is almost entirely false. Comparing to the current version, almost none of the student version remains except the infobox data. Even the structure image was massively flawed. Rifleman 82 ( talk · contribs) and then I worked on cleanup, then Smokefoot made a major improvement (correcting material I had doubted using sources he had to hand). I don't know who is grading / supervising Kolmodi2, but the contribution this student made was very poor, in my opinion.
Another problematic example is Ryanhan2 ( talk · contribs)'s article on allylcyclopentane, which was created via the AfC process. Though the amount of text is not insignificant, the actual cointent is a re-hashing of infobox information mixed with chemical and logical errors. Quite understandably, Smokefoot's response to this article was to nominate it for deletion, a discussion which was closed as "Keep" despite any real policy-based support. During the AfD, most of the content was removed and with Rifleman 82's removal of "junk references", the article is now a three-sentence stub with a single reference. Ryanhan2 has not edited since 28 November. I have no idea what the instructor thinks of Ryanhan2's work, but I think that the effort of the community here has been far more than is justified by a three-sentence-plus-infobox stub. I have since added a second reference, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics which I have used to support infobox data. I did this because I noticed that the original article included values for ΔcH° (−32 kJ mol−1 for the liquid, −12 kJ mol−1 for the gas). These values seemed to me to be improbably small, but were attributed to the CRC Handbook, a reliable and respected source. I did not find any value for this quantity in the reference at the place indicated, another flaw in the draft, but the Handbook does support several infobox values so I added those references. I've also added an MSDS. EdChem ( talk) 09:57, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Addendum: I posted this on SandyGeorgia's talk page which mentions my concerns about additions to the metallocene article, so I haven't expanded on it here.
Notifications: I have posted at WT:CHEMISTRY (which I am sure Rifleman and Smokefoot will see) and individually to MichChemGSI to invite comments and opinions. EdChem ( talk) 05:13, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
This may not be the right place to ask this question, but I've been reviewing source usage for student articles -- this was a topic that came up higher up this page. I'm looking at both student and non-student edits. There are a few edits that I'd like to get second opinions on. Could folks comment on whether the following are acceptable, or are covered by WP:LIMITED, or are unacceptable close paraphrasing? I'll number these so folks can refer to them by number in responses.
1. Text in source: "Chile has the lowest female participation rate in the work force in all of Latin America." Text in article: "Chile has the lowest rate of female participation in the work force in all of Latin America"
2. Text in source: "Chile is one of the only states in the world to have elected a female president". Text in article: "Chile legalized divorce in 2004 and is also one of the only countries to have elected a female president."
3. Text in source: "Although 47.5% of university students are women, many university graduates choose to be homemakers instead of seeking employment." Text in article: "Despite 47.5% of students in college are women, many still chose to join the workforce, choosing to be homemakers."
4. Text in source: "women activists in Chile pressed presidential candidates in 2009 to pursue reforms that helped women to enter the workforce, including job training, maternity leave options, and flexible working schedules." Text in article: " In 2009, activists demanded that presidential candidates develop reforms that would improve work conditions for women. Reforms included maternity leave, flexible work schedules and job training."
5. Text in source: "Younger women often choose cohabitation over marriage and they have fewer children." Text in article: "Today, younger women are opting out of marriage and having fewer children than their predecessors."
6. Text in source: "In 2002, urban women had a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. Rural women have more children, at 2.9 children per woman, but they too have less children than in the 1990s." Text in article: "A 2002 study reported that urban women average 2.1 children per woman with women living in rural areas having more children, at 2.9. As of the 1990s, both urban and rural women were averaging fewer children than previously."
7. Text in source: "Women in Chile have a long life expectancy and high rates of literacy. Women live on average 80.8 years" Text in article: "Women in Chile have long life expectancy, living an average of 80.8 years, about six years longer than men"
8. Text in source: "It is estimated, unofficially, that between 120,000 and 160,000 women have illegal abortions each year" Text in article: "Estimates range between 120,000 and 160,000 for the number of Chilean women who have illegal abortions each year."
-- Any comments? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 23:43, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure if everyone who's commented here realizes this, but not all of the example edits above are by students; they are by three different editors, only one of whom is a student.
Here is a marked up copy of the article version I am analyzing. All uses of the four sources in question are marked up in blue, green or red, to indicate which editor added that material. (I.e. you can think of them as blue editor, green editor, and red editor.) The eight examples above are the only uses of those sources where there's any question about close paraphrasing -- I've underlined those in the marked up copy.
My question for this group is: given what you see in the marked up copy, what should we tell the student? (For the moment I'd rather not say which colour represents the student, just to avoid any unconscious bias in the responses. The other two editors are very experienced and long term Wikipedians.) In particular, a couple of responses above pointed out that the question of whether this sort of paraphrasing was acceptable depended on the context and the density of this kind of paraphrase; the markup should give you some additional context to answer that question.
My original motivation with this analysis was to find out just how much misuse of sources was going in student work, and to compare that with the source usage standards visible in the same articles, by looking at non-student work in those articles. I confess I'm rather surprised to discover that I'm stuck at this early point unable to make a definite statement about whether the student, or the regular editors, were using their sources correctly. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:00, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
If the consensus is that a student's assignment made Wikipedia worse instead of improving Wikipedia, why should they be rewarded with any credit for the assignment? Instead of partial credit, shouldn't they receive negative credit or no credit? Biosthmors ( talk) 23:55, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Has there been any success with giving students start class articles and ask that they improve them up to C or B class? We already have GAs and DYKs as a discouraged assignment at WP:AFSE; should improving a start class article be an encouraged assignment? Biosthmors ( talk) 00:14, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
Since we've got the course page extension running and it has potential to make it easier to monitor and prevent problems with independent classes (as well as education program classes), I think we should start actively trying to get the random classes that pop up to use the extension, and have the professors go through some vetting beforehand. To that end, I added a section to Wikipedia:Training/For educators where the instructors of independent classes can request permission to set up a structured course page (for which they need the Course instructor user right). See Wikipedia:Training/For educators/Setting up your course 2. It's currently set up to post a new section onto this noticeboard, where the instructor explains what the assignment plan is, how many students will be editing, and so on. Here is the pleload form; feel free to modify it.
I'm going to overhaul {{ welcome teacher}} so that it points to the training and encourages instructors to use a structured course page.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:10, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Shouldn't all courses be required/expected/strongly encouraged to
And shouldn't all of these 4 points be included in a grading rubric for students? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:36, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Who will be making decisions on which which professors are accepted into (or kicked out of) the program, which Wikipedians are ambassadors, etc., starting in Summer 2013? Biosthmors ( talk) 03:28, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
What we need is an automated solution to not only determine who here is plagiarizing from others but who is plagiarizing from us. In the last few months I have come across three textbooks that have lifted heavily from Wikipedia without attribution and these where just examples I stumbled upon [19]. I remember hearing that we had something like this at one point in time? Does anyone know? Maybe the education program should donate $25,000 to hire programmers to developing a solution or the WMF should direct programming resources to it. I am currently attempting to find volunteers. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:50, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Some background: You may know that we have produced a series of handouts over the last 2.5 years for the Education Program; many were developed as we suddenly realized the need for one, and they lacked cohesion. I've been working over the last couple of months at revamping them, as we have gotten the feedback from students that there are too many of them, they are too detailed, they are too long, and they don't look official since they all are different. So I am getting all handouts down to one page, in the same visual identity. My goal is to make them short enough that students will actually read them, but detailed enough to convey the key elements that students need to know to contribute good content to Wikipedia. They also include links to Wikipedia policy and guideline pages for more details if students want more details.
I have just uploaded a new plagiarism handout to Wikimedia Commons: File:Classroom_handout_-_Avoiding_plagiarism_on_Wikipedia.pdf. I hope that I have taken into account the concrete suggestions for what to tell students that have been listed on this page, but I welcome any feedback. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 18:16, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
Copyvio and plagiarism are two almost entirely separate issues, and what matters here is plagiarism (a moral and intellectual issue, not a legal one). Long block quotes are fine on Wikipedia within reason, just as they're fine in academic texts, but you must give the name of the person you're quoting, or closely paraphrasing, or borrowing an idea from. Not only to give credit (as I wrote above), but also to make clear to the reader: "These are the books and papers I have read, and here I am reporting what they say," which is what undergraduate essays and Wikipedia articles are supposed to be about. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:29, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
I've updated the file on Commons, trying to take into account the central concerns raised here. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 21:27, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
The other source of frustration is that we keep trying to reinvent the wheel. Universities have already described plagiarism and posted advice for students, so we should simply follow it. Here is good advice from Harvard: "What Constitutes Plagiarism?":
Note the in-text attribution. This isn't difficult to explain to students, especially as the cases we've seen have not been subtle examples on the borderline. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:43, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
The Harvard page looks good and I'll read it some more in detail. I'm a bit concerned about their definition of "Common knowledge" and the need to cite vs ours. Their cases where a citation is required would roughly correspond to our cases where in-text attribution was required (for an opinion, idea, beliefs, etc). By their guidance, there would be a lot of facts that wouldn't need a citation where we certainly would require one. What they are really talking about is attribution of ideas and original thought. The fact that the space shuttle weighs so many tonnes or the a drug has the risk of causing liver damage are facts that need citations on WP but do not need attributed to any person or group.
In subjects that are less about professors thinking deep original thoughts and more about experiments, the need for attribution is reduced in an encyclopaedia but is still common in academic writing. If you read an academic medical review paper, it will give attribution for various discoveries but those discoveries don't constitute original thought. We don't need to (and indeed shouldn't) in-text-attribute those discoveries unless they are notable in and of themselves as part of the history of a disease or a drug or whatever.
My point here is that we need to be careful that Wikipedia is a mix of subjects. The academic writing in those subjects wont translate exactly to Wikipedia and the degree of mismatch may be much greater in some subjects than others. We need to offer students and professors subject-appropriate guidance on how to write encyclopaedia articles and how such writing differs from academia. Colin° Talk 09:15, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
The FAQ of the Cambridge guidelines says "How do I avoid plagiarising? -- By being sure you understand and follow the correct referencing techniques for your subject. Some of the most commonly used reference techniques are Harvard and Vancouver..." This is dreadful advice and no wonder we see student comments like the one quoted further up this page: "Some of parts of the article was 100% copied from a book but I thought that didn't matter as long as it was cited where we got the information from." Hmm.
Colin°
Talk
20:25, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Oxford's plagiarism page, again stressing in-text attribution. The following is in their words:
SlimVirgin (talk) 19:39, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
What are the main incentives professors have to stay aligned with the Education Program? What prevents them from making their own Wikipedia assignments, anonymously and under the radar? What would make an under the radar professor join the education program? What's in it for them? Biosthmors ( talk) 03:33, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
Done OhanaUnited Talk page 01:25, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Chris Leeder
University of Michigan, School of Information
SI 110 Introduction to information; introductory undergraduate course for the Informatics major, covering a wide range of historical and technologic topics related to information technology and the Internet; most students are freshmen but there is a range. I am a doctoral student and Head Graduate Student Instructor for the course. I have takent he GLAM (Galelries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) Wikipedia training and am working with our Campus Ambassadors on this assignment.
Students will not be writing new articles. My goal is to introduce them to the Wikipedia editing process and to give them a better understanding of how Wikipedia works.
A rough draft of the assignments: 1) Create a user page and account 2) Create a sandbox and practice editing techniques 3) Review the Did You Know, Good Article, and Featured Article process and criteria 4) Make 5 minor edits to articles they are interested in (copyediting) 5) Choose a course-related article that could be improved and write a short description of suggested changes 6) Introduce themselves on the Talk page of the article and discuss their suggestions 7) Make 5 substantive edits to the article 8) Add a source citation to the article (from a course reading?) 9) Write a short reflection on what they have learned about Wikipedia
Approximately 100
1/9/13-4/23/13 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cleeder ( talk • contribs) 23:47, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Done OhanaUnited Talk page 01:25, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Lori L. Britt
James Madison University
SCOM 350: Introduction to Organizational Communication. Sophomores through seniors learn about theories of organizing and how they affect out experiences as members of organizations. Writing for Wikipedia will be one of two experiential learning options students will complete throughout the term (the other is service-learning helping an area nonprofit organization meet a goal). Students will work at both a product (writing about organizational communication ideas and concepts for a public audience) and process level (reflection on the process of learning about and navigating member participation in the online Wikipedia organization.
Students will research what information is currently available on Wikipedia on organizational communication and theories of organizing. Then they will identify shortcomings or gaps and significantly edit or write articles on a specific topic in this area. Along the way they will learn the ropes of Wikipedia by doing some minor edits, cleaning up pages, learning the style conventions, etc.
Since this is one option, I anticipate about half, or 15 students will choose the Wikipedia option. I plan to have a former student who excelled at this project last fall Skype with the class in the early days to discuss his experience. I think this will help students for whom the fear of the unknown might be a deterrent.
Start and end dates January 7- April 30, 2013 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Llbritt ( talk • contribs) 23:58, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Chris Cooper
Western Carolina University
Policy Analyasis (PA 673): This is a graduate level policy analysis course and a core course in the Western Carolina University MPA program. This is the third year in a row I will have used Wikipedia in this course. Each student is required to write about one policy. I will be working with Kasey Baker.
Writing or substantially improving one entry related to a public policy of their choosing.
25
Jan 13 to May 3
In a now-archived thread, I mentioned Mu wave as a page where I had a good experience with a student editor. I was rather pleased to notice today that the student editor, who has now graduated, has returned to make more edits. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 16:20, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Here at in-progress lists of classes it looks like will be participating in the US and Canada Education Programs for the coming term. I expect both will grow a fair bit.
-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 18:29, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
The brochure "Evaluating Wikipedia Article Quality" is mentioned under Wikipedia:Training/For_educators/Companion_materials but does not seem to be listed under the Resources tab mentioned.
I found it here
Cleeder ( talk) 15:27, 5 January 2013 (UTC)Cleeder
The Education Working Group's proposal that was submitted to WMF, revised based on the RfC and related discussions, is now up. It looks like the next step, about 2 weeks from now, will be to submit it to the Affiliations Committee. You can post feedback and suggestions on the proposal talk page.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 19:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Why not just start an RfC asking the community what it thinks of the proposal at Wikipedia talk:Education Working Group/Proposal? Biosthmors ( talk) 04:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree with Biosthmors: this is all rather odd. We had an RFC, which was to all intents and purposes ignored (admittedly it was messy, but it produced no kind of mandate either). And there's obviously no real desire to consult with Wikipedians about the program. My sense is that the WMF and the working group feel that they had their fingers burnt once too often, and wanted to plough ahead with the schedule they had set themselves.
But on the other hand, so be it. Essentially, the EP doesn't need to have much if anything to do with Wikipedia and its governance model. There's nothing to stop independent bodies such as this from arising and using Wikipedia for their own purposes. We can't insist that they do things the Wikipedia way. If there's some kind of positive outcome at least some of the time, then fair enough. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 16:44, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Chris Cooper.
Western Carolina University.
PA 673: Public Policy Analysis. A core course in the MPA program at Western Carolina University. As one component of this course, students will write or substantially improve Wikipedia entries on public policy.
Writing, or substantially improving Wikipedia entries related to public policy.
25
Jan 15th to May 10th?
My edits to Education Program:Saint Louis University/Signal Transduction (SP13) don't show up on my watchlist. Will they soon? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:18, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
Is education program space (and are the new course pages) designed to be a place where the community can't openly edit it? Biosthmors ( talk) 18:17, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Will Special:Courses perhaps soon list the ambassadors that are signed up for classes so it will be easy to see who has one and who doesn't? Biosthmors ( talk) 04:32, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
I happened to stumble across some student edits at Motor unit that require some cleanup. I am considering just undoing all the edits to the entire article back to its pre-student status. I figured someone here might be interested in this, maybe to provide feedback to the course director, though i don't know whether it was an explicit USEP project or not. I have already posted notices at WP:Neuro and WP:Neuroscience.
-- UseTheCommandLine ( talk) 10:18, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
"Dr. S. Deban and University of South Florida" according to User talk:Shwu123, who edited motor unit. Has anyone here been in contact with the professor? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:08, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
I was just reading up on any changes to the Educaton Program today, and took note of the fact that instructors apparently now get a huge toolset. I've seen editors with less than 50 edits who have the account creator, autopatrolled user, epinstructor, filemover, IP block exemption, reviewer, rollbacker
rights. Taking out the ones that have an obvious use in course instruction (ACC, EPI) leaves them with these rights unexplained (in my mind):
Autopatrolled
Filemover
IP block exemption
Reviewer
Rollback
In talking to another editor, I can see a reason for the IP block in case of any blocks put on that institution during the course, which would affect the instructor's ability to teach, and the students as well. However, I'm still left wondering why all of these rights are given to a fairly new editor. In particular, I can't see any reason for a new user whose main purpose is instructing a class on editing to need filemover
, reviewer
, and autopatrolled
. Those are (almost) never given to new users, certainly never to users with 48 edits. Unless the instructor can provide a use for those rights that can't be taken care of with {{
rename media}}, or waiting for a new article/edit to be reviewed, then I don't think they should have those rights. It's not that I don't trust the instructor, just giving all of those rights to someone before seeing their editing habits is very concerning to me. I apologize if this is in the wrong spot, if it is I give anyone permission to move it to a better area. Thanks,
gwickwire
talk
edits
02:09, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
As someone who is/was active in several of these rights, I would like to express my opinion:
Autopatrolled
- "Autopatrol is given so that when profs create a page like
this, it wouldn't flood the
new page patrol and upsetting those patrollers." - Patrollers rarely patrol the Wikipedia namespace and you will see why by looking at
Special:NewPages, there are dozens of unpatrolled AfDs, SPIs,
FACs and the list goes on. Does that mean we give Autopatrolled
to people who create dozens of AfDs?Filemover
- As someone who is active in moving files here and on Commons, I find tons of controversial {{
rename media}} requests. How do we know that these instructors are going to make appropriate moves, do they even know the relevant policies?Reviewer
- As noted by Fluffernutter "Autopatrolled and reviewer, in particular, strike me as a Very Bad Idea to give to participants who maybe don't know a whole lot about what a valid article looks like, how to write using our MOS, or how to use our copyright or BLP policies."I am not going to comment on rollback, IP block exemption or account creator as they can be extremely useful to instructors if used correctly. As I stated before, "do they even know the relevant policies?" - We should atleast be dropping links and/or templates to assist instructors in using their tools correctly. :) -- Cheers, Ril ey 04:57, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
I also am very concerned about this situation. It seems to me that there is a valid justification for IP block exemption. And that's the only one. Even rollbacker otherwise requires an administrator to provide the tool, hopefully only after actually checking the editor's demonstrated ability to use it. It seems to me that the community has consensus standards for most of these rights, and they shouldn't be given out to new editors simply because they are instructors without clear evidence of community consent to modifying those standards. After all, this noticeboard has had numerous instances of editors pointing out serious failures of some instructors to adhere to Wikipedia's editing norms, so empirically there is no valid reason to presume that instructors automatically qualify for the permissions. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 22:55, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
One other point to be made here is that we're not talking about a large set of editors. Even if the education program expands considerably we're talking about maybe a dozen or so concurrent users in a day. We've nearly racked up a dozen sysops who were found to have been sockpuppets of banned users, and we survived that. :) Protonk ( talk) 15:29, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
If I'm following all of this discussion correctly, I would support Account Creator rights for professors. I'd strongly prefer to assign IP Block Exempt status only on an as-needed and temporary basis so I hope this right is removed after the students and professors finish a course unless there is some need for them to keep IPBE. I strongly oppose automatically granting autopatrol, filemover, reviewer, and rollback to professors, students, and/or ambassadors, and I think any change to the status quo for how these rights are assigned should go through a community RFC. I'll add that I don't remember any discussion of these user rights being a part of the RFC about whether the education extension should be implemented, and I would have opposed the education extension if I had known that these rights changes were included as a part of that package. There was no mention that I can see of these rights changes at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Education Program extension. I can see some value in the extension but not in the rights changes. Pardon me for being upset but I dislike being surprised in this way. -- Pine ✉ 07:10, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
To clarify a bit, the only user rights that are connected with the extension are the course instructor, campus volunteer, online volunteer, and course coordinator rights, and each of these has effects that are limited to the extension features. If we do decide that, for example, everyone with the course instructor right should also be given ACC access, that would be an easy change to make. But as it is, those extension rights are independent of the additional rights being discussed here.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 13:07, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
John Chetro Szivos
Fitchburg State University
In this course, students examine origins, nature, and consequences of communication in a variety of subfields. This course reviews the roles of theory in comprehension of communication practices. Furthermore, it introduces the link between communication theory and the methodologies of communication research, including both qualitative and quantitative approaches, with an emphasis on interpretive approaches that are relevant to organizational settings. This is a graduate course in the Master's program in Applied Communication
I am hoping they will be able to select a communication theory or issue and prepare an edit an entry
20
January 19 - May 15 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.3.118.249 ( talk) 01:04, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
First off, is this the right place to ask general questions about how to use the education extension?
On my course page, I see that it says there is currently one student enrolled. But I don't see any quick link to the list of students for just this course. There's a link to the complete list of students in the whole program, but then I'd have to search that list manually for just the students in my course. What am I missing?
Klortho ( talk) 04:49, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
DGG suggested to me recently that it might be helpful to clarify some points that keep coming up, related to what the community can expect from education program participants. He and I worked on a draft and I sent it to the working group participants to get their take on it, since that's a group of editors and educators who have been involved with the EP for a while. Here's what emerged, slightly edited from the original draft.
I would like to see the new US/Canada EP organization, if the WMF creates it, adopt some language like this; and I think it would be helpful if the global EP made a similar statement of intent. I've used "EP" as shorthand for the new organization, whatever its name turns out to be.
Any comments or improvements to the wording? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:45, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
On expedited reviews: I don't think everyone waiting for their volunteer work to be reviewed for GA, for example, would appreciate students getting ahead of them in line. The opinions of those who are waiting for a GA review should be prioritized, when considering this question, in my opinion. I know that if I were to have a student get priority over me for a GA review, I wouldn't like it. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Amy E. Hughes
CUNY, Brooklyn College
For the first time, I am incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into a course that I am teaching because I would like to give students the option of completing a Wikipedia project in lieu of the customary research paper. The course is "Theater History from 1642" and it is the second half of a two-semester survey of Western theater history. We will explore theater practice and drama from the Restoration to postmodernism, examining scripts, theory, audiences, theater architecture, scenic and costume design, and acting styles in light of the social and cultural conditions that influence theatrical literature and performance. It is a required course for many MA and MFA students studying theater in my department. All students must complete a significant research project (35% of grade), either 1) an academic research paper addressing a significant and original research problem, following the conventions associated with a conference paper; or 2) a Wikipedia project, in which students will create or substantially edit one or more pages on Wikipedia about notable individuals, historical periods, and/or aesthetic movements in theater history, citing at least ten secondary sources.
I am modeling this assignment on the 12-week syllabus recommended by Wikipedia. Students will have work due every week throughout the semester. First, they will learn how to set up a user account, post on a Talk page, "claim" the articles they want to work on by posting on the Wikipedia page for this course, and set up their sandbox. Then, students will post their preliminary bibliography in their sandbox for my review. Next, they will complete a needs assessment and a writing plan, which will be peer-reviewed by a classmate. After the NA and WP are approved by me, they will start making improvements to the article they've selected. During week 9, every student will complete at least one peer review of the work done to date by posting comments on the article's Talk page. Students will continue working on the articles until the twelfth week, at which point they will submit to me a reflective paper describing their experience in this project, along with a "work journal" logging the hours and tasks completed each week. After completing this project, I believe my students 1) will have increased their knowledge about several topics in theater history, 2) be better able to assess and critically read information posted on the Internet, 3) be more familiar with the social/editorial conventions, formatting, and programming associated with wikis generally and Wikipedia specifically, 4) be a better writers—the transparency and flexibility of wiki technology will allow them to see the strengths and weaknesses in their writing, hone their skills as researchers and editors, and give and receive help from other members of the Wikipedia community.
15-17 students
January 30 to May 22, 2013
Amy E Hughes ( talk) 14:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
There has been a lot of feedback being generated at Wikipedia:Training/For students/Training feedback. Is anyone welcome to address these comments by editing Wikipedia:Training/For students, for example? And how would one go about editing the training, exactly? Biosthmors ( talk) 18:42, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
In regards to Wikipedia:Education Working Group/Proposal:
Thanks. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:26, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I see there is an upcoming meeting on January 28th ( Wikipedia:Education Board/Meetings/2013/1). Can the community please get an update? About the points raised above, for example? Biosthmors ( talk) 18:46, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm thinking the lists at Wikipedia:Online_Ambassadors/Mentors and Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Campus_Ambassadors are likely to contain people who are no longer doing anything with student editors or professors. (I looked at just one person's contributions and I didn't see any recent activity.) Maybe we should contact them all using EdwardsBot and email to ask that they list at WP:AFSE, if they want to be active Wikipedia editors. If people aren't active editors then I don't think they should be on the list at that article. I think we should also abandon the profiles and maintain simple lists. User pages serve the profile purpose. One can always add a footnote to the article to explain the subjects one is willing and not willing to be an ambassador for. Biosthmors ( talk) 14:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Could we organize Special:CampusAmbassadors in a regional (possibly map) way, or at least present location details, so people can scroll through and see if anyone is possibly available in their area? Biosthmors ( talk) 02:01, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I'll be working closely with a number of courses at UC Berkeley next semester. I've been discussing the concerns that have arisen in past education program classes with the instructors that I will be working with, including concerns about plagiarism. All of the instructors that I will be working with feel very strongly that plagiarism is not acceptable, and both myself and the instructors will be actively monitoring student contributions for plagiarism (and if any cases of obvious intentional plagiarism are uncovered, they will be dealt with in a strong manner.
One of the instructors I will be working with brought something to my attention that I was previously unaware of - apparently UC Berkeley has access to Turnitin in a fashion that is easy to use, has no additional marginal cost, and in a way that could be applied to student's contributions to Wikipedia. If used in this class, it would be used in a fashion that did not submit to Turnitin pre-existing text on Wikipedia - only the student's direct additions would be scanned. Students would at be aware of what this involved. I know that there is controversy over the fact that Turnitin retains papers submitted to it in its database, but since the content would be submitted to Wikipedia under a CC license anyway, this wouldn't be releasing any additional rights over the content as far as I know.
I know that a lot of people have very strong feelings about Turnitin. I, bluntly, don't know enough about the background to the controversy surrounding Turnitin to know whether or not using the service in this way would be a good idea, or in line with our values. I honestly didn't even know UCB had access to Turnitin until today. Certainly, it would aid in ensuring that assignments coming out of this class weren't plagiaristic - both by its deterrent effect and potentially catching people directly. I don't feel like I'm educated enough about the issues surrounding the use of Turnitin to advise the instructor about whether the positives of using Turnitin in this way outweigh the negatives of doing so, so I figured I would post this here to solicit input.
Anyone have any strong thoughts one way or the other? Thanks, Kevin Gorman ( talk) 08:28, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Maria Schmeeckle
Illinois State University
Sociology 318: Children in Global Perspective. This is an upper division undergraduate elective. I am trying to participate in the American Sociological Association Wikipedia Initiative. This is one of 3 service learning options for my students. We have a campus ambassador who will orient the students: Mayuko Nakamura.
They will attempt to improve articles related to children, or add quality references.
Probably 10-15.
January 15-May 2, 2013. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maria Schmeeckle ( talk • contribs) 03:52, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Melissa Parade (TA)
Brett R. Fajen (Instructor)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Perception and Action This course is an advanced undergraduate/graduate level introduction to the topic of perception and action. It is designed to be of interest to students in cognitive science and related fields who want to better understand how humans and other animals interact with the world. Using real-world examples from both routine, everyday tasks and highly practiced skills, we will (1) explore different theoretical approaches (e.g., information processing, computational, neural, embodied cognition, dynamical systems, and ecological), (2) discuss classic and current research on perception, motor control, and perceptual-motor learning, (3) learn about mathematical and computational tools used to build models and analyze data, and (4) consider some applications, including training, rehabilitation, human-machine interaction, and robotics.
Student will work in groups to create a new Wikipedia article (or substantially revise an existing article that is in need of improvement) on a topic related to the material covered in this course. This assignment will require you to choose an appropriate topic, conduct a literature search, synthesize current knowledge on your topic into a clearly written article, and respond to feedback about your article from classmates, the instructor, and other Wikipedia users.
10-15 students
January 24 to (approx.) May 15, 2013
Will I be able to add my adviser as a co-instructor on this course once the page has been created? -- Melissa Parade ( talk) 16:10, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Jackson Peebles
Western Michigan University
SPPA 2000 - Human Communication Disorders, Department of Speech Pathology & Audiology (Undergraduate)
Students will be assigned several pages to review very thoroughly, verifying sources, citations, and adding the latest evidence-based research while formatting properly. The first several articles will be very thoroughly reviewed by professors, graduate students, and (not or) research assistants.
This program will be piloted by a single honors research assistant overseen by myself (another undergraduate honors research assistant), a graduate assistant, a masters-level clinician, and three doctoral-level associate professors. If it is successful, the professors will likely remain the same or incorporate the chair/department, two other graduate students can be added, and standard honors undergraduate students will be assigned homework that entails proper editing of Wikipedia.
SPPA 2000 is offered in both in the Fall and Winter semesters (Sept-April) as well as occasionally during the summer semesters. -- Jackson Peebles ( talk) 08:16, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Darcie Vandegrift
Carrie Dunham-LaGree
Drake University
Working with my campus ambassador, I am creating a Wikipedia assignment for the first time using a version of the 12-week syllabus timeline over fifteen weeks. I want students to develop information literacy as well as to gain deeper understanding of youth studies. For the course “Global Youth Studies,” our class will read a textbook and scholarly articles to understand the social conditions of young adults in a variety of countries around topics including employment, education, popular culture, civic engagement, and health. The entries will focus on how youth experience particular social conditions due to age, historical time period, and social inequality. I will ask that they either edit three sections of an essay or create a new entry. Their work will be focused on the social conditions of youth in a particular country (Venezuelan youth) or comparative essay about youth conditions across the world (e.g., “sexual violence in teen relationships”).
Students will have work due throughout the semester. They will set up an account and complete the online orientation. In week two, they will bring a draft of a proposed topic and complete an in-lab orientation with our campus ambassador. Here they will learn to use a talk page and evaluate article quality. In week three, they will discuss Wikipedia community etiquette and standards, and evaluate an existing Wikipedia article. Week four will include editing an existing article with one-two sentences. In week six, they will turn in a draft proposal that includes proposed articles to include in the topic area. We will also review "sandboxes" and how to use them. In week seven, they will return to the library for further orientation on locating materials and will turn in revised materials. In week eight, they will turn in a short summary version of the article or proposed improvements.In week nine, they will move their drafts to the sandbox and begin editing there with a classmate's help. In week eleven (two weeks), they will receive feedback on their article, and revise it to move out of the sandbox in week ten. They will continue this feedback process in week twelve. In week thirteen they will respond to feedback. They will add final touches and present in weeks fourteen and fifteen.
19
January 30 to May 15, 2013
— Preceding comment added by Prof.Vandegrift ( talk • contribs) 20:18, 30 January 2013 Prof.Vandegrift ( talk) 20:47, 30 January 2013 (UTC)(UTC)
Special:Log/course does not show diffs, unless I'm missing something. This takes the functionality of a normal Wikipedia course page in Wikipedia or User space in a backwards technological direction. Does anyone find this to be desirable? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:24, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
Other problems I perceive with the extension is the inability to edit sections and the small edit window. Biosthmors ( talk) 21:42, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
I note that the working group proposal is being actively edited. I'm not sure why, as it was initially described as a copy of what had already been submitted to the WMF. Anyhow, it seems to have become a work in progress again. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 05:25, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi. Template:Welcome student is not very welcoming, and it's rarely used when we don't know if they are working as part of a class, yet it says "It appears you are participating in a class project." (emphasis mine) Can we fix this? We used to have an pretty awesome welcome template; what happened to that? Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 18:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Are there things listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Online_Ambassadors and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Campus_Ambassadors that should be redirected, or might the pages themselves be turned into redirects? Biosthmors ( talk) 20:11, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
Any ideas why Template:Course assignment/doc was created the way it was? Seems odd. Biosthmors ( talk) 07:43, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Sherry Seston
Alverno College
Virology BI302. This is a junior level undergraduate class covering the history and molecular biology of viruses.
I plan to follow the 12-week syllabus provided by the education program to have students improve and create articles related to virology. Topics may range from articles on a specific virus or viral disease, to the history of virology, biographies of virologists, and biotechnology.
13 students are currently enrolled (1 auditing). I estimate about 11 will complete the full wikipedia project.
Jan 23, 2013 to May 17, 2013 S L Seston ( talk) 20:03, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
User:Prof.Vandegrift gave Article Feedback at Feedback on Help:Education Program extension/Instructors of "How can I add a section to my course page?". Perhaps someone with more experience with the structure of the course offering system could help them out? Thanks, Shearonink ( talk) 20:08, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Dr Jenny Chamarette DrJennyCee ( talk) 16:10, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
Film Studies Department, Queen Mary, University of London
Research Methods (Film)
Research Methods (Film) is a single-semester module (12 weeks) focusing on developing the research skills that second year undergraduate students of Film will need to succeed in their third and final year of study, and in the world of work. In the first part of the module, students work in small groups to adopt and edit a Wikipedia page on a particular film; in the second part of the module they will work individually on a proposal for a possible dissertation/research project.
The module involves elements of formal teaching, group-led and independent study, weekly reading and preparation, and peer review; and a range of assessments, including the editing of a Wikipedia page, group and individual presentations, and written assignments. It is strongly recommended that students planning to take on research projects in their third and final year, also take this module.
In the first half of the module, students form small groups, and then 'adopt' a Wikipedia entry on a single film. Students have been encouraged to 'adopt' entries which are currently classified as 'stub' or 'start' class, in order to make editing more satisfying and so that their contributions are clearer. Student user names and groups are posted on my talk page. Once students have adopted their wikipedia entry, they evaluate the structure, content, presentation and referencing of the entry, and give a short presentation on their findings in order to develop important source evaluation skills to their work on- and off-line.
After their first presentations, the student groups then work together to edit their chosen wikipedia pages, in order to make improvements to the scholarly quality of the entry. All students have undertaken the student training online, and they have received lectures from me off-line about Wikipedia practices and codes of conduct. Their final edits are then submitted to me for assessment: they have a word limit of 500 words from each group, on each entry.
I am currently working with The Interior, and Sage Ross (WMF), who are both helping me to develop the course. I have also pointed students towards the WikiProject Film pages, though I'm not yet working with the project directly.
6 weeks working with Wikipedia
Assignment 1 (offline): week 3
This assignment comprises a group exercise, where you will identify, evaluate and present a review of a Wikipedia page for a particular film that you would like to contribute to as a group.
This page must be an existing Wikipedia page, and must describe a single film, which is commercially available on DVD and with English subtitles. You will need to discuss and agree your page selection with the course convenor, who may reject your proposal if the page has been too extensively edited already. You are therefore advised to select a page for a film which has been less substantially written about on Wikipedia, but which has sufficient scholarly resources written in English, in order to build a better quality page.
Your group will then ‘adopt’ the page, and conduct a review and evaluation of the quality of the page as a scholarly resource, which will be presented as a group during the workshop in week 3.
Assignment 2 (online): week 6
This exercise builds on Assignment 1. Having successfully completed a review and evaluation of your selected Wikipedia page, your group will contribute 500 words of editing to the page’s content.
This can include, for example: rewriting page content, the insertion of supporting documentation and citations of a higher level of scholarly quality, the re-organisation of material, and the addition of sections or subsections to the page.
Bear in mind that, as you edit, other people will be able to see your work. These individuals will often be from outside the academic community, and will make contributions according to their own interests. If they don’t believe your edits to be correct or appropriate, they may also edit or change them, or revert them to their original content.
You will therefore need to keep a careful record of your changes, and of the overall word count for your changes. You can usefully do this on the page history section of the Wikipedia page, but it is important to keep your own record of your activity and total word count. Should other users edit your work, you may not include your own re-edits to the page content in the word count.
There are currently 20 students in the class.
Monday 7 January - Thursday 28 March (though wikipedia projects will be completed by Friday 15 February) 2013
Next cohort to run from September-December 2013, and annually thereafter
As a part of the 11th grade computer science curriculum regarding Internet research, website evaluation/credibility and citing sources, the 11th grade students at the Abaarso Tech School of Science and Technology located in Abaarso, Somaliland will be learning how to contribute and edit Wikipedia. These students are the amongst the brightest in the autonomous, unrecognized region of Somalia known as Somaliland. They have been through intensive training in the past term as well as the first half of this term on citing sources online, effective Internet research and evaluating website credibility. Wikipedia fits perfectly into the class syllabub as it highlights all of the above. Having the students contribute to Wikipedia would overall help improve their online research ,writing and critical thinking skills.
Dhastingsabaarsotech ( talk) 19:28, 6 February 2013 (UTC)Dan Hastings
Support Course Instructor request. This sounds like a good plan to me, I think should grant this and move forward. As an Online Ambassador, I'd be happy to help the students if need be. •
Jesse V.
(talk)
17:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
I have been in talks with some faculty at OHSU School of Medicine for a few months now about a wiki editing pilot project. I just spoke with the students (a total of 8, so it should be quite manageable) about editing the ins and outs of editing wikipedia a bit. It is part of a course on pharmacology, and the "prompt" they were given had something to do with methamphetamine, or perhaps other sympathomimetics or indications for same. And FWIW, I have also spoken a bit with Lane Rasberry and Doc James about this in the past, it's just now getting going.
I just wanted to drop everyone (
WP:USEP
WP:ENB,
WP:MED,
WP:PHARM) a note who might be interacting with some of these folks over the next month or two (the course runs until April 10). I gave them a rundown on some of the common mistakes students make as part of these projects, e.g. assuming that one's edits have to stay up in order for them to be useful as a grade (which I've seen a number of times). I am confident they will be able to avoid most of these common pitfalls.
As it stands it appears that they will be looking for either stubs to build out that are related to the clinical vignette that is their initial prompt; they might instead/also work on rewriting part of an article that is jargon-laden or otherwise confusing to adhere more closely to WP:MEDMOS. The consensus was that they would try and sandbox everything before putting it in an actual article.
Most of them, as of right now, do not have WP accounts, but should be making them soon. If you see them around, say Hi!
-- UseTheCommandLine ( talk) 00:54, 9 February 2013 (UTC) --- Updated links UseTheCommandLine ( talk) 01:11, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
When I set up the {{ course page wizard}} for adding default structure to the extension course pages, I added a section with instructions for adding a talk page banner noting that an article is being edited for an assignment in a course: {{ course assignment}}. It looks like this:
This article was the subject of an educational assignment. Further details were available on the "Education Program:Example University/Example Course (2013 Q1)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki. |
I simplified it from {{ educational assignment}}, which takes more parameters but often got used incorrectly. I think it's important to have banner code that can simply be copied and pasted, rather than code that has to be adjust by the student or customized for each class (with starting and ending dates, for example). Per comments from Geniac and Biosthmors, I wanted to ask for more input on what a talk page banner like this should do. Is changing tense after the assignment ends important ("...article is vs. was the subject...")? (We could include an additional parameter for term into the template, and then just update the wizard every few months for new terms, but that such an update is a likely point of failure. Or we could try more complex logic for automatically determining an end date several months forward from when the course page gets set up.)
Is there anything else a standard talk page banner should include, such as links to particular pages? Given the clutter of typical talk pages, my first instinct is to keep it as simple as possible, but I could see a case for adding a link to this noticeboard, or links to the userpage of the instructor and/or ambassadors and/or the student who added the template. Biosthmors suggests including the Wikipedia:Assignments for student editors essay.
Thoughts?-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:07, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Assuming a normal deployment, a bunch of bug fixes as well as some significant changes to the EducationProgram extension are about to go live. The most noticeable is that the main page contents (until now, "Description") will move to the top of the page, with the Summary box and Students table beneath. This should make course pages feel a bit more familiar and wiki-like. If you notice any new bugs, please let me know. (We know of one regression, already fixed but not yet deployed, related to the ambassador profile pages.)-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 19:29, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi all. A note was left on my talk page about a project at BC which I don't think is coordinated with you all (not that it needs to be, of course). A course page is found here, User:Hakeleh/BI432 Spring 2013. I hope I can leave this all in your hands, to maybe drop a line to the instructor (and see also User:Pleusm). Thanks, Drmies ( talk) 03:45, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Is there a way that one could hide their own edits at Special:MyCourses? Right now, it's rather useless...as anything interesting is covered up by my boatload of edits. — Theopolisme ( talk) 21:02, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Each of my students have informed me that they tried to add their article to the course page but were unable to do so. By the time I received their message, the article had been successfully added to the page. If this delay is inherent in the way the page is set up and is not a bug, it would be helpful to add a statement to let students know. Also, I am planning multiple rounds of edits with different students editing some articles as a group effort and then switching to edit different articles later in the semester. The grid may be too rigid for my class, but I'm still thinking about what will work best. Thanks for all the support! Biolprof ( talk) 19:04, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
University of Hull
Interaction, Experience & Engagement. This is for second year undergraduate students on the following degrees: BA (Hons) Digital Arts, BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media, and BA (Hons) Digital Media Studies within the School of Arts & New Media. Wikipedia is being used as a platform for exploring information about Machinima and related uses of computer animation. The course tutor has worked with several groups of similar undergraduate students at this institution over the past 2-3 years; this work was most recently presented at the EduWiki conference in September 2012 at the University of Leicester (UK).
The students are being assigned specific articles related to the subject (for the most part existing articles) and adding or fixing information within Wikipedia guidelines. See this page for further details. Within the same class, they will eventually also go on to make their own Machinima full of useful information gathered from exploring the articles about the subject on Wikipedia through interactive engagement.
20
1-28 February 2013 (Yes, the course has already started...I discovered this new arrangement rather late in the day, but I'm keen to embrace it sooner rather than later. -- ToniSant ( talk) 12:04, 10 February 2013 (UTC))
This tutorial video gives instructions for creating a "sandbox" page, with a lower-case "s", but {{ WAP student}} links to "Sandbox" with a capital "S". They are not the same page, as you know, and this has caused some confusion among our students. Klortho ( talk) 14:20, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
/sandbox
instead of /Sandbox
.
Yunshui
雲
水
14:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello there. Many apologies if this is the wrong place to post this question. I'm finding the course page for my course incredibly useful, both as a way of gathering information all in one place for students, and as a means of keeping an eye on how students are progressing with their assignments. I was wondering though, whether there is a feature within the course page that might allow me to post the same message to all of the users enrolled on the course? If not, I have methods of contacting student groups outside wikipedia (of course!), but it might be helpful if I post my responses directly to them while they are working on their editing from within Wikipedia. I'd be very grateful for any thoughts - it's not urgent, but could perhaps be useful for other course instructors too. Thanks and warm wishes. DrJennyCee ( talk) 16:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
I've just posted a proposal for an IEG on metawiki that would involve a few different kinds of focused outreach to academics in an effort to improve ENWP's coverage of topics that lay at the intersection of women and philosophy. If it's approved, I would be conducting the project along with Alex Madva and Katie Gasdaglis. I'm hopeful that if approved and carried out, it would go a long way towards addressing Wikipedia's under-representation of our targeted content, and would create a scalable model of educational outreach to underrepresented disciplines that can be used in other fields. A lot more details are available on the meta page. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 02:18, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
University of Hull
Psychology of Internet Behaviour. This is for final year undergraduate students on the following degrees: BSc Web Design and Developemnt, BA (Hons) Digital Arts, BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media, and BA (Hons) Digital Media Studies within the School of Arts & New Media. In the past both ToniSant and I have used the wiki platform to introduce students to examples of internet behaviour, observed through participation in the wiki context.
Like ToniSant's module above, the students are being assigned specific articles related to the subject (for the most part existing articles) and adding or fixing information within Wikipedia guidelines. The course ran in a similar vein last year and the staff involved (including me) plan to do something broadly similar this time around. See this page for further details.
approx 30
Jan 28-May 8 2013 (with practical work beginning mid Feb)
In my volunteer capacity, I've posted a draft Individual Engagement Grant proposal on Meta: meta:Grants:IEG/Wikipedia Massive Open Online Courses. If you're interested in the idea of a Wikipedia course on one of the new MOOC systems like Coursera or edX, please take a look and give feedback.-- ragesoss ( talk) 02:59, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
A new student group will edit pages on my watchlist, and they have started to present their plans. And everyday I find myself pleading to students (and their teacher) to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. Could you please help me make my text better so it gets really clear for the students why, and so I (and other editors) can just copy and glue it? This is what I wrote last time (and I am not very happy with this text):
All sources you mention are WP:primary sources, that is, results of single studies. In order to know if the results of these studies really represent encyclopedic information, you need to know if the results have been peer-reviewed and replicated. For that, you need WP:secondary sources, such as reviews (however, the introduction of a primary source can be a review-like, when the authors discuss numerous results of earlier studies). So please, reconsider your choice of journals and use secondary sources instead!
Thank you! Lova Falk talk 08:55, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
Very good point to omit the peer-reviewed part. Here comes the new text:
All sources you mention are WP:primary sources, that is, results of single studies. However, Wikipedia is not an academic paper or essay! Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources (for instance, reviews) and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources (such as professional or advanced academic textbooks -i.e. not undergraduate introductory textbooks). WP:MEDRS describes how to identify reliable sources for medical information, which is a good guideline for many psychology articles as well. So please, reconsider your choice of journals and use secondary sources instead!
Please comment! Lova Falk talk 10:13, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you Colin and Tryptofish for your help! Unfortunately, I have already had several occasions today for pasting this text (sometimes with minor adjustments). Lova Falk talk 19:07, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Eric Phetteplace
Chesapeake College
"The Nature of Knowledge" is Chesapeake College's interdisciplinary capstone course that seeks to look at how different disciplines approach problem-solving. It is for sophomore students who have completed most of the other coursework for a two-year degree or in preparation of transferring to a 4-year institution. Our specific topic involves how knowledge changes when it becomes digitized and networked. As such, we're using Wikipedia as an example both of open and networked content. We're reading Good Faith Collaboration as a textbook. We will be focusing on editing pages related to our local area, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, including the page for Chesapeake College itself.
Our students will be editing Wikipedia articles related to Eastern Shore of Maryland topics, including Chesapeake College and possibly Wye Mills, MD. We will allow students to suggest articles to work on but will approve them based on how capable we think the students are of contributing; a high quality article is tougher to add to, so we will be more likely to approve shorter or lower quality ones. We will focus on research, finding sources, adding citations, and expanding content. Specifically, most of the pages we're targeting are stubs or poorly written, so we'll be lengthening low-quality articles and hopefully providing more sources. We are not necessarily aiming for Feature Article quality. We want to encourage students to act as part of the Wikipedia community so we will ask them to participate in Talk Page discussions, too.
We have about 20 students.
Class began January 22nd and ends May 13th, 2013. Our students are just starting to practice editing Wikipedia now and most editing won't happen until the last month of class.
-- Phette23 ( talk) 23:14, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Lynn Marie Hamilton, Ph.D.
University of Pikeville
Composition 11--a first-year, undergraduate course in academic writing that emphasizes research. The Wikipedia assignment will require students to contribute 1000 words to Wikipedia, whether in the form of a new article or development of a stub article. At GSU, Tony Yadro was my campus ambassador, but I would like to be assigned two or more on-line ambassadors.
The Wikipedia assignment will require students to contribute 1000 words to Wikipedia, whether in the form of a new article or development of a stub article. Because this is a writing course, students will be encouraged to pick a topic that represents a specific area of their interest. The writing they do must be carefully researched and documented (of course), attentive to the demands of the audience which could also be called compliance with Wikipedia policies, and compliant with the Wikipedia interface. Because one of the biggest challenges of this assignment has been, in my experience, finding the right topic, some time will be devoted to helping students find a topic that they are interested in and which also has sufficient research available and meets Wikipedia guidelines.
60
The class started in January and goes to May 20.
-- Georgiasouthernlynn ( talk) 15:24, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Hey Lynn! I have a question. If, for example, your class finds a 2000 word article that contains poorly written, unsourced, and unencylopedic prose, would you please also allow your students to completely rewrite the article with brand new prose, giving readers a well-sourced, fresh, and encyclopedic entry of 1000 words? Your students can do much more than simply build on top of what already exists. They can also copy edit, remove unnecessary text, and rewrite content to improve the encyclopedia. As you can see at Wikipedia:Backlog#Status, there are many articles already tagged for improvement! I'll see if I can help you find articles for your assignment. Would you like that kind of assistance? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:00, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello Biosthmors,
The work you describe sounds like it would be a good project. Could you link me to about twenty articles that are not too specialized that students could edit as you suggest? And, if possible, it would be really helpful if they could be linked to my talk page. I find it difficult to recover and work with threads of conversation like this one. For instance, I just tried to give you my email, and it got blocked.-- Georgiasouthernlynn ( talk) 15:29, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
The page Education Program:Davidson College/Cognitive Psychology (2013 Q1) doesn't have either Edit or View Source tabs and the history doesn't show the diffs. Therefore if the prof or their ambassador edit the page, I can't see what or when they made the change. This can be a problem if I comment on the course details (such as assignments being set the students) and then later I look and the text has changed. I can't see when or how it changed. Why do these pages work this way. I can understand protecting them in some way but there seems no good reason to hide the source or diffs -- it doesn't help transparency. Colin° Talk 12:41, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I am under the impression that our educational material (such as Wikipedia:Training/For students/Choosing articles 3) emphasizes quantity of new prose to the detriment of quality improvement (in terms of the opportunity cost). Quality could be improved by reducing word count through copy-editing and changing prose by updating sources when needed. For example, one of my best contributions last year was to review malaria (see Talk:Malaria/GA2). As you can see under the collapsed section "some addressed comments", there was a lot we did to improve the article. While it stayed a "B-Class" before and after (I was still finding problems with WP:V even at the end of the review), I think it went from a low-quality B-Class article to a high-quality B-Class article. Shouldn't students and professors be encouraged to engage on the talk pages of articles like this to improve important subjects? Along those lines, I am wary of any assignment that asks students to create new articles, unless they have been agreed upon by knowledgeable Wikipedians. Again, I feel this is a quantity over quality incentive we have currently baked into the system for ourselves. Thoughts? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:05, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
New user Psyc-mmills ( talk · contribs) has started producing articles labelled:
"NOTE: This is a stub, and it will be expanded as a university class project until May 10, 2013 under the auspices of the Association for Psychological Science Wikipedia Initiative."
I am not sure whether this is the instructor or just the first student out of the starting gate. I and others have given advice on the user talk page, including pointing to WP:SUP, but I don't know what should be done to plug this class into your new system. JohnCD ( talk) 21:20, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
There are two open Online Ambassador applications at Wikipedia talk:Online Ambassadors that could use some input (for TucsonDavid and Nerdfighter). I think it would make sense to start having those applications posted here (like we've been doing with instructor rights requests), in order to further consolidate the education sprawl and make sure applicants get feedback.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:09, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Why are there no diffs when editors edit course pages? Can we add this to the software? Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:51, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
After nominating Rational and Natural Theories of Management for deletion for being an essay, I decided to dig into the edit history and started to suspect sockpuppetry, as different users would insert large chunks of text into the vaguely defined. More searches led me to Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Macy's Management Practicses and Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Procter & Gamble Management Practices, and I started to get the 'Management' theme. Other articles of interest included IDEO and Inequality in the workplace. Through the works cited and a stray IP address, I started to connect the edits to Harvard University. Finally, I discovered this edit with the summary "Lenovo Management Practices for SOC 25 Assignment 2". Sociology 25: Sociology of Organizations is an introductory course taught by Frank Dobbin last Fall, although it doesn't look like he's teaching the course this semester. FallingGravity ( talk) 09:45, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
Welcome Lynn! (Whose assignment was archived here.) I have a question. If, for example, your class finds a 2000 word article that contains poorly written, unsourced, and unencylopedic prose, would you please also allow your students to completely rewrite the article with brand new prose, giving readers a well-sourced, fresh, and encyclopedic entry of 1000 words? Your students can do much more than simply build on top of what already exists. They can also copy edit, remove unnecessary text, and rewrite content to improve the encyclopedia. As you can see at Wikipedia:Backlog#Status, there are many articles already tagged for improvement! I'll see if I can help you find articles for your assignment. Would you like that kind of assistance? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:46, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Several distinct users have been creating very similar articles about individual acts of Shakespeare plays, see e.g.:
Some suspect socking but based on the topics I think it's more likely this is a class assignment that we don't know anything about. I've messaged all the students asking them to inform their teacher that this assignment isn't appropriate and to contact me, but they've been nonresponsive so far. Dcoetzee 01:48, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
FYI, Sage has outlined a plan at Wikipedia talk:Training there to update the trainings, and there is a possibility the trainings will be translated. I would like to help with improving the trainings and education material also. Anyone else? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:29, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
See Education_Program:University_of_San_Francisco/Environmental_Law_(Spring_2013). Course description: "This is the second part of a two part course examining the basic legal setting for the protection and management of the environment. After learning the major federal statutes and constitutional principles of Environmental Law this course will explore species protection, toxic risk legislation, citizen actions, international law and emerging issues in the field. It discusses how environmental law is made and applied. The course also includes material on economic analysis, scientific and legal causation and expert testimony." Please feel free to just add yourself if interested using the "Become an Online Ambassador" button in the table at the bottom. Thanks! Dcoetzee 01:51, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Hi, all!
Professor Lynn Hamilton is looking for an Online Ambassador for her Composition class. She has participated in the Education Program for a few semesters but is now at a new university (University of Pikeville) in Kentucky, where there are no trained Campus Ambassadors. She is going to have her students enroll on the Course Page as soon as the assignment starts, so perhaps an Online Ambassador particularly interested in writing (as this is a comp class and, I believe, the students can choose their article topic0 is available to support them. Please sign on if you are! Thanks, guys! JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 18:27, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
I applied, interviewed, and was accepted as a outreach:Regional Ambassadors/Current. I suppose someone (or me) should add myself to that list. (Is it otherwise updated, by the way?) From what Jami told me I think I'm more of an ambassador at large, though I am based in Atlanta if anything arises there. I do need the WP:Course coordinator right to grant rights to campus ambassadors, when that time comes. I'm currently a course campus volunteer and a course online volunteer. Thanks. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:24, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Just a little clarification... the user right referred to above is actually the Course coordinator right, which is not limited to Regional Ambassadors (although no one but Regional Ambassadors plus me and Jami have it right now, I think). If anyone else who isn't an admin (in which case, the coordinator right is superfluous) would like to help distribute the instructor right to users who request it (and do the same for new ambassadors / class volunteers), let's work out a procedure for requesting it. It could be as simple as posting a request on this page, and if there's consensus that the user is sufficiently clueful, that's it.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:25, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Since we've started doing Online Ambassador applications here, might we also transition into doing at least part of a Campus Ambassador application here too? Biosthmors ( talk) 20:36, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
Some of you guys might want to check in on Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Theaterproject2013, which was filed against several users. I thought—and a couple checkusers agreed with me—that this is a class project and not socking. Maybe you could get in touch with the professor and steer them in the right direction? Thanks! Reaper Eternal ( talk) 12:02, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
My students in the global education program are not being allowed to create accounts. The problem appears to be that the entire university uses a single IP address. Who knew? We really, really cannot afford to create 55 accounts at the rate of only six per day--as I have been informed we will be required to do. That would set us hopelessly behind on the project timeline. Please help. My courses are duly registered with the global education program and everything. Georgiasouthernlynn ( talk) 18:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Stuartyeates ( talk · contribs)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Hey guys. I've been away for a few months, so I'm not up-to-date on what's going on with the education program(s). But I just stumbled across Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket and Englishness and I'm wondering if someone who is could take a look. It appears to be a page for a university class, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be located in WP space (and shouldn't be WikiProjects either)? Hope this is the right noticeboard, if not please do point me elsewhere. Cheers, Jenks24 ( talk) 16:54, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
This, currently featuring at WP:ANI is in fact a uni course project that has set itself up as a normal Wikiproject. Can someone talk to them? Johnbod ( talk) 15:35, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
With some reluctance, I have taken some of the issues raised here to ANI. Anyone is invited to comment there. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 20:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
Could the option for professors to add and remove students as reviewers be added to the course extension? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:25, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
This class is the second iteration of a previous The Rhetoric of Digital and Interactive Media Environments class. It's not an official Education Program class (although it does have Campus Ambassadors supporting it), but I wanted to highlight it as, from what I understand, it may have around 400 students.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:45, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
Why not encourage assignments where students open peer reviews on important topics? They could begin the peer review by saying,
I am opening this peer review for [[Course page|this assignment]], and my classmates will be commenting here. How well I address peer review comments, and how much I improve the article will be judged to help determine my grade. I would like to try to reach X-Class by the end of the review, thanks.
This way, I think we'd have a clear platform to encourage particpation, collaboration, and quality improvements where they are desired, instead of encouraging assignments that create unnecessary articles or dump large quantitites of poor-quality and unneccessary prose on obscure topics. Biosthmors ( talk) 03:31, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
I just copied the course page text of
Education Program:Saint Louis University/Signal Transduction (SP13) into a user subpage (
User:Biolprof/Signal Transduction Spring 2013) and then I replaced the content with {{User:Biolprof/Signal Transduction Spring 2013}}
so that I can edit the course page in a traditional larger format, see
WP:diffs, etc. Might have I created any new issues? And will the current fixes to the extension also show edit boxes inside the course page, so that I can select "edit" for individual sections, as I currently can at User:Biosthmors/Signal Transduction Spring 2013?
Biosthmors (
talk)
19:39, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
Is there any support for making this default for getting "Campus coordinator" rights? It seems redundant to add it after when people like myself can give a user the rights, but then need to find an administrator to add this right, and if possible, I was wondering if we could make this a right for them by default. I know there is the risk for abuse for this, but it is so small we would easily be able to monitor this. Kevin Rutherford ( talk) 20:37, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
This is just an FYI that I've marked the Education Working Group proposal as "historical." This is for three reasons: 1) Nobody from the working group has been editing it (and most never did), and there has been little to no response to comments on the talk page; 2) it's purpose was always unclear, and has only become more so; 3) it seems that the working group doesn't even exist any more, now that a subset of its members are calling themselves the "Education Board."
I'm not sure what venue there should be for community discussion of the Education Board's activity, which seems to continue from what one can gather. The lack of transparency and/or accountability is quite astounding. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 21:33, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm going to try to be a bit more responsive on-wiki, but I am really busy in real life, so please feel free to poke me at my talk page or via email if I seem to be ignoring a discussion. I don't have a whole lot to add to the note Biosthmors linked to just yet -- we are still working on the tedious administrivia of starting up a 501(c)(3). If there are any specific questions, please post them here and I promise to respond as quickly as I have time for. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:10, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for citing those The Interior! To me, the following bullet point strikes me as problematic.
The organization will strive to sustain the successes of the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program at educational institutions in the United States and Canada. Members will recruit to expand the program and provide all volunteers, instructors, and editors with necessary resources. The organization and its members will strive to encourage greater use and understanding of Wikipedia at educational institutions. [27]
I think the words successes, expand, and greater use unfortunately all precede the word understand. The wording suggests that the group is confident that they have a good system and are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to "scale up". Shouldn't there be a mention of avoiding the problems, such as those identified in the RFC? I don't think the confident language is justified. In my opinion, this is a time when basic things should be re-evaluated to make there is a firm foundation, instead of concerning one's self with growth. I would like to see more of an explicit committment and willingness to improve upon the resources provided to instructors, students, and ambassadors, for example. As I mention here, I think there is room for improvement in the most basic instructions we are currently providing classrooms. So I recommend that this precept be modified to acknowledge the real need to improve, rather than focusing on the potential for expansion. I think we need a committment to quality, as the RfC identified that as a major problem from the community's view. Biosthmors ( talk) 02:45, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
The organization will strive to improve upon the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program in the United States and Canada. Members will support all stakeholders: readers, Wikipedia editors, students, and instructors to help the program succeed. Classrooms will be supported to leave behind quality contributions, so that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sister projects benefit from greater engagement.
Indeed. Mike said that when you met in Chicago you'd decide whether or not to make the proposal public. What was the decision? -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 22:40, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
The proposal is, as Mike has said, up on Meta. And there are some quite significant changes to the proposal, and indeed to the whole project of the proposed organization. Sadly, as it's on Meta, there are very few eyes there. I'd recommend anyone to go have a look at it, and the changes it's undergoing. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 19:04, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
There have been some comments, here and elsewhere, to the effect that it's not been very easy to see what's happening with the process started by the Education Program working group last year. We're going to try to post regular updates on this page to make the process a bit more transparent. To recap, for those unfamiliar with the background, that working group process led to a proposal to create a nonprofit, to be called the "Wiki Education Foundation -- USA and Canada": WEF-USCA for short; or just WEF.
The WEF has an interim board, the members of which are listed here. The board has been meeting by phone and will be meeting in Chicago on the weekend of the 23rd of March. Current tasks include getting the final form a grant proposal to the Grant Advisory Committee, getting an affiliation proposal to the Affiliations Committee, and working with a pro bono lawyer to set up the bye-laws for the new 501(c)(3) and incorporate the new entity. The budget includes funds for hiring staff for the WEF; we're still discussing exactly what qualifications are needed. Do we need someone who is very experienced at running a non-profit? Or do we want someone with lots of fund-raising experience? Or someone with a strong Wikipedia editing record? Rod Dunican will be at the Chicago meeting, and I expect that there will be further discussion of the role of the WEF and the input of the community in the form of the RfC.
Three members of the board -- me, Chanitra, and Pat -- are going to monitor this page and will add an update periodically. We'd like to do an update weekly, but there may be nothing happening on a given week, since the board is all-volunteer. We'll also try to respond in a timely way to comments here; and we'd like to get input and feedback on the updates we post here. If you have any questions, please post them, and we'll try to respond. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 21:45, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
(Outdenting) Jon, I'm going to break up your comments into bullets so I can answer them separately rather than running multiple answers inline, partly because it's easier for me and also in case we need to pursue one of these points further.
A brief update from Chicago, on a point I know Jon was curious about: the (draft) affiliation proposal is already public on meta, m:Wiki Education Foundation; and the grant proposal will also be public. The board also resolved to make all minutes public. I'll be posting the minutes later this week, I hope; they're not yet approved but should be this week. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 00:46, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Hanad Mukhtar ( talk · contribs)
(User:Hanad Mukhtar.)
Howdy, y'all! Recently, for the Schreiner University course, I created two YouTube tutorials related to moving an article from sandbox to mainspace—they can be viewed at [28], just in case you were, you know, planning on recording some tutorials about that kind of stuff. ;) — Theopolisme ( talk) 22:18, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
You should check out one of today's DYKs for Women in the Arab Spring, an article User:Nadhika99 created for her assignment at Rice. I added the page to the trophy case but thought I'd post a note here, in case anyone wanted to see it on the main page. Nadhika was in Diana Strassmann's class last Spring and took another one this term. Enjoy her interesting article! JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 19:47, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
An issue of secondary vs primary sourcing has come up for Education Program:Davidson College/Cognitive Psychology (2013 Q1). User:Garrondo and User:Lova Falk have suggested for students to follow WP:MEDRS and use primarily secondary sources. In some areas, secondary sources are somewhat lacking. For a number of the article additions, students have used primary sources from peer-reviewed journals to describe models proposed by these primary sources. The models are similarly described in other secondary material and by abstracts/discussions in other peer-reviewed primary journals. WP:MEDRS states:
Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse. For that reason, edits that rely on primary sources should only describe the conclusions of the source, and should describe these findings clearly so the edit can be checked by editors with no specialist knowledge. In particular, this description should follow closely to the interpretation of the data given by the authors or by other reliable secondary sources.
If secondary sources are hard to find/non-existent, or do not contradict/disavow the primary sources (the additions aren't 'wrong' per se) and the additions are new content (new articles, new sections), is the usage of primary sources an editorial judgement? This issue seems to exist more for certain areas in the social sciences where there appears to be fewer review journals than for chemistry/biology which have an abundance of secondary review material. Smallman12q ( talk) 02:40, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
As this is a perennial topic for the many Association for Psychological Science classes, and one that a lot of the professors push back against (see the discussion on page 9 of this forth-coming paper about the APS Wikipedia Initiative, in addition to the on-wiki examples we're familiar with), perhaps it would be useful to have an RfC about appropriate sourcing for psychology articles. We could reach out the APS editors and try to forge a consensus about where primary peer-reviewed literature is and is not appropriate.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 13:16, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
Health-related content in any English Wikipedia article (not just medicine, biology and psychology articles) must be supported by independent "secondary" or "tertiary" sources, such as expert reviews in high-impact peer-reviewed journals, university-level textbooks, professional guidelines, etc. "Primary" sources, such as reports of randomized controlled trials, case reports and comparative studies (even if they are published in a peer-reviewed journal) are rarely adequate support for assertions in this field. If health-related information is not covered in high quality independent secondary or tertiary sources, it is unlikely to be suitable for Wikipedia. The distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary sources is discussed at Primary, secondary and tertiary sources.
Students editing health-related content and those supervising or grading their work must read Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine).
I've just read that paper. Three brief responses. I think we should prepare a more substantial response. I see misunderstanding, poor science and propaganda.
Colin° Talk 14:49, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
Would you be interested in attending that conference, Colin, if the foundation covered your expenses? -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 04:08, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Pages such as Special:OnlineVolunteers aren't self explanatory for users who follow such links from third party sites and who have no previous knowledge of the workings of wikipedia. There is no text explaining that this is part of the meta:Wikipedia Education Program rather than generic Wikipedia signups, there is no pointer on where to start, etc. Could some text be written please? Stuartyeates ( talk) 23:21, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Robert Kluijver
Paris School of International Affairs
Contemporary Art and Geopolitics in the Middle East. This is a 24-hour course given in English to the students of the International Master programme (MA) of the Instituten for Political Studies in Paris, better known as Sciences Po.
The objective of the course is to allow the students to gain fresh insights into current social and cultural developments in the Arab world, by way of an informed reading of its contemporary art production.
Being an enthusiastic user of Wikipedia myself, I have noticed how little coverage contemporary art gets in general, and that from the Middle East in particular. Impressed by the level of my students' papers in previous years, and convinced that the generation of knowledge in the academic sphere should be reformed in order to reach a wider audience, I decided to ask my students to write Wikipedia articles this year, instead of the usual persuasive papers. I hope to continue and expand on this experience in coming years.
This (first) year I need to experiment with Wikipedia assignments in class. I realize there are many dangers and pitfalls, and hope that with the guidance of the Wikipedia community, and intelligent input from my students, we can make this a success.
I have first asked all my students to create a user profile, start editing on the User Page and in their Sandbox, and start copyediting or providing references to existing pages to get a feel of how Wikipedia works. I have provided them with some basic tools but realize they need more yet. I then suggested a list of topics, based on existing coverage on Wikipedia; most students have chosen one of those I suggested, some have suggested their own.
In the meanwhile I have been discussing with Wikipedia community members such as Yunshui and Biosthmors, they have convinced me I better run this exercise through WEP; it is a bit late (student papers are due within a month) and I am aware I have made a few mistakes already, but I'm determined to see this through with success, and learn for next year.
18
25 January to 27 April 2013
-- RobertK Prods ( talk) 00:22, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
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Our Timeline:
Wikipedia Project: Why do this real-world experiment in editing?
Grading (maximum 60 participation points):
Step 2. Vote for 10 sites in need of editing (due March 31 through the course website). You will vote for 10 sites (5 genes and 5 people) that you would like to edit based on the nominations you read.
Quality of citations
Originality (remember, we only report what has been shown; we do not introduce our own ideas).
Step 4. Critique another Wiki site. Individually, you will offer suggestions for improvements to an assigned Wiki site (due April 18 as a document submitted through Blackboard). Grading according to the “Grading Rubric for Wiki Critiques.” Step 5. Edit your first Wiki site AGAIN. Finally, you and your teammates will revisit your first Wiki site and make improvements (due April 25). Do your best to respond to the critiques provided by your peers. Grading same as Step 3. As a team, you will write a document that summarizes what you did using the “Wiki Project Grading Rubric” as a guide. Submit your team’s summary through Blackboard. Seek to comply with the following attributes of an informative wiki entry. Attributes of a good article on a circadian gene:
Attributes of a good article on a circadian researcher:
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-- Circadiansync ( talk) 00:14, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
The Wiki Education Foundation is the organization that is proposed to take over the coordination role of the US/Canada Education Program from the WMF after June of this year. It's applying for thematic organization status; the proposal is here.
There is a question I would like to get specific feedback on from the editors involved with the EP. The board is intended to be made of three people who represent the Wikipedia community, three who represent the educator community, one from the WMF, and one who represents chapters and any additional groups that form with a specific interest in education and Wikipedia (e.g. there might be a group that focuses on one university or one academic discipline). There are four more optional appointed seats.
It's going to be fairly easy to select Wikipedians -- some form of on-wiki election will work. But how should we plan to get educators on the board, and who should select them? Should the educators be elected by the Wikipedia community plus educators, or by educators only, or should they be selected by the board, or is there some other method we should follow? I can think of pros and cons for all three options. Allowing the community to vote on educator seats will almost certainly overwhelm the few votes of the educators, but on the other hand this is a role that will affect the community, so they should have a say. Voting by educators only is more likely to give us educators that have the support of the other educators in the community, and in any case they only constitute three of the eight to twelve seats, so they can't be a majority; on the other hand very few educators are sufficiently interested or knowledgeable about the program now and would have no basis for voting for any particular candidate. Selections by the board will solve the problem of there being a small group of educators involved, since the board can search out candidates with the skills it needs; but this is the least democratic approach (though the board, with multiple Wikipedians on it, will have that perspective in its selection process).
Any comments? The exact method of the elections doesn't have to be decided now -- it's more a question of what's the appropriate electorate for this group of board members. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:18, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
I'd have thought this would be fairly easy: have one election, on wiki, with the stipulation that three of the people elected must be educators (defined in some fashion or another: does this include librarians, contract staff, TAs, etc.). I can't say I like the sound of "pre-vetted candidates," especially as the board is self-selecting four additional members in any case. Those seats can be used for non-contributing faculty such as Bob and Diana, if the board feels it fit. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 21:39, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
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Go Phightins! ( talk · contribs)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Is the education program moving away from the word ambassador and towards the word volunteer? Special:CampusAmbassadors and Special:OnlineAmbassadors now appear as Special:CampusVolunteers and Special:OnlineVolunteers. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:19, 2 April 2013 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | → | Archive 10 |
Are the Phase II and Phase III finance plans done? I believe the due date for both of them was November 15 and that the date for WMF to provide money for Phase II was December 1st. I am interested in seeing the plans. Thanks! -- Pine ✉ 00:00, 3 December 2012 (UTC)
I've started a student source assessment page. I've included instructions for how to add assessments, and done a few to make it clear what the approach is. I plan to work on this as I have time but would appreciate any feedback on the format and approach, and would also appreciate any help -- this is going to take me weeks if I do it on my own.
I'm including an analysis of all the sources in the given articles, regardless of who added each source. This is to avoid a subsequent debate along the lines of "well, the students only copied text from 2% of sources, and I bet that's better than the existing ratio". I'm only going to be checking sources available online, but I think this will constitute a large fraction of the work done. If anyone is able to check any of the offline sources, of course that would be very helpful.
So far I have found two errors, one by a student and one by an experienced Wikipedian. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 13:41, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
It appears there is a class editing from SUNY Fredonia (see Talk:Dementia). I didn't see it listed at Wikipedia:United States Education Program/Courses/Present. Does anyone have details on the class/professor? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:51, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
We recently got flooded with biology related Good article nominations, most of which seemed reasonable I will admit. I was just wondering if we can expect anymore anytime soon. We are already overburdened with nominations from regular editors and like many other projects lack reviewers so wont be able to handle multiple courses at once, especially if reviews are expected in a couple of weeks. I recall a discussion some time ago (not sure where) about a pre-screening process for student articles that they should go through before nomination. I have done a very superficial review of some of the recent articles that have been submitted and left a few tags. I am thinking that if the tags are not addressed in a timely fashion (say a week) it can safely be assumed that the nominators won't respond to a review so the articles can be quickfailed. Would there be any objections to this approach? AIRcorn (talk) 23:02, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I wonder if Mike Cline, or someone else from the program, could say more about the draft strategic plan. It talks a lot about stakeholders, so I suppose the obvious question is whether Wikipedians are regarded as stakeholders. I was also wondering about the status of the plan to become a separate thematic organization since the RfC ended with an unclear consensus.
I'm also curious about this: "The availability of a qualified volunteer workforce exceeds project requirements." What is the volunteer workforce?
Final question. The draft says: "The program's operating budget is robust and enables the program to deliver quality services to all its stakeholders/partners as well as grow its volunteer resources." Elsewhere it says: "Benefactors value the program as a professional, innovative way to improve education and are providing high-levels of financial and marketing support." Are more details available about the operating budget and who the benefactors are? SlimVirgin (talk) 19:26, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Please don't kid yourself that there is an "excess" of volunteer labour of this sort, or that the workforce is "happy".This response is not unexpected but does represent a misunderstanding of the statement. What is being described is a future desired end-state, not a statement or assumption of fact about the current state. It is a measure of future success. In 2015, if indeed the new EP has created an environment where we have sufficent willing, able and content volunteers from the WP community supporting the program, would anyone be disappointed? I think not! -- Mike Cline ( talk) 04:51, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
My concern is that everyone who is being consulted is involved and wanting to move forward with the program in its current form, including the people from the Foundation who are overseeing it. Some disinterested professional input is needed to identify and resolve the ethical issues, which are significant. For example, there have to be guarantees that all students are told they can work in a sandbox and have their essays deleted once the course is over, so that they are not required to release their work or interact with strangers on the Internet. There have to be guarantees that they are not being forced to use their real names. And Wikipedians need to know that we're not expected to act as unpaid teaching assistants, identify plagiarism and determine who fails a course. SlimVirgin (talk) 02:56, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
And Wikipedians need to know that we're not expected to act as unpaid teaching assistants, identify plagiarism and determine who fails a course.These kinds of phrases that come across as demands are troubling because everyday editors make unreasonable, ill-informed and selfish demands on other editors. The community deals with those demands in a variety of ways, but it all boils down to the ultimate set of sanctioned expectations: Wikipedia:Five pillars. I am fairly confident that the new EP has no intention to encourage, sanction or enable the kind of expectations you seek to avoid. Can the EP prevent them absolutely, NO. Just as the WP community can't prevent all the unreasonable, ill-informed and selfish demand editors place on members of the community every day 24/7. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 04:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
One thing I'd like to stress is that although it is my firm belief that we should strive to create a model set of guidelines that are both ethically and pedagogically sound, decisions about what is ethical or pedagogically sound can and must be handled at the level of the individual university, not centrally. University instructors assess these issues as part of their jobs and in accordance with the policies of their universities. We can provide guidance in these areas, we can't provide mandates. If a university instructor decides that requiring their students to edit in the main space of the encyclopedia and actively engage in the community of practice that Wikipedia presents represents a meaningful pedagogical benefit and doesn't see any ethical issues with it - and their university doesn't see any ethical issues with it - then we cannot and should not try to dictate otherwise to them. They are the people most qualified to make these decisions, and it's (literally) their job to make them. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 04:40, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
SlimVirgin has raised a really important point, and I'd like to expand on it because I am not sure that everyone is recognising the significance. As we all know, all WP contributions must be irrevocably released under license. However, for that release to be valid there must be informed consent on the part of the contributor. We all have a choice - to contribute or not - and links are provided to make clear the terms under which we contribute. But, if a student is required to contribute, and to mainspace, as a requirement of their studies then the consent under which the release is made is coerced. SlimVirgin has point out this is an ethical issue, and she is 100% correct - such behaviour from an academic would not be seen as ethically acceptable by the ethics rules governing any institution with which I am familiar. (For the record, I have held academic positions and been required to gain ethical clearance for my research. Generally formal clearances do not arise for teaching situations, but the principles are applicable.) The ethical problem is an issue for the EP programme - I would advise providing guidelines for consideration by educators contemplating wikipedia-connected assignments - but the more important issue for us and the foundation is the invalidation of the release under which the contributions were granted. It might be necessary in such a case to remove and oversight improperly released contributions, frustrating the aim of improving article content. Student editors must be free to not release their work into article space, and to have sandbox contributions deleted if that is their wish. The rigorous protection of such options goes a long way to ensuring that any contributions that are added to article space come with a release granted by free and informed consent. They must also be free to pseudonymity, in line with standard policy. These issues may not have been considered before now, but they are important and deserve proper attention now. EdChem ( talk) 10:35, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
@Colin, EdChem, Malleus-Those of us associated with the EP are always on the lookout for best practices that will benefit WP. The concerns raised here will help us do that. That's why this noticeboard is here. However, I don’t think this is a fair statement. You might be able to communicate more clearly if you took your blinkers off and saw what's actually happening, or think is happening, as opposed to what you'd like to see happening
To a certain extent, we all are operating with blinkers on because we can only comment on what we know from our experiences and through validations of what others have said-positive or negative. The fact that I’ve had very positive experiences with the EP without any consternation from the WP community does not mean the negative experiences didn’t happen elsewhere. Conversely, because there have been negative experiences doesn’t invalidate the efficacy of the positive experiences. Additionally, I challenge the notion that anyone associated with the EP is denying or downplaying the impacts of the negative experiences. We sincerely want to mitigate the negative and encourage the positive impacts moving forward. Where I do think that there is some serious denial going is in recognizing the changing tide within Academia about the use of Wikipedia in the classroom that will continue unabated whether there is a formal EP or not. I have read literally dozens of professional journal articles completely independent of the EP that are touting the efficacy of WP in the classroom. This abstract for just one article provides a good summary of what’s going on out there in Education land.
ABSTRACT: It seems improbable that Wikipedia could be considered a valid resource for education like schools and universities because of the risks of incurring mistakes, inaccuracies, and plagiarism. The bad reputation of the free encyclopedia is false. Wikipedia is reliable and can be used in the curriculum as a new approach for the social and collaborative construction of knowledge. It will enter fully into educational contexts, which will represent an opportunity to reflect on the verification of information, the ethical use of technology, and the role of democratic participation of people that use social software. In fact the creation and maintenance of articles as classroom activities offer higher processes of cognitive development and on-line relationships, allowing development of essential digital competencies for life-long learn, like information literacy , participation literacy and ethical literacy.
— Wikipedia as a Training Resource for Digital Competencies [1]
As I said above we can chose to ride the tide and leverage this in ways that result in significant benefit WP or we can chose to fight the tide, but we can’t stop it. University students and professors are going to be participating in the WP experience regardless. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 12:30, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
If desired, it would be trivially easy to ban universities from running courses on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia decided student-assignment editing was harmful (or, for example, such editing from establishments that don't join the program) then a block and a letter to the management would swiftly end things.might be technically true, but wouldn’t that be totally contrary to the strategic goals of the movement. Goals by the way that represent the collaborative efforts of a very large and diverse population of Wikipedia editors as well as outside experts and advisors. You may personally disagree with the strategic outreach goals, but those goals represent broad community consensus about the future of the movement. In light of those goals and the broad consensus around them, I doubt seriously that implementing your trivially easy solution would be trivially easy at all. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 14:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
You don't need to grovel and promise we're right about everything, but you do need to at least make an attempt to respect and address the opinions people are offering. Kevin is doing it. Sage is doing it. Most of the other EP-involved voices we're seeing here are doing it. But you appear to be working very hard to not do it, and that's torpedoing everyone else's efforts. Wikipedians are, in the main, a blunt bunch. We rely on straightforward, written text to get our work done. Platitudes and buzzwords get in the way, so we expect people to say what they intend to communicate because otherwise it's a waste of our time, and we have better things to be doing on wikipedia than having our time wasted. The more we see you attempting to gloss over every complaint or comment anyone makes with meaningless handwaving, essentially nodding while giving us the finger behind your back, you're hurting our perception of EP. It is not considered clever or skillful here on Wikipedia to use deliberately obfuscatory language to evade actual conversation; it's just considered unconstructive. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 16:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
by June 2015 you hope "[t]he ..Hope is not part of the plan. These are desirable goals, that if the new EP is approved, a lot of people are going to work hard to achieve. It may seem like a trival bit of language, but its not. To achieve the goals, the new EP has to address the the mistakes of the past, but until then the EP is in the hands of the WMF and those volunteer Wikipedians that willingly support it, and even those volunteers, including me, can only do so much with the scope of our involvement. As a Campus Ambassador at MSU I and my fellow ambassadors can significantly influence how Wikipedia is used there, but beyond that, I can only provide advice and counsel based on my own experiences. What happens at PPodunk U. is effectively out of my personal control? I, as are many others are awaiting important decisions at the WMF because we think this can work? Keep asking questions as long as you are willing to accept my good faith personal opinion and factual knowledge in response. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 17:19, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
By the way, it's worth adding that I know it must be difficult to listen to criticism of a project you care about and have put a lot of work into, so I just want to say thank you to the people who are listening and absorbing it. I think it will end up being constructive, even if the process is a bit painful. SlimVirgin (talk) 21:32, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
I think almost no editors on wikipedia realize what EP is up to and what they are planning for the future. Wikipedians are almost (an understatement) completely uninformed about what is going on, due to the lack of transparency of these educational programs.
I don't see how wikipedians could possibly vote for a "member of the board" to represent them, or whatever it is you are suggesting. From my point of view, that is no where near sufficient representation for wikipedians over this massive education program that is so disruptive to wikipedia. And regarding the university "writing centers" [2] someone provided a link to me above, that in no way prepares students to edit wikipedia, IMO. MathewTownsend ( talk) 23:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
And Wikipedians need to know that we're not expected to act as unpaid teaching assistants, identify plagiarism and determine who fails a course.Amen to that! I think that, as time goes on, the English Wikipedia may actually want to make those things a matter of policy. I'm sensitive to the argument that we don't want to tell instructors how to teach their classes, but the flip side of that is that we don't want instructors to tell us how to operate Wikipedia, beyond what they can contribute to consensus like any other editor. We have every right to set policy about Wikipedia. It's fine if an editor choses to ferret out plagiarism (indeed, commendable), and it's fine if they choose to help the instructor in some other way, but that's a matter of choice, not an implied obligation. (And I strongly agree with what MatthewTownsend just said about, in effect, classes not WP:OWNing anything.) -- Tryptofish ( talk) 00:19, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
OK, so what is emerging here is that there seems to be a WMF staffing problem, and that is impacting established editors and article quality. It's looking like that staffing problem's name is Frank, based on Jbmurray's feedback. What can we do about this? And I have another question: why the sudden change? We were always told that editor retention was an important goal, and now we're seeing some backtracking on that, as if it was never a goal. It was: [3] This whole thing is beginning to look like a run-around so folks can keep their jobs. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 18:56, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Thank you for all the comments that have been posted here. I think there are a few points that we, as WMF, should clarify.
1. Please keep in mind that the Education Program is global. Annie Lin, LiAnna Davis, and Frank Schulenburg all work on the strategy and global levels of the program — the reason you see only Sage and me responding here is that Sage and I are the only two staff people working on the U.S. and Canada programs. Frank, Annie, and LiAnna are all focused primarily on supporting the Education Program in the other countries where the program is in operation. Sage and I are keeping the rest of the team updated about the discussion, but Sage and I are the ones who work directly to support the U.S. and Canada programs.
2. Please also keep in mind that there are two times a year that we can make significant changes to the program: before the start of the fall term and before the start of the spring term. I'll talk a bit about the spring 2013 term later, but I want to make it clear that major changes to the future of the program will be something decided upon by the organization that comes out of the Working Group. I want to thank Mike Christie and Mike Cline, who are both members of the Working Group and who have participated in this discussion in that role. One key responsibility of the new organization will be to address many of the concerns raised here — and as someone who has been part of the Working Group, I will say we have definitely been discussing these issues.
3. In terms of the upcoming term:
Please let me know if there are specific questions asked somewhere above that I have missed. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 00:51, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
If they did, there wouldn't be all this worry about biting students, alienating professors etc. The students and professors could be treated as are other wikipedia editors and would not require kid glove handling. Many of the articles that passed the "burden" test and were rated in another evaluation as a net plus to wikipedia are a mess. The EP is using faulty data to rate its impact on wikipedia. And what about all those articles in sandboxes that an online ambassador (above) said she felt uncomfortable moving to main space because she didn't know enough about the subject matter - and the one that she did move took her hours of cleanup and resulted in a very mediocre article? And if you check the professors and student's contributions, they flee wikipedia when finished. Whose going to clean up the mess that already exists? One of the courses from the initiative Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/Cognitive Psychology (Greta Munger) has already been noted above as offering a faulty assignment to students, and is still assigning students to 'compose a one-sentence "hook," nominate it for "Did you know," ' and to "Nominate your article for Good Article status".
And the last assignment is "Try to address issues from Good Article reviews"! So that means some poor wikipedian completes a GA review (which is a bloody pain) and maybe the editor will try to address the issues? MathewTownsend ( talk) 18:55, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I think editing wikipedia taking time and dedication to learn. I don't think editors can pop in with a few hundred edits and expect to understand how to edit here. I just don't think it can be done. It makes a mockery of those editors here who have spent years and thousands of edits to learn how to contribute constructively on wikipedia. I think the EP articles should all be sandboxed until they are vetted by an experienced editor, if one wants to take the time and energy to do it. What do you suggest? (You seem to be asking the wikipedia community to step in and do the work that these professors and the APS can't do. I've looked at the APS page and there's nothing useful there - just a list of old courses and for the most part messy articles.) I'm not understanding what you expect me to do. MathewTownsend ( talk) 19:47, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
Recently, some experienced editors noticed copyright violations from editors participating in the Wikipedia Education Program and notified the instructor who created the assignment. Off-wiki, the professor reminded the editors of the plagiarism guidelines on both Wikipedia and at their academic institution and gave them a short timeline to fix their contributions, as he was hoping to turn this into a learning experience for them. Since many of them have not yet reverted the close paraphrasing and plagiarism themselves, the professor is now working with his Regional Ambassadors to remove the copyvios while preserving all of the other positive contributions his students made.
Since on-wiki time runs a bit more quickly than off-wiki time, I ask that we all assume good faith and know that this professor, who of course opposes plagiarism and negatively impacting Wikipedia, is trying to hold himself accountable for the burden these copyvios place on the community.
That being said, I'd really like any interested editors to work closely with the initial board of the (hopefully) new thematic organization for the Education Program over the next month or so to develop a proactive plan for future issues with our program's participants. Of course there will always be some issues (these are new editors in a very complex world of unknown policies and guidelines), and of course professors will try to prevent them in the first place, but I think we owe it to the community to create a trustworthy system to handle these issues, as our program is supposed to be a positive experience for everyone involved. I know many of our program participants are hoping to move the program in the direction of integrating more closely with the already-existing infrastructure on Wikipedia, but it's perfectly reasonable that our members should help alleviate any negative burden we inadvertently add to other editors. Perhaps you guys can "sign up" here (just place your name below?) if you're interested in working with the initial Board to develop a promising accountability plan for the future of the program. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 01:49, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
Can we get a notification at WikiProject Medicine (and here) on the classes that will be starting for Spring 2013 and will (or are likely to) fall under the scope of that project? Productive communication with those professors now, before the assignments are ossified, could have tremendous payouts in reduced headaches for next semester. Best. Biosthmors ( talk) 19:30, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Forgive me if this is addressed above - there is so much to read here. I encounter a bit of student editing in these categories. Are they subject to more student editing projects than other categories? (A lot of the feedback above seems to be coming from editors involved in those areas.) That is, is Wikipedia's health-related content a particular focus of this project? -- Anthonyhcole ( talk) 04:23, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
Something like "Editing Wikipedia is a form of live publishing. The long term editors of Wikipedia are very experienced at finding plagiarism. If either you or your class do not know what "plagarism" is, we advice against editing the online encyclopedia or first learning about how to avoid it. If you are caught involved in this sort of activity this could result in you being expelled from university and negative press for your school. We at Wikipedia have caught other sources plagiarizing from us and take these activities very seriously [5]. Sincerely The Wikipedia Community. Thoughts? Than no one can say we did not warm them. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:08, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
This is something I've been doing with every class I've been involved with so far, and I think it would be a good idea to try to make sure it's something stressed to all classes. Amusingly, I think I've even used that exact same article as an example before. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 22:52, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
The simplest way to convey the plagiarism issue is by telling the students that there will be a lot more pair of eyes watching the article than just a regular assignment where only the TAs and the prof could read it so any attempts will be easily caught and reverted. Also tell them that the evidence will be kept forever in the history. That should persuade them not to do it. OhanaUnited Talk page 08:28, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Several people have made the point that we're all drawing conclusions from the particular experiences we've had, which is a fair point; the people involved with the education program are doing the same, of course. Could someone post examples of articles that were definitely improved by the program (apart from Brianwc's classes, which have already been mentioned)? Mike Cline said he would post some. If anyone else could do the same, it would help to put things in perspective. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:42, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Much of the result of the following is documented in part here: MSU Education Program Work
Our experiences at Montana State University started when the US Public Policy project recruited a professor in Native American Studies. The course we would work on was Federal Indian Law and Policy a graduate level course. The professor’s interest in involving WP in the curriculum was twofold. First, she felt that Federal Indian Law was poorly represented in WP and that maybe there was a way to use her class to help expand free knowledge on the subject. The second motivation, I the one that I found most profound and challenging was this. A large percentage of her students were of Native American heritage. They had a tendency to be very biased and emotional when thinking and writing about Native American issues, especially issues of rights and law. The Professor believed the WP tenant of NPOV would make a great teaching tool that would enable her students to be much more effective advocates in the world of Native American issues if they could learn to think and write in unbiased, unemotional ways. So my fellow ambassador (an MSU Library archivist) and I (an experienced Wikipedian and instructional designer) worked with the Professor to map out a curriculum involving WP that would meet her desired learning objectives. To meet the first learning objective, a collaborative of students would conduct a comprehensive literature review on the subject of Federal Indian Law and survey WP content to see what needed more work or where there were missing topics. The second objective was met by several students who chose to research, expand or write about a few of the missing topics or topics needing work using basic WP guidelines for verifiability, NPOV, etc. About mid-way through the term we organized a formal computer lab session and tutored students in the basic WP landscape so they knew what they were writing for. When the assignments were complete (this amounted to about ¼ the total grade), they were submitted to the professor for review/grading/comments etc. in whatever format she desired. Very near the end of the term, we organized another computer lab session for those students who wanted to contribute their work to WP. There was no obligation to do so. Under the tutelage of the ambassadors, a number of articles were edited/created, to include the Outline of United States federal Indian law and policy which flowed out of the comprehensive literature review. Even after the term ended, as an ambassador I continued to make improvements to some articles as time permitted.
The second experience involved completely different learning objectives. The Freshman Writing Course (101) taught three styles of basic written communication in three separate segments. Segment 3 involved encyclopedic writing and WP was the desired model to teach to. By this time we had recruited a third ambassador, a tenured reference librarian. These were classes of 3 sections of 25 students all held on the same day each week. We worked with the instructor to craft a lesson plan to meet the learning objectives. In this course the emphasis was on good prose, good sourcing, and good written organization. The topic of the writing wasn’t relevant so we incorporated WP into the lesson by allowing student to select stubs on anything they felt comfortable sourcing and writing about. I think the requirement was ~2500 words of new prose written in encyclopedic style that would meet WP guidelines. When the assignment was complete, it was submitted to the instructor along with copies of the source material used where it was graded by instructor and returned to the student. We then organized computer lab sessions to allow those students that wanted to contribute their work, to do so under the tutelage of three ambassadors to ensure it met WP guidelines. We repeated this process significantly more efficiently for a second term and another 75 students. Not all students finished these courses, but those that did, did so in a way that met the instructors learning objectives while producing content that helped grow WP. Nothing in either of these courses was about editing WP as the learning objectives were all about teaching better writing skills. We just designed those objectives so that the product of the learning would be of benefit to WP.
One of the innovative things the instructor allowed us to try was a very fast paced, standup collaborative team exercise at the whiteboard where a team of -4-6 students with three journal sources on a topic in-hand (pre-read) had to right a four sentence lead paragraph using WP guidelines on leads. We would run 4 teams at a time. Each team had one source that was different from all the other groups. We gave them about 10 minutes to write the lead paragraph based on their sources. The groups would then openly critique each other’s prose and challenge the paraphrasing, differing information (different sources) and overall comprehensive of the lead paragraph. This was not a graded exercise and there was no right or wrong answers, but one that was designed to reinforce good sourcing, paraphrasing , construction and collaborative writing. In other words, we created a scenario using WP norms to allow the instructor to recognize and capitalize on teaching moments. The instructor loved it, the students loved it, and Wikipedia got credit for some fun in the classroom.
As we move forward at MSU we will continue to jointly establish curriculum with willing instructors around WP designed to meet whatever learning objectives are on the table. It may involve editing, it may not, but whatever curriculum we employ we will ensure any content contributed to WP meets WP norms. We have another proposed WP exercise in the works that doesn’t involve editing but will be of great benefit to the encyclopedia. Research skills receive a lot of interest at MSU in the freshman/sophomore years and the MSU library has a variety of programs related to improving those skills. WP has ~ 250,000 un-sourced articles and god knows how much unverified content. We are crafting a curriculum where students conduct the necessary research to find sources for un-sourced WP material. If we are successful, all that work can then be made available to WP where other editors can use those sources to improve articles and verify content. We are excited about this idea.
I am proud of what we’ve accomplished at MSU for several reasons. We’ve helped professors use WP to achieve learning objectives and we’ve helped students create some work that has improved WP. All without any adverse or negative burden on WP. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 03:25, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
BLP was being done before it was a policy...we just didn't know it yet. How about we find a way to force the students to comment at talkpages before they make substantive edits? Can the EP set this as a guideline for editing especially anything that might require the expenditure of monies ot doublecheck their work? Then, after its reviewed, they can post it in article space. I don't know if that is feasible...just trying to find a happy middle ground. I am just a -- MONGO 01:02, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Here are some articles that appear to me to be good examples of student work, though I haven't checked how the student used sources in these cases. I agree with Brian Carver's post, above, that it would be better not to generalize about the students and professors. I also think that Jon Murray's classes are an excellent example of what students can accomplish; they are not a product of the EP, but then no articles are "products" of the EP -- they're all done by students, Jon's classes included. There are two separate questions. The first is what level of work are students doing on Wikipedia, and what problems and benefits are they bringing with them? The second is what shall we do about it? My answers are "a mixture of good and bad", and "train professors and institutions so they can do better". Anyway, here are three articles that seem worthwhile additions to the encyclopedia to me, from three different classes.
If these examples are not enough to convince anyone that students are capable of doing good work, please say so and I will find more. -- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:32, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
The psych class run in 2012 by Marentettte here is given as an example of a class that did well. I'll admit this is also an undergrad class (if I'm reading correctly) but the students appear to be year 3 or 4. So they've chosen their speciality and are taking a focussed class. The terrible psych edits I've seen are in 1st year "Introduction to Psychology" classes and such like. From my ancient memories of uni, such classes were chosen by students who had to add another science module to their course and chose it as a soft option on something interesting, rather than e.g. Statistics, which sounds boring and hard. Can anyone give examples of 1st-year students doing some good? Or students doing "Introduction to.." basic classes doing some good? Otherwise, I propose we ban such classes, in the nicest possible way, as their students really don't know what they are writing about and have no intrinsic motivation in the subject.
This is the second class Marentettte has done and two of the students are from the previous assignment. There was one before in 2011. Also, both times the online ambassadors were greatly experienced Wikipedians. Neelix has 131,000 edits and Nikkimaria has 30,000 edits.
The class was very small and focussed on a couple of articles. The students gave an outline of their intentions and used drafts. The prof gave excellent advice here about the audience and the importance of not trashing the existing text with 100% new material; more good avice here about outlines and review before diving in and making a mess; she states she will be doing an expert review here.
Looking at the prof's contributions I see her spending long evenings for many days working with the students and on the articles. Reviewing and copyediting the final work, not just commenting on drafts. And that's just for a handful of articles the first time and only two articles the second time. What an investment.
In contrast with this class it seems the prof was much less capable wrt editing Wikipedia, much less involved in reviewing/copyediting the work, the class was much bigger (40 students) and some of them chose subjects that the prof was not an expert in, so couldn't comment on them or fix them. Although the students were reminded to use secondary sources (and some of the sources I saw were good), it didn't appear all understood plagiarism or researched the appropriateness of their content to the page. Colin° Talk 17:52, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Someone suggested above: "perhaps recruiting ambassadors who are willing to monitor and clean up their classes' messes (it seems like this ought to already be part of the job description, but it doesn't seem to be)".
I've never seen much action by online ambassadors. (Maybe it's all by email and chat.) Perhaps recruiting online ambassadors who are experienced wikipedians, who are also familiar with the subject matter of education course articles and who are willing to "monitor and clean up their classes' messes" would be the way to go. (And that would probably be more than one online ambassador for every 15 students, the ideal now but not always achieved.) MathewTownsend ( talk) 01:04, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
I've been following this discussion (and over the past several months others previous, including the RFC and the various scattered fallout over the Pune program etc.). I've also had quite a bit to do with the various incarnations of the EP, from an informal meeting in San Francisco, to seeing members of the team in Barcelona, to being part of the Jamboree in Boston. (These guys get around, I tell you... I mean, I obviously do, too, but mostly on my own dime and nowhere near as much as they do.)
Most of the WMF folk are well-intentioned (and they're better than some of the people who went before... Rod, for instance), but with few exceptions (Sage is one) they have not much idea about how Wikipedia actually works, and have never been active Wikipedians. Moreover, as an institution the WMF is much better at promotion and spin, but has little investment in following up on what they have started. This whole business of handing off the program, as though it were a hot potato that they no longer want to touch, is a very poor show indeed.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of people in academia who, in part encouraged by the WMF (but in part spurred by examples such as my own), have become very excited about the possibilities of using Wikipedia in the classroom. I met Steve Joordens, for instance, in Boston. He's a good guy but even at the time I was wondering how on earth he could pull off something with a class of 1500 students. Sadly, in the celebratory atmosphere of that meeting, it was hard to raise any doubts, cautions, or caveats. At the same meeting there was also much excitement about the Pune program, and we all know what happened there...
In short, for a variety of reasons a lot of hopes have been raised around this program. And a lot of good material has been produced. Sometimes things have gone well. But when things have gone wrong, they have gone badly wrong, and the WMF hasn't wanted to hear any doubts, and hasn't wanted to pick up the pieces.
Frankly, it's a crying shame because the WMF has had oodles of money and resources passing through its hands, and masses of goodwill, especially but not only from academics. It's been a shame to see that money and those resources too often wasted, in almost every way conceivable. (The Barcelona junket was a particular disaster, but it was one I saw only by accident, as I happened to be at the Mozilla Fest there in any case. The Wikimedia folk there had scarcely a clue as to what they were doing, and yet they had a golden opportunity to make connections and to talk to people, both to learn and to gain allies.)
Anyhow, beyond the waste it's also a shame because I strongly believe that there needs to be more thought and more effort devoted to thinking through (and doing something about) the relationship between Wikipedia and academia, which at present is frankly a broken relationship, with massive misunderstandings on both sides. The dialogue of the deaf that results would be amusing if it weren't also almost tragic. To take one example: academics fear Wikipedia because of the rampant plagiarism that (they think) creates it and that it in turn creates; yet here we have ongoing denunciation of student projects, for almost precisely the same reason. You'd have thought we'd have here the basis of a common conversation, common goals, and perhaps a shared set of tragedies. Instead we have mutual recriminations and allegations.
I think that the relationship between Wikipedia and the University (also, more broadly, the university and the intellectual commons) is a vital one, for a number of reasons. In reality, Wikipedia and the university are (or should be) in this together: they are both ultimately utopian enterprises, dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge to all, without commercial or ideological restraints. They are both, frankly, embattled, and their enemies are similar: rampant commercialization and privatization, for instance; or, in brief, an extraordinary attempt to enclose and profit from the digital commons.
This is why, beyond the basic obfuscation and evasions that it carries with it, I'm so against the management-speak that seems to come with the Education Project in its new incarnation. It is precisely this sort of shallow rationalization, short-termism, and unthinking belief in modish rhetoric that is killing the university and has the potential to kill Wikipedia. No wonder Wikipedians react so strongly against it! It is precisely the opposite of any solution to heal the rift between Wikipedia and the University. For it is the death-rattle of both.
Anyhow, all this may sound too high-falutin' or something. But there should be a forum for an honest and productive conversation between academics and Wikipedians (which is also a conversation among academics and Wikipedians, because of course there are plenty of people who are both, and in the end the divide is a false one). This should deal with pragmatic considerations such as plagiarism as well as the less-pragmatic ones about ethics. (By the way, there are also legalities at issue: strictly speaking when I tell my students to edit on Wikipedia I am also breaking the law of my home province; but that's another matter.)
We could ask why students, even good students, decide to plagiarize on Wikipedia, even those who wouldn't necessarily plagiarize elsewhere. (The other semester I had a grad class work on the Spanish Wikipedia and it turned out that two of the articles they wrote were massively plagiarized... No, I hadn't checked initially, because it honestly didn't occur to me that grad students would plagiarize in such a stupid manner. But they did.) We could think about ways to combat this. Incidentally, I find that Wikipedia assignments ultimately work well as a way to teach students not to plagiarize, just as they teach them about the perils of using poor sources. But it takes a while to get to that point; these are difficult lessons to learn, especially perhaps among this generation of students.
But more importantly we should also be thinking harder (and doing more) about the role that Wikipedia can and should play in the education sector, and vice versa. This should be a positive and productive relationship. I salute the WMF for realizing the potential of the two "sides" working together. This is why ultimately I support the Education Project. Indeed, I think it is vital. But this is also why (again) I think it's a huge shame that it has gone through such difficulties, and that it looks nowhere near resolving them anytime soon.
OK, I know: in the classic Wikipedia idiom, your response should probably be TLDNR. Shorter version: the Education Program (or something like it) is essential, but we can't let it be blighted by short-termism, blinkered vision, unthinking celebration, and shallow rhetoric. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 06:57, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Ach, and immediately after writing this, I move to the next page on my watchlist and have to remove some massive plagiarism from Sparknotes, of all places. Sigh. We do need to get together on this stuff. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 07:01, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Having done a fair bit of outreach, I must say that most of my efforts have resulted in little concrete success within Wikipedia itself. This includes giving talks at 5 universities, offering a scholarship, and encouraging my own students to become involved. The only exception has been the medical translation efforts where I managed to find a very professional NGO which deeply shares our goal. [8] Finding new good editors is very hard and there is much that does not work. Thus I see this projects goal as figuring out what works and what dose not. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:51, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Two things are emerging from this discussion: Sage Ross and Moonriddengirl are possibly the only "real" Wikipedians on staff (editors who know how to build content and previously engaged Wikipedia at the article level), such that poor staffing has been a big part of the failed programs; and the WMF has liability concerns, causing it to ditch the programs rather than disclaim them.
On the Section 230 and liability issues, it is no surprise that the Wikimedia Foundation wants to offload responsibility for student projects to other groups. WMF already knows that student projects lead to rampant copyright violation. It should now be on notice that they also lead to errors in medical articles, which can have real-world consequences. But regardless of the legalities, there is a moral issue here: should the foundation or any of its offshoots actively support poorly-supervised projects which can lead to unrealistic expectations or real harm to those who suffer from physical or psychological conditions which are the subject of articles edited by entry-level students without professional expertise?
The answer to this question is clear: the Foundation should immediately cease funding or any other support for any student editing projects in the realms of introductory courses on psychology, psychiatry, and medicine.
Should the WMF be publicly disclaiming these programs, given the known consequences, or pushing the liability off to non-WMF entities? And what can we "real" Wikipedians do about the consequences of what are obvious gaps in staffing decisions? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 19:22, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
WMF staff (mostly comprised of people who don't edit and don't know day-to-day editing issues) have promoted programs (without consulting the regular folk out here in the trenches) that are largely utilized and populated by people who don't know Wikipedia policies (some exceptions like Jbmurray, who are underutilized, and Sage Ross who is probably overworked), leading to big problems, leading WMF attorneys to realize there are potential legal concerns (well, let's hope they realize it, because if they don't, the problem is even bigger), leading WMF staff to offload the programs to someone else to (attempt to) eliminate the WMF liability.
But the regular editors will still have to deal with the issues whether they are coming from offloaded programs or WMF-supported programs. All points to: WMF staff don't understand regular editors or the consequences of these decisions. If the WMF hired *editors* who knew something about editing, we might not have these issues (I wonder what might have happened differently if someone like Jbmurray had been on board). At any rate, offloading the program to avoid potential liability won't make things any better for the regular editor who has to deal with the cleanup. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 23:16, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
The sandbox issue is one that the education program has continually adjusted, to get a good balance between new editors learning the basics before jumping into a well-kept article and doing a whole re-write or new article in a sandbox without the editor realizing that they've gone off in a bad direction (resulting in either a huge dump of new work that needs cleanup, or the work never being used at all). In general, if students get into mainspace early, they are much more likely to interact with experienced editors and do better (and more) work that is solid, which is why we've advised limited use of sandboxes.
Here is the current "best practices" advice from the new student and educator trainings:
(Those are from the educators training, but they are also in the Ambassadors training and the last three are in the student training.)
Please feel free to edit those (and I'll try update the other trainings to reflect the consensus recommendations, based on those ones). The intended audience is both professors working with (or wanting to work with) the US and Canada Education Programs and teachers doing Wikipedia assignments independently.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 12:34, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
I have seen somewhere (but can't now locate it) a suggestion that students should copy an existing article into a sandbox, work on it there and eventually paste it back. I'm glad to see the guidance above doesn't suggest that, and it's important they shouldn't do it. Parallel versions are highly undesirable, because:
JohnCD ( talk) 16:09, 17 December 2012 (UTC)
OK, let's take a sample case I just encountered, so we can use this to understand how professors, students, WMF staff, ambassadors, and the community can or should use this board. I will notify all involved parties next. My apologies to Mike Christie for just now encountering this, as I was reviewing old links he left on my page while I was mostly not editing (and my extra apologies to him for not being available all spring, summer and fall, as he repeatedly queried my talk). [9] I found this article by reviewing that course page for topics I'm familiar with.
One of the student's first edits to the article was to remove a large chunk of sourced text. Every single article edit was made in one day, just before the course ended. Within minutes of finishing the work, in one session, the (clearly unprepared) article was simultaneously nominated at both DYK and GAN, adding to the drain on resources at those pages; an established editor would have likely known the article was not GA quality, and we don't know if the course required her to submit these nominations.
The article contains blatant, easily spotted, outright cut-and-paste plagiarism from at least the online sources, meaning certainly the offline sources will need checking as well. Since the student plagiarized online sources, someone will need to access and check offline sources. Samples:
I stopped there; since the first three edits contain plagiarism, it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the entire article does. Nor does it seem unreasonable to assume that neither the professor nor the ambassador (sorry, Mike, you know I adore you and value your work!) checked.
There are other style issues: grammatical, MOS, information and sections that should be eliminated-- in other words, a lot of cleanup needed. A good deal of the portions that need cleanup were in the article before the student started editing, but what the student did was 1) not fix faulty text or sections, while 2) deleting sourced information to 3) replace it with plagiarized text.
Cleanup will be easier once the plagiarism is removed, but since it wasn't detected on time, the article has been edited since. This article "looks" good, but it was not an improvement; it was a net negative to Wikipedia, and a drain on editor time.
Many courses require students to do a few edits before they start writing; Lcannaday's only other edits to Wikipedia were to:
SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 18:21, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
So, what admin is going to revert to pre-plagiarism, revdel or whatever adminly thing has to be done to remove the plagiarism, check the offline sources I can't access, etc? Once all that is done, I can cleanup the issues that were in the article pre-student editing. I'm more interested in using this example as a guide to how we should approach the hundreds or thousands of same that are out there. For starters, the professor should be uninvited, since he clearly wasn't engaging the project adequately. Since we know this professor wasn't checking for plagiarism, I suggest every article his course touched is suspect. Should we revert them all? Who is going to be responsbible for checking all of them? Is someone going to submit a copyvio investigation on the entire course? If these were not students, that is what we would be doing. So, how does this board plan to address this and similar situations? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:08, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
@ SandyGeorgia: Nice example. Having gone through the available information on the course page, I have some questions that I would need answered before I could come to all the conclusions you’ve come too. The fact that the article you cite has been edited in a manner that is a bad for WP is undeniable and unfortunate. The questions I have (and these have to be mostly rhetorical because I don’t think we can know the answers accurately after the fact):
Again Sandy, good example which indeed demonstrates the potential adverse burden on the community if these types of activity aren’t avoided. But avoided they can be through good instructional design, good training, good resources outlining best practices, and collaborative activities between the Wikipedia community and academia. We have ample evidence that this can be done right? -- Mike Cline ( talk) 18:28, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
good example which indeed demonstrates the potential adverse burden on the community if these types of activity aren’t avoided.was a summary in a global context. It actually reinforces what you are saying--we've got to fix the issues or the problems will get worse. I get it, but what I don't understand is why everyone is looking for a scapegoat and cherry picking language to reinforce that search. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 21:17, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
We should IMO spend some time discussing solutions. We have fairly clearly identified a problem. I propose getting press for these concerns using concrete cases. We can than point profs who are interested in being involved to these articles so that they see involvement as requiring supervision not simply a free source of TAs. Do others have comments on this idea or other ideas? Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 19:11, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm very confused by the plagarism issue. If the sources are cited then how it is plagarism? Some of parts of the article was 100% copied from a book but I thought that didn't matter as long as it was cited where we got the information from.
Colin° Talk 16:03, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Keep Don't care if it stays up. Just need it up until December 18th to get credit for a into to neuroscience class.
When we find plagiarism, indicating that the prof didn't check the work, what should we do?
etcetera ... SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 05:09, 15 December 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I've been trying to work through some of the massive backlog at WP:CCI (largely not to blame on students btw!) and have a proposal to help speed things up. As I'm sure you all know, the IEP yielded a lot of garbage including a ton of copyright violations. This happened both in mainspace and in sandboxes. I'd like to nuke all of the sandbox pages of users who did not continue to be active after the course ended, without evaluating them further. Right now there are thousands upon thousands of articles at CCI waiting to be evaluated, with the backlog growing by the day, and I don't think checking this for copyvio is a good use of anyone's time. Any thoughts/opposition/support? Calliopejen1 ( talk) 01:04, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
here and here. Beyond My Ken ( talk) 21:47, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Background: I have edited WP on-and-off for many years and consider myself reasonable knowledgable on wiki-policy, editing, and on chemistry. I have an FA, a couple of GAs, and a bunch of DYKs, as well as a PhD in chemistry. I also have an academic background, being a published researcher and having taught undergraduate chemistry. I have never used WP for teaching or assessment, but have worked on articles that have been edited (poorly and well) by student editors. Obviously, all opinions are my own and do not represent the chemistry or chemicals WikiProjects, the FAC, GA, or DYK communities, or the instructors or students with whom I have interacted. The Chemistry WikiProject, FYI, has a considerable number of student-related articles being edited.
Comments: One very positive example from my experience comes from the oxaziridine article which DMelvinKaphan ( talk · contribs) built to this point in December 2010 (there were a few small edits from others, but the work was almost exclusively DMelvinKaphan's). I classify this as a "student editor"'s work because s/he describes him- or her-self as "an undergraduate chemistry major at the University of Rochester. The impetus for creation of this account was to publish a wikipedia page on the chemistry of oxaziridines, a subject that has heretofore been neglected from the Wikipedia" on her or his user page. I don't know if it was an assignment. DMelvinKaphan nominated the article for GA, which it passed on 29 December 2010, and I nominated it for DYK, the article making its front page appearance on 14 December 2010 (1332 views). The article has deteriorated recently, now being tagged as having a lead problem, though a request at WT:CHEMISTRY#Oxaziridine seeks help in this area. The article has received more than 3600 views in the last 90 days. Unfortunately, DMelvinKaphan has not edited since April 2011.
Around the same time, I had positive interactions with MichChemGSI ( talk · contribs), working with a group of students. On the article isolobal principle, this single edit addition added 12000 bytes of material. Now, I'm not wild about the dump-a-huge-change-and-vanish approach by (like Chem507f10grp5 ( talk · contribs)) (all of this editor's other edits were in a sandbox, but looking at the diff between that addition and the current version, covering 31 edits, shows that the addition has remained largely intact. The article's topic relates to Hoffman's work that earned him the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I nominated the article for DYK, and it was viewed 2368 times when it appeared on the main page on 23 December 2010. The article has been viewed 3372 times in the last 90 days.
A more difficult case from that group of students concerned the insertion reaction article. The history is harder to follow as the sandbox-to-mainspace move was made by MichChemGSI as a cut-and-paste move. As he was not the student(s), a history merge and cleanup was required - see discussions on his talk page - and the cessation of the strudents sharing a single account (like Chem507f10grp3 ( talk · contribs)) was also done around this time. In short, this was what the students contributed, much of it good, but also very unbalanced. There are many other insertion reactions that are not covered in this article, as my 14000 byte addition to their 19000 byte draft shows. Most of the follow-up clean-up was done by Smokefoot ( talk · contribs) who removed much material that belonged in the migratory insertion article. I nominated the article for DYK, at it received 454 views, likely partly due to it appearance being on 26 December 2010. There was a lot of work needed on the article following the student editing, but the article is a definite improvement of the 'pedia, in my opinion.
More recent experiences have been more problematic. The article on niobium(V) ethoxide was started by Kolmodi2 ( talk · contribs), likely by "borrowing" the ethanol article then blanking it. The student's completed version might be best described as chemically flawed. For the non-chemists, that compound is not an organometallic compound, so the lead is almost entirely false. Comparing to the current version, almost none of the student version remains except the infobox data. Even the structure image was massively flawed. Rifleman 82 ( talk · contribs) and then I worked on cleanup, then Smokefoot made a major improvement (correcting material I had doubted using sources he had to hand). I don't know who is grading / supervising Kolmodi2, but the contribution this student made was very poor, in my opinion.
Another problematic example is Ryanhan2 ( talk · contribs)'s article on allylcyclopentane, which was created via the AfC process. Though the amount of text is not insignificant, the actual cointent is a re-hashing of infobox information mixed with chemical and logical errors. Quite understandably, Smokefoot's response to this article was to nominate it for deletion, a discussion which was closed as "Keep" despite any real policy-based support. During the AfD, most of the content was removed and with Rifleman 82's removal of "junk references", the article is now a three-sentence stub with a single reference. Ryanhan2 has not edited since 28 November. I have no idea what the instructor thinks of Ryanhan2's work, but I think that the effort of the community here has been far more than is justified by a three-sentence-plus-infobox stub. I have since added a second reference, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics which I have used to support infobox data. I did this because I noticed that the original article included values for ΔcH° (−32 kJ mol−1 for the liquid, −12 kJ mol−1 for the gas). These values seemed to me to be improbably small, but were attributed to the CRC Handbook, a reliable and respected source. I did not find any value for this quantity in the reference at the place indicated, another flaw in the draft, but the Handbook does support several infobox values so I added those references. I've also added an MSDS. EdChem ( talk) 09:57, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
Addendum: I posted this on SandyGeorgia's talk page which mentions my concerns about additions to the metallocene article, so I haven't expanded on it here.
Notifications: I have posted at WT:CHEMISTRY (which I am sure Rifleman and Smokefoot will see) and individually to MichChemGSI to invite comments and opinions. EdChem ( talk) 05:13, 16 December 2012 (UTC)
This may not be the right place to ask this question, but I've been reviewing source usage for student articles -- this was a topic that came up higher up this page. I'm looking at both student and non-student edits. There are a few edits that I'd like to get second opinions on. Could folks comment on whether the following are acceptable, or are covered by WP:LIMITED, or are unacceptable close paraphrasing? I'll number these so folks can refer to them by number in responses.
1. Text in source: "Chile has the lowest female participation rate in the work force in all of Latin America." Text in article: "Chile has the lowest rate of female participation in the work force in all of Latin America"
2. Text in source: "Chile is one of the only states in the world to have elected a female president". Text in article: "Chile legalized divorce in 2004 and is also one of the only countries to have elected a female president."
3. Text in source: "Although 47.5% of university students are women, many university graduates choose to be homemakers instead of seeking employment." Text in article: "Despite 47.5% of students in college are women, many still chose to join the workforce, choosing to be homemakers."
4. Text in source: "women activists in Chile pressed presidential candidates in 2009 to pursue reforms that helped women to enter the workforce, including job training, maternity leave options, and flexible working schedules." Text in article: " In 2009, activists demanded that presidential candidates develop reforms that would improve work conditions for women. Reforms included maternity leave, flexible work schedules and job training."
5. Text in source: "Younger women often choose cohabitation over marriage and they have fewer children." Text in article: "Today, younger women are opting out of marriage and having fewer children than their predecessors."
6. Text in source: "In 2002, urban women had a fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. Rural women have more children, at 2.9 children per woman, but they too have less children than in the 1990s." Text in article: "A 2002 study reported that urban women average 2.1 children per woman with women living in rural areas having more children, at 2.9. As of the 1990s, both urban and rural women were averaging fewer children than previously."
7. Text in source: "Women in Chile have a long life expectancy and high rates of literacy. Women live on average 80.8 years" Text in article: "Women in Chile have long life expectancy, living an average of 80.8 years, about six years longer than men"
8. Text in source: "It is estimated, unofficially, that between 120,000 and 160,000 women have illegal abortions each year" Text in article: "Estimates range between 120,000 and 160,000 for the number of Chilean women who have illegal abortions each year."
-- Any comments? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 23:43, 18 December 2012 (UTC)
I'm not sure if everyone who's commented here realizes this, but not all of the example edits above are by students; they are by three different editors, only one of whom is a student.
Here is a marked up copy of the article version I am analyzing. All uses of the four sources in question are marked up in blue, green or red, to indicate which editor added that material. (I.e. you can think of them as blue editor, green editor, and red editor.) The eight examples above are the only uses of those sources where there's any question about close paraphrasing -- I've underlined those in the marked up copy.
My question for this group is: given what you see in the marked up copy, what should we tell the student? (For the moment I'd rather not say which colour represents the student, just to avoid any unconscious bias in the responses. The other two editors are very experienced and long term Wikipedians.) In particular, a couple of responses above pointed out that the question of whether this sort of paraphrasing was acceptable depended on the context and the density of this kind of paraphrase; the markup should give you some additional context to answer that question.
My original motivation with this analysis was to find out just how much misuse of sources was going in student work, and to compare that with the source usage standards visible in the same articles, by looking at non-student work in those articles. I confess I'm rather surprised to discover that I'm stuck at this early point unable to make a definite statement about whether the student, or the regular editors, were using their sources correctly. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:00, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
If the consensus is that a student's assignment made Wikipedia worse instead of improving Wikipedia, why should they be rewarded with any credit for the assignment? Instead of partial credit, shouldn't they receive negative credit or no credit? Biosthmors ( talk) 23:55, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Has there been any success with giving students start class articles and ask that they improve them up to C or B class? We already have GAs and DYKs as a discouraged assignment at WP:AFSE; should improving a start class article be an encouraged assignment? Biosthmors ( talk) 00:14, 22 December 2012 (UTC)
Since we've got the course page extension running and it has potential to make it easier to monitor and prevent problems with independent classes (as well as education program classes), I think we should start actively trying to get the random classes that pop up to use the extension, and have the professors go through some vetting beforehand. To that end, I added a section to Wikipedia:Training/For educators where the instructors of independent classes can request permission to set up a structured course page (for which they need the Course instructor user right). See Wikipedia:Training/For educators/Setting up your course 2. It's currently set up to post a new section onto this noticeboard, where the instructor explains what the assignment plan is, how many students will be editing, and so on. Here is the pleload form; feel free to modify it.
I'm going to overhaul {{ welcome teacher}} so that it points to the training and encourages instructors to use a structured course page.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:10, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Shouldn't all courses be required/expected/strongly encouraged to
And shouldn't all of these 4 points be included in a grading rubric for students? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:36, 21 December 2012 (UTC)
Who will be making decisions on which which professors are accepted into (or kicked out of) the program, which Wikipedians are ambassadors, etc., starting in Summer 2013? Biosthmors ( talk) 03:28, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
What we need is an automated solution to not only determine who here is plagiarizing from others but who is plagiarizing from us. In the last few months I have come across three textbooks that have lifted heavily from Wikipedia without attribution and these where just examples I stumbled upon [19]. I remember hearing that we had something like this at one point in time? Does anyone know? Maybe the education program should donate $25,000 to hire programmers to developing a solution or the WMF should direct programming resources to it. I am currently attempting to find volunteers. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:50, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Some background: You may know that we have produced a series of handouts over the last 2.5 years for the Education Program; many were developed as we suddenly realized the need for one, and they lacked cohesion. I've been working over the last couple of months at revamping them, as we have gotten the feedback from students that there are too many of them, they are too detailed, they are too long, and they don't look official since they all are different. So I am getting all handouts down to one page, in the same visual identity. My goal is to make them short enough that students will actually read them, but detailed enough to convey the key elements that students need to know to contribute good content to Wikipedia. They also include links to Wikipedia policy and guideline pages for more details if students want more details.
I have just uploaded a new plagiarism handout to Wikimedia Commons: File:Classroom_handout_-_Avoiding_plagiarism_on_Wikipedia.pdf. I hope that I have taken into account the concrete suggestions for what to tell students that have been listed on this page, but I welcome any feedback. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 18:16, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
Copyvio and plagiarism are two almost entirely separate issues, and what matters here is plagiarism (a moral and intellectual issue, not a legal one). Long block quotes are fine on Wikipedia within reason, just as they're fine in academic texts, but you must give the name of the person you're quoting, or closely paraphrasing, or borrowing an idea from. Not only to give credit (as I wrote above), but also to make clear to the reader: "These are the books and papers I have read, and here I am reporting what they say," which is what undergraduate essays and Wikipedia articles are supposed to be about. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:29, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
I've updated the file on Commons, trying to take into account the central concerns raised here. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 21:27, 27 December 2012 (UTC)
The other source of frustration is that we keep trying to reinvent the wheel. Universities have already described plagiarism and posted advice for students, so we should simply follow it. Here is good advice from Harvard: "What Constitutes Plagiarism?":
Note the in-text attribution. This isn't difficult to explain to students, especially as the cases we've seen have not been subtle examples on the borderline. SlimVirgin (talk) 22:43, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
The Harvard page looks good and I'll read it some more in detail. I'm a bit concerned about their definition of "Common knowledge" and the need to cite vs ours. Their cases where a citation is required would roughly correspond to our cases where in-text attribution was required (for an opinion, idea, beliefs, etc). By their guidance, there would be a lot of facts that wouldn't need a citation where we certainly would require one. What they are really talking about is attribution of ideas and original thought. The fact that the space shuttle weighs so many tonnes or the a drug has the risk of causing liver damage are facts that need citations on WP but do not need attributed to any person or group.
In subjects that are less about professors thinking deep original thoughts and more about experiments, the need for attribution is reduced in an encyclopaedia but is still common in academic writing. If you read an academic medical review paper, it will give attribution for various discoveries but those discoveries don't constitute original thought. We don't need to (and indeed shouldn't) in-text-attribute those discoveries unless they are notable in and of themselves as part of the history of a disease or a drug or whatever.
My point here is that we need to be careful that Wikipedia is a mix of subjects. The academic writing in those subjects wont translate exactly to Wikipedia and the degree of mismatch may be much greater in some subjects than others. We need to offer students and professors subject-appropriate guidance on how to write encyclopaedia articles and how such writing differs from academia. Colin° Talk 09:15, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
The FAQ of the Cambridge guidelines says "How do I avoid plagiarising? -- By being sure you understand and follow the correct referencing techniques for your subject. Some of the most commonly used reference techniques are Harvard and Vancouver..." This is dreadful advice and no wonder we see student comments like the one quoted further up this page: "Some of parts of the article was 100% copied from a book but I thought that didn't matter as long as it was cited where we got the information from." Hmm.
Colin°
Talk
20:25, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
Oxford's plagiarism page, again stressing in-text attribution. The following is in their words:
SlimVirgin (talk) 19:39, 20 December 2012 (UTC)
What are the main incentives professors have to stay aligned with the Education Program? What prevents them from making their own Wikipedia assignments, anonymously and under the radar? What would make an under the radar professor join the education program? What's in it for them? Biosthmors ( talk) 03:33, 23 December 2012 (UTC)
Done OhanaUnited Talk page 01:25, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Chris Leeder
University of Michigan, School of Information
SI 110 Introduction to information; introductory undergraduate course for the Informatics major, covering a wide range of historical and technologic topics related to information technology and the Internet; most students are freshmen but there is a range. I am a doctoral student and Head Graduate Student Instructor for the course. I have takent he GLAM (Galelries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) Wikipedia training and am working with our Campus Ambassadors on this assignment.
Students will not be writing new articles. My goal is to introduce them to the Wikipedia editing process and to give them a better understanding of how Wikipedia works.
A rough draft of the assignments: 1) Create a user page and account 2) Create a sandbox and practice editing techniques 3) Review the Did You Know, Good Article, and Featured Article process and criteria 4) Make 5 minor edits to articles they are interested in (copyediting) 5) Choose a course-related article that could be improved and write a short description of suggested changes 6) Introduce themselves on the Talk page of the article and discuss their suggestions 7) Make 5 substantive edits to the article 8) Add a source citation to the article (from a course reading?) 9) Write a short reflection on what they have learned about Wikipedia
Approximately 100
1/9/13-4/23/13 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cleeder ( talk • contribs) 23:47, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Done OhanaUnited Talk page 01:25, 3 January 2013 (UTC)
Lori L. Britt
James Madison University
SCOM 350: Introduction to Organizational Communication. Sophomores through seniors learn about theories of organizing and how they affect out experiences as members of organizations. Writing for Wikipedia will be one of two experiential learning options students will complete throughout the term (the other is service-learning helping an area nonprofit organization meet a goal). Students will work at both a product (writing about organizational communication ideas and concepts for a public audience) and process level (reflection on the process of learning about and navigating member participation in the online Wikipedia organization.
Students will research what information is currently available on Wikipedia on organizational communication and theories of organizing. Then they will identify shortcomings or gaps and significantly edit or write articles on a specific topic in this area. Along the way they will learn the ropes of Wikipedia by doing some minor edits, cleaning up pages, learning the style conventions, etc.
Since this is one option, I anticipate about half, or 15 students will choose the Wikipedia option. I plan to have a former student who excelled at this project last fall Skype with the class in the early days to discuss his experience. I think this will help students for whom the fear of the unknown might be a deterrent.
Start and end dates January 7- April 30, 2013 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Llbritt ( talk • contribs) 23:58, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Chris Cooper
Western Carolina University
Policy Analyasis (PA 673): This is a graduate level policy analysis course and a core course in the Western Carolina University MPA program. This is the third year in a row I will have used Wikipedia in this course. Each student is required to write about one policy. I will be working with Kasey Baker.
Writing or substantially improving one entry related to a public policy of their choosing.
25
Jan 13 to May 3
In a now-archived thread, I mentioned Mu wave as a page where I had a good experience with a student editor. I was rather pleased to notice today that the student editor, who has now graduated, has returned to make more edits. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 16:20, 25 December 2012 (UTC)
Here at in-progress lists of classes it looks like will be participating in the US and Canada Education Programs for the coming term. I expect both will grow a fair bit.
-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 18:29, 4 January 2013 (UTC)
The brochure "Evaluating Wikipedia Article Quality" is mentioned under Wikipedia:Training/For_educators/Companion_materials but does not seem to be listed under the Resources tab mentioned.
I found it here
Cleeder ( talk) 15:27, 5 January 2013 (UTC)Cleeder
The Education Working Group's proposal that was submitted to WMF, revised based on the RfC and related discussions, is now up. It looks like the next step, about 2 weeks from now, will be to submit it to the Affiliations Committee. You can post feedback and suggestions on the proposal talk page.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 19:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Why not just start an RfC asking the community what it thinks of the proposal at Wikipedia talk:Education Working Group/Proposal? Biosthmors ( talk) 04:52, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
I agree with Biosthmors: this is all rather odd. We had an RFC, which was to all intents and purposes ignored (admittedly it was messy, but it produced no kind of mandate either). And there's obviously no real desire to consult with Wikipedians about the program. My sense is that the WMF and the working group feel that they had their fingers burnt once too often, and wanted to plough ahead with the schedule they had set themselves.
But on the other hand, so be it. Essentially, the EP doesn't need to have much if anything to do with Wikipedia and its governance model. There's nothing to stop independent bodies such as this from arising and using Wikipedia for their own purposes. We can't insist that they do things the Wikipedia way. If there's some kind of positive outcome at least some of the time, then fair enough. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 16:44, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Chris Cooper.
Western Carolina University.
PA 673: Public Policy Analysis. A core course in the MPA program at Western Carolina University. As one component of this course, students will write or substantially improve Wikipedia entries on public policy.
Writing, or substantially improving Wikipedia entries related to public policy.
25
Jan 15th to May 10th?
My edits to Education Program:Saint Louis University/Signal Transduction (SP13) don't show up on my watchlist. Will they soon? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:18, 11 January 2013 (UTC)
Is education program space (and are the new course pages) designed to be a place where the community can't openly edit it? Biosthmors ( talk) 18:17, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Will Special:Courses perhaps soon list the ambassadors that are signed up for classes so it will be easy to see who has one and who doesn't? Biosthmors ( talk) 04:32, 17 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi,
I happened to stumble across some student edits at Motor unit that require some cleanup. I am considering just undoing all the edits to the entire article back to its pre-student status. I figured someone here might be interested in this, maybe to provide feedback to the course director, though i don't know whether it was an explicit USEP project or not. I have already posted notices at WP:Neuro and WP:Neuroscience.
-- UseTheCommandLine ( talk) 10:18, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
"Dr. S. Deban and University of South Florida" according to User talk:Shwu123, who edited motor unit. Has anyone here been in contact with the professor? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:08, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
I was just reading up on any changes to the Educaton Program today, and took note of the fact that instructors apparently now get a huge toolset. I've seen editors with less than 50 edits who have the account creator, autopatrolled user, epinstructor, filemover, IP block exemption, reviewer, rollbacker
rights. Taking out the ones that have an obvious use in course instruction (ACC, EPI) leaves them with these rights unexplained (in my mind):
Autopatrolled
Filemover
IP block exemption
Reviewer
Rollback
In talking to another editor, I can see a reason for the IP block in case of any blocks put on that institution during the course, which would affect the instructor's ability to teach, and the students as well. However, I'm still left wondering why all of these rights are given to a fairly new editor. In particular, I can't see any reason for a new user whose main purpose is instructing a class on editing to need filemover
, reviewer
, and autopatrolled
. Those are (almost) never given to new users, certainly never to users with 48 edits. Unless the instructor can provide a use for those rights that can't be taken care of with {{
rename media}}, or waiting for a new article/edit to be reviewed, then I don't think they should have those rights. It's not that I don't trust the instructor, just giving all of those rights to someone before seeing their editing habits is very concerning to me. I apologize if this is in the wrong spot, if it is I give anyone permission to move it to a better area. Thanks,
gwickwire
talk
edits
02:09, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
As someone who is/was active in several of these rights, I would like to express my opinion:
Autopatrolled
- "Autopatrol is given so that when profs create a page like
this, it wouldn't flood the
new page patrol and upsetting those patrollers." - Patrollers rarely patrol the Wikipedia namespace and you will see why by looking at
Special:NewPages, there are dozens of unpatrolled AfDs, SPIs,
FACs and the list goes on. Does that mean we give Autopatrolled
to people who create dozens of AfDs?Filemover
- As someone who is active in moving files here and on Commons, I find tons of controversial {{
rename media}} requests. How do we know that these instructors are going to make appropriate moves, do they even know the relevant policies?Reviewer
- As noted by Fluffernutter "Autopatrolled and reviewer, in particular, strike me as a Very Bad Idea to give to participants who maybe don't know a whole lot about what a valid article looks like, how to write using our MOS, or how to use our copyright or BLP policies."I am not going to comment on rollback, IP block exemption or account creator as they can be extremely useful to instructors if used correctly. As I stated before, "do they even know the relevant policies?" - We should atleast be dropping links and/or templates to assist instructors in using their tools correctly. :) -- Cheers, Ril ey 04:57, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
I also am very concerned about this situation. It seems to me that there is a valid justification for IP block exemption. And that's the only one. Even rollbacker otherwise requires an administrator to provide the tool, hopefully only after actually checking the editor's demonstrated ability to use it. It seems to me that the community has consensus standards for most of these rights, and they shouldn't be given out to new editors simply because they are instructors without clear evidence of community consent to modifying those standards. After all, this noticeboard has had numerous instances of editors pointing out serious failures of some instructors to adhere to Wikipedia's editing norms, so empirically there is no valid reason to presume that instructors automatically qualify for the permissions. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 22:55, 15 January 2013 (UTC)
One other point to be made here is that we're not talking about a large set of editors. Even if the education program expands considerably we're talking about maybe a dozen or so concurrent users in a day. We've nearly racked up a dozen sysops who were found to have been sockpuppets of banned users, and we survived that. :) Protonk ( talk) 15:29, 18 January 2013 (UTC)
If I'm following all of this discussion correctly, I would support Account Creator rights for professors. I'd strongly prefer to assign IP Block Exempt status only on an as-needed and temporary basis so I hope this right is removed after the students and professors finish a course unless there is some need for them to keep IPBE. I strongly oppose automatically granting autopatrol, filemover, reviewer, and rollback to professors, students, and/or ambassadors, and I think any change to the status quo for how these rights are assigned should go through a community RFC. I'll add that I don't remember any discussion of these user rights being a part of the RFC about whether the education extension should be implemented, and I would have opposed the education extension if I had known that these rights changes were included as a part of that package. There was no mention that I can see of these rights changes at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Education Program extension. I can see some value in the extension but not in the rights changes. Pardon me for being upset but I dislike being surprised in this way. -- Pine ✉ 07:10, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
To clarify a bit, the only user rights that are connected with the extension are the course instructor, campus volunteer, online volunteer, and course coordinator rights, and each of these has effects that are limited to the extension features. If we do decide that, for example, everyone with the course instructor right should also be given ACC access, that would be an easy change to make. But as it is, those extension rights are independent of the additional rights being discussed here.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 13:07, 21 January 2013 (UTC)
John Chetro Szivos
Fitchburg State University
In this course, students examine origins, nature, and consequences of communication in a variety of subfields. This course reviews the roles of theory in comprehension of communication practices. Furthermore, it introduces the link between communication theory and the methodologies of communication research, including both qualitative and quantitative approaches, with an emphasis on interpretive approaches that are relevant to organizational settings. This is a graduate course in the Master's program in Applied Communication
I am hoping they will be able to select a communication theory or issue and prepare an edit an entry
20
January 19 - May 15 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.3.118.249 ( talk) 01:04, 16 January 2013 (UTC)
First off, is this the right place to ask general questions about how to use the education extension?
On my course page, I see that it says there is currently one student enrolled. But I don't see any quick link to the list of students for just this course. There's a link to the complete list of students in the whole program, but then I'd have to search that list manually for just the students in my course. What am I missing?
Klortho ( talk) 04:49, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
DGG suggested to me recently that it might be helpful to clarify some points that keep coming up, related to what the community can expect from education program participants. He and I worked on a draft and I sent it to the working group participants to get their take on it, since that's a group of editors and educators who have been involved with the EP for a while. Here's what emerged, slightly edited from the original draft.
I would like to see the new US/Canada EP organization, if the WMF creates it, adopt some language like this; and I think it would be helpful if the global EP made a similar statement of intent. I've used "EP" as shorthand for the new organization, whatever its name turns out to be.
Any comments or improvements to the wording? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:45, 7 January 2013 (UTC)
On expedited reviews: I don't think everyone waiting for their volunteer work to be reviewed for GA, for example, would appreciate students getting ahead of them in line. The opinions of those who are waiting for a GA review should be prioritized, when considering this question, in my opinion. I know that if I were to have a student get priority over me for a GA review, I wouldn't like it. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:01, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
Amy E. Hughes
CUNY, Brooklyn College
For the first time, I am incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into a course that I am teaching because I would like to give students the option of completing a Wikipedia project in lieu of the customary research paper. The course is "Theater History from 1642" and it is the second half of a two-semester survey of Western theater history. We will explore theater practice and drama from the Restoration to postmodernism, examining scripts, theory, audiences, theater architecture, scenic and costume design, and acting styles in light of the social and cultural conditions that influence theatrical literature and performance. It is a required course for many MA and MFA students studying theater in my department. All students must complete a significant research project (35% of grade), either 1) an academic research paper addressing a significant and original research problem, following the conventions associated with a conference paper; or 2) a Wikipedia project, in which students will create or substantially edit one or more pages on Wikipedia about notable individuals, historical periods, and/or aesthetic movements in theater history, citing at least ten secondary sources.
I am modeling this assignment on the 12-week syllabus recommended by Wikipedia. Students will have work due every week throughout the semester. First, they will learn how to set up a user account, post on a Talk page, "claim" the articles they want to work on by posting on the Wikipedia page for this course, and set up their sandbox. Then, students will post their preliminary bibliography in their sandbox for my review. Next, they will complete a needs assessment and a writing plan, which will be peer-reviewed by a classmate. After the NA and WP are approved by me, they will start making improvements to the article they've selected. During week 9, every student will complete at least one peer review of the work done to date by posting comments on the article's Talk page. Students will continue working on the articles until the twelfth week, at which point they will submit to me a reflective paper describing their experience in this project, along with a "work journal" logging the hours and tasks completed each week. After completing this project, I believe my students 1) will have increased their knowledge about several topics in theater history, 2) be better able to assess and critically read information posted on the Internet, 3) be more familiar with the social/editorial conventions, formatting, and programming associated with wikis generally and Wikipedia specifically, 4) be a better writers—the transparency and flexibility of wiki technology will allow them to see the strengths and weaknesses in their writing, hone their skills as researchers and editors, and give and receive help from other members of the Wikipedia community.
15-17 students
January 30 to May 22, 2013
Amy E Hughes ( talk) 14:17, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
There has been a lot of feedback being generated at Wikipedia:Training/For students/Training feedback. Is anyone welcome to address these comments by editing Wikipedia:Training/For students, for example? And how would one go about editing the training, exactly? Biosthmors ( talk) 18:42, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
In regards to Wikipedia:Education Working Group/Proposal:
Thanks. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:26, 8 January 2013 (UTC)
I see there is an upcoming meeting on January 28th ( Wikipedia:Education Board/Meetings/2013/1). Can the community please get an update? About the points raised above, for example? Biosthmors ( talk) 18:46, 24 January 2013 (UTC)
I'm thinking the lists at Wikipedia:Online_Ambassadors/Mentors and Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Campus_Ambassadors are likely to contain people who are no longer doing anything with student editors or professors. (I looked at just one person's contributions and I didn't see any recent activity.) Maybe we should contact them all using EdwardsBot and email to ask that they list at WP:AFSE, if they want to be active Wikipedia editors. If people aren't active editors then I don't think they should be on the list at that article. I think we should also abandon the profiles and maintain simple lists. User pages serve the profile purpose. One can always add a footnote to the article to explain the subjects one is willing and not willing to be an ambassador for. Biosthmors ( talk) 14:58, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
Could we organize Special:CampusAmbassadors in a regional (possibly map) way, or at least present location details, so people can scroll through and see if anyone is possibly available in their area? Biosthmors ( talk) 02:01, 25 January 2013 (UTC)
I'll be working closely with a number of courses at UC Berkeley next semester. I've been discussing the concerns that have arisen in past education program classes with the instructors that I will be working with, including concerns about plagiarism. All of the instructors that I will be working with feel very strongly that plagiarism is not acceptable, and both myself and the instructors will be actively monitoring student contributions for plagiarism (and if any cases of obvious intentional plagiarism are uncovered, they will be dealt with in a strong manner.
One of the instructors I will be working with brought something to my attention that I was previously unaware of - apparently UC Berkeley has access to Turnitin in a fashion that is easy to use, has no additional marginal cost, and in a way that could be applied to student's contributions to Wikipedia. If used in this class, it would be used in a fashion that did not submit to Turnitin pre-existing text on Wikipedia - only the student's direct additions would be scanned. Students would at be aware of what this involved. I know that there is controversy over the fact that Turnitin retains papers submitted to it in its database, but since the content would be submitted to Wikipedia under a CC license anyway, this wouldn't be releasing any additional rights over the content as far as I know.
I know that a lot of people have very strong feelings about Turnitin. I, bluntly, don't know enough about the background to the controversy surrounding Turnitin to know whether or not using the service in this way would be a good idea, or in line with our values. I honestly didn't even know UCB had access to Turnitin until today. Certainly, it would aid in ensuring that assignments coming out of this class weren't plagiaristic - both by its deterrent effect and potentially catching people directly. I don't feel like I'm educated enough about the issues surrounding the use of Turnitin to advise the instructor about whether the positives of using Turnitin in this way outweigh the negatives of doing so, so I figured I would post this here to solicit input.
Anyone have any strong thoughts one way or the other? Thanks, Kevin Gorman ( talk) 08:28, 19 January 2013 (UTC)
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Maria Schmeeckle
Illinois State University
Sociology 318: Children in Global Perspective. This is an upper division undergraduate elective. I am trying to participate in the American Sociological Association Wikipedia Initiative. This is one of 3 service learning options for my students. We have a campus ambassador who will orient the students: Mayuko Nakamura.
They will attempt to improve articles related to children, or add quality references.
Probably 10-15.
January 15-May 2, 2013. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Maria Schmeeckle ( talk • contribs) 03:52, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
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Melissa Parade (TA)
Brett R. Fajen (Instructor)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Perception and Action This course is an advanced undergraduate/graduate level introduction to the topic of perception and action. It is designed to be of interest to students in cognitive science and related fields who want to better understand how humans and other animals interact with the world. Using real-world examples from both routine, everyday tasks and highly practiced skills, we will (1) explore different theoretical approaches (e.g., information processing, computational, neural, embodied cognition, dynamical systems, and ecological), (2) discuss classic and current research on perception, motor control, and perceptual-motor learning, (3) learn about mathematical and computational tools used to build models and analyze data, and (4) consider some applications, including training, rehabilitation, human-machine interaction, and robotics.
Student will work in groups to create a new Wikipedia article (or substantially revise an existing article that is in need of improvement) on a topic related to the material covered in this course. This assignment will require you to choose an appropriate topic, conduct a literature search, synthesize current knowledge on your topic into a clearly written article, and respond to feedback about your article from classmates, the instructor, and other Wikipedia users.
10-15 students
January 24 to (approx.) May 15, 2013
Will I be able to add my adviser as a co-instructor on this course once the page has been created? -- Melissa Parade ( talk) 16:10, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
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Jackson Peebles
Western Michigan University
SPPA 2000 - Human Communication Disorders, Department of Speech Pathology & Audiology (Undergraduate)
Students will be assigned several pages to review very thoroughly, verifying sources, citations, and adding the latest evidence-based research while formatting properly. The first several articles will be very thoroughly reviewed by professors, graduate students, and (not or) research assistants.
This program will be piloted by a single honors research assistant overseen by myself (another undergraduate honors research assistant), a graduate assistant, a masters-level clinician, and three doctoral-level associate professors. If it is successful, the professors will likely remain the same or incorporate the chair/department, two other graduate students can be added, and standard honors undergraduate students will be assigned homework that entails proper editing of Wikipedia.
SPPA 2000 is offered in both in the Fall and Winter semesters (Sept-April) as well as occasionally during the summer semesters. -- Jackson Peebles ( talk) 08:16, 29 January 2013 (UTC)
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Darcie Vandegrift
Carrie Dunham-LaGree
Drake University
Working with my campus ambassador, I am creating a Wikipedia assignment for the first time using a version of the 12-week syllabus timeline over fifteen weeks. I want students to develop information literacy as well as to gain deeper understanding of youth studies. For the course “Global Youth Studies,” our class will read a textbook and scholarly articles to understand the social conditions of young adults in a variety of countries around topics including employment, education, popular culture, civic engagement, and health. The entries will focus on how youth experience particular social conditions due to age, historical time period, and social inequality. I will ask that they either edit three sections of an essay or create a new entry. Their work will be focused on the social conditions of youth in a particular country (Venezuelan youth) or comparative essay about youth conditions across the world (e.g., “sexual violence in teen relationships”).
Students will have work due throughout the semester. They will set up an account and complete the online orientation. In week two, they will bring a draft of a proposed topic and complete an in-lab orientation with our campus ambassador. Here they will learn to use a talk page and evaluate article quality. In week three, they will discuss Wikipedia community etiquette and standards, and evaluate an existing Wikipedia article. Week four will include editing an existing article with one-two sentences. In week six, they will turn in a draft proposal that includes proposed articles to include in the topic area. We will also review "sandboxes" and how to use them. In week seven, they will return to the library for further orientation on locating materials and will turn in revised materials. In week eight, they will turn in a short summary version of the article or proposed improvements.In week nine, they will move their drafts to the sandbox and begin editing there with a classmate's help. In week eleven (two weeks), they will receive feedback on their article, and revise it to move out of the sandbox in week ten. They will continue this feedback process in week twelve. In week thirteen they will respond to feedback. They will add final touches and present in weeks fourteen and fifteen.
19
January 30 to May 15, 2013
— Preceding comment added by Prof.Vandegrift ( talk • contribs) 20:18, 30 January 2013 Prof.Vandegrift ( talk) 20:47, 30 January 2013 (UTC)(UTC)
Special:Log/course does not show diffs, unless I'm missing something. This takes the functionality of a normal Wikipedia course page in Wikipedia or User space in a backwards technological direction. Does anyone find this to be desirable? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:24, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
Other problems I perceive with the extension is the inability to edit sections and the small edit window. Biosthmors ( talk) 21:42, 28 January 2013 (UTC)
I note that the working group proposal is being actively edited. I'm not sure why, as it was initially described as a copy of what had already been submitted to the WMF. Anyhow, it seems to have become a work in progress again. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 05:25, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
Hi. Template:Welcome student is not very welcoming, and it's rarely used when we don't know if they are working as part of a class, yet it says "It appears you are participating in a class project." (emphasis mine) Can we fix this? We used to have an pretty awesome welcome template; what happened to that? Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 18:23, 30 January 2013 (UTC)
Are there things listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Online_Ambassadors and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Campus_Ambassadors that should be redirected, or might the pages themselves be turned into redirects? Biosthmors ( talk) 20:11, 1 February 2013 (UTC)
Any ideas why Template:Course assignment/doc was created the way it was? Seems odd. Biosthmors ( talk) 07:43, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Sherry Seston
Alverno College
Virology BI302. This is a junior level undergraduate class covering the history and molecular biology of viruses.
I plan to follow the 12-week syllabus provided by the education program to have students improve and create articles related to virology. Topics may range from articles on a specific virus or viral disease, to the history of virology, biographies of virologists, and biotechnology.
13 students are currently enrolled (1 auditing). I estimate about 11 will complete the full wikipedia project.
Jan 23, 2013 to May 17, 2013 S L Seston ( talk) 20:03, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
User:Prof.Vandegrift gave Article Feedback at Feedback on Help:Education Program extension/Instructors of "How can I add a section to my course page?". Perhaps someone with more experience with the structure of the course offering system could help them out? Thanks, Shearonink ( talk) 20:08, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
Dr Jenny Chamarette DrJennyCee ( talk) 16:10, 7 February 2013 (UTC)
Film Studies Department, Queen Mary, University of London
Research Methods (Film)
Research Methods (Film) is a single-semester module (12 weeks) focusing on developing the research skills that second year undergraduate students of Film will need to succeed in their third and final year of study, and in the world of work. In the first part of the module, students work in small groups to adopt and edit a Wikipedia page on a particular film; in the second part of the module they will work individually on a proposal for a possible dissertation/research project.
The module involves elements of formal teaching, group-led and independent study, weekly reading and preparation, and peer review; and a range of assessments, including the editing of a Wikipedia page, group and individual presentations, and written assignments. It is strongly recommended that students planning to take on research projects in their third and final year, also take this module.
In the first half of the module, students form small groups, and then 'adopt' a Wikipedia entry on a single film. Students have been encouraged to 'adopt' entries which are currently classified as 'stub' or 'start' class, in order to make editing more satisfying and so that their contributions are clearer. Student user names and groups are posted on my talk page. Once students have adopted their wikipedia entry, they evaluate the structure, content, presentation and referencing of the entry, and give a short presentation on their findings in order to develop important source evaluation skills to their work on- and off-line.
After their first presentations, the student groups then work together to edit their chosen wikipedia pages, in order to make improvements to the scholarly quality of the entry. All students have undertaken the student training online, and they have received lectures from me off-line about Wikipedia practices and codes of conduct. Their final edits are then submitted to me for assessment: they have a word limit of 500 words from each group, on each entry.
I am currently working with The Interior, and Sage Ross (WMF), who are both helping me to develop the course. I have also pointed students towards the WikiProject Film pages, though I'm not yet working with the project directly.
6 weeks working with Wikipedia
Assignment 1 (offline): week 3
This assignment comprises a group exercise, where you will identify, evaluate and present a review of a Wikipedia page for a particular film that you would like to contribute to as a group.
This page must be an existing Wikipedia page, and must describe a single film, which is commercially available on DVD and with English subtitles. You will need to discuss and agree your page selection with the course convenor, who may reject your proposal if the page has been too extensively edited already. You are therefore advised to select a page for a film which has been less substantially written about on Wikipedia, but which has sufficient scholarly resources written in English, in order to build a better quality page.
Your group will then ‘adopt’ the page, and conduct a review and evaluation of the quality of the page as a scholarly resource, which will be presented as a group during the workshop in week 3.
Assignment 2 (online): week 6
This exercise builds on Assignment 1. Having successfully completed a review and evaluation of your selected Wikipedia page, your group will contribute 500 words of editing to the page’s content.
This can include, for example: rewriting page content, the insertion of supporting documentation and citations of a higher level of scholarly quality, the re-organisation of material, and the addition of sections or subsections to the page.
Bear in mind that, as you edit, other people will be able to see your work. These individuals will often be from outside the academic community, and will make contributions according to their own interests. If they don’t believe your edits to be correct or appropriate, they may also edit or change them, or revert them to their original content.
You will therefore need to keep a careful record of your changes, and of the overall word count for your changes. You can usefully do this on the page history section of the Wikipedia page, but it is important to keep your own record of your activity and total word count. Should other users edit your work, you may not include your own re-edits to the page content in the word count.
There are currently 20 students in the class.
Monday 7 January - Thursday 28 March (though wikipedia projects will be completed by Friday 15 February) 2013
Next cohort to run from September-December 2013, and annually thereafter
As a part of the 11th grade computer science curriculum regarding Internet research, website evaluation/credibility and citing sources, the 11th grade students at the Abaarso Tech School of Science and Technology located in Abaarso, Somaliland will be learning how to contribute and edit Wikipedia. These students are the amongst the brightest in the autonomous, unrecognized region of Somalia known as Somaliland. They have been through intensive training in the past term as well as the first half of this term on citing sources online, effective Internet research and evaluating website credibility. Wikipedia fits perfectly into the class syllabub as it highlights all of the above. Having the students contribute to Wikipedia would overall help improve their online research ,writing and critical thinking skills.
Dhastingsabaarsotech ( talk) 19:28, 6 February 2013 (UTC)Dan Hastings
Support Course Instructor request. This sounds like a good plan to me, I think should grant this and move forward. As an Online Ambassador, I'd be happy to help the students if need be. •
Jesse V.
(talk)
17:48, 8 February 2013 (UTC)
I have been in talks with some faculty at OHSU School of Medicine for a few months now about a wiki editing pilot project. I just spoke with the students (a total of 8, so it should be quite manageable) about editing the ins and outs of editing wikipedia a bit. It is part of a course on pharmacology, and the "prompt" they were given had something to do with methamphetamine, or perhaps other sympathomimetics or indications for same. And FWIW, I have also spoken a bit with Lane Rasberry and Doc James about this in the past, it's just now getting going.
I just wanted to drop everyone (
WP:USEP
WP:ENB,
WP:MED,
WP:PHARM) a note who might be interacting with some of these folks over the next month or two (the course runs until April 10). I gave them a rundown on some of the common mistakes students make as part of these projects, e.g. assuming that one's edits have to stay up in order for them to be useful as a grade (which I've seen a number of times). I am confident they will be able to avoid most of these common pitfalls.
As it stands it appears that they will be looking for either stubs to build out that are related to the clinical vignette that is their initial prompt; they might instead/also work on rewriting part of an article that is jargon-laden or otherwise confusing to adhere more closely to WP:MEDMOS. The consensus was that they would try and sandbox everything before putting it in an actual article.
Most of them, as of right now, do not have WP accounts, but should be making them soon. If you see them around, say Hi!
-- UseTheCommandLine ( talk) 00:54, 9 February 2013 (UTC) --- Updated links UseTheCommandLine ( talk) 01:11, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
When I set up the {{ course page wizard}} for adding default structure to the extension course pages, I added a section with instructions for adding a talk page banner noting that an article is being edited for an assignment in a course: {{ course assignment}}. It looks like this:
This article was the subject of an educational assignment. Further details were available on the "Education Program:Example University/Example Course (2013 Q1)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki. |
I simplified it from {{ educational assignment}}, which takes more parameters but often got used incorrectly. I think it's important to have banner code that can simply be copied and pasted, rather than code that has to be adjust by the student or customized for each class (with starting and ending dates, for example). Per comments from Geniac and Biosthmors, I wanted to ask for more input on what a talk page banner like this should do. Is changing tense after the assignment ends important ("...article is vs. was the subject...")? (We could include an additional parameter for term into the template, and then just update the wizard every few months for new terms, but that such an update is a likely point of failure. Or we could try more complex logic for automatically determining an end date several months forward from when the course page gets set up.)
Is there anything else a standard talk page banner should include, such as links to particular pages? Given the clutter of typical talk pages, my first instinct is to keep it as simple as possible, but I could see a case for adding a link to this noticeboard, or links to the userpage of the instructor and/or ambassadors and/or the student who added the template. Biosthmors suggests including the Wikipedia:Assignments for student editors essay.
Thoughts?-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:07, 4 February 2013 (UTC)
Assuming a normal deployment, a bunch of bug fixes as well as some significant changes to the EducationProgram extension are about to go live. The most noticeable is that the main page contents (until now, "Description") will move to the top of the page, with the Summary box and Students table beneath. This should make course pages feel a bit more familiar and wiki-like. If you notice any new bugs, please let me know. (We know of one regression, already fixed but not yet deployed, related to the ambassador profile pages.)-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 19:29, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Hi all. A note was left on my talk page about a project at BC which I don't think is coordinated with you all (not that it needs to be, of course). A course page is found here, User:Hakeleh/BI432 Spring 2013. I hope I can leave this all in your hands, to maybe drop a line to the instructor (and see also User:Pleusm). Thanks, Drmies ( talk) 03:45, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Is there a way that one could hide their own edits at Special:MyCourses? Right now, it's rather useless...as anything interesting is covered up by my boatload of edits. — Theopolisme ( talk) 21:02, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
Each of my students have informed me that they tried to add their article to the course page but were unable to do so. By the time I received their message, the article had been successfully added to the page. If this delay is inherent in the way the page is set up and is not a bug, it would be helpful to add a statement to let students know. Also, I am planning multiple rounds of edits with different students editing some articles as a group effort and then switching to edit different articles later in the semester. The grid may be too rigid for my class, but I'm still thinking about what will work best. Thanks for all the support! Biolprof ( talk) 19:04, 9 February 2013 (UTC)
University of Hull
Interaction, Experience & Engagement. This is for second year undergraduate students on the following degrees: BA (Hons) Digital Arts, BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media, and BA (Hons) Digital Media Studies within the School of Arts & New Media. Wikipedia is being used as a platform for exploring information about Machinima and related uses of computer animation. The course tutor has worked with several groups of similar undergraduate students at this institution over the past 2-3 years; this work was most recently presented at the EduWiki conference in September 2012 at the University of Leicester (UK).
The students are being assigned specific articles related to the subject (for the most part existing articles) and adding or fixing information within Wikipedia guidelines. See this page for further details. Within the same class, they will eventually also go on to make their own Machinima full of useful information gathered from exploring the articles about the subject on Wikipedia through interactive engagement.
20
1-28 February 2013 (Yes, the course has already started...I discovered this new arrangement rather late in the day, but I'm keen to embrace it sooner rather than later. -- ToniSant ( talk) 12:04, 10 February 2013 (UTC))
This tutorial video gives instructions for creating a "sandbox" page, with a lower-case "s", but {{ WAP student}} links to "Sandbox" with a capital "S". They are not the same page, as you know, and this has caused some confusion among our students. Klortho ( talk) 14:20, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
/sandbox
instead of /Sandbox
.
Yunshui
雲
水
14:30, 13 February 2013 (UTC)
Hello there. Many apologies if this is the wrong place to post this question. I'm finding the course page for my course incredibly useful, both as a way of gathering information all in one place for students, and as a means of keeping an eye on how students are progressing with their assignments. I was wondering though, whether there is a feature within the course page that might allow me to post the same message to all of the users enrolled on the course? If not, I have methods of contacting student groups outside wikipedia (of course!), but it might be helpful if I post my responses directly to them while they are working on their editing from within Wikipedia. I'd be very grateful for any thoughts - it's not urgent, but could perhaps be useful for other course instructors too. Thanks and warm wishes. DrJennyCee ( talk) 16:20, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
I've just posted a proposal for an IEG on metawiki that would involve a few different kinds of focused outreach to academics in an effort to improve ENWP's coverage of topics that lay at the intersection of women and philosophy. If it's approved, I would be conducting the project along with Alex Madva and Katie Gasdaglis. I'm hopeful that if approved and carried out, it would go a long way towards addressing Wikipedia's under-representation of our targeted content, and would create a scalable model of educational outreach to underrepresented disciplines that can be used in other fields. A lot more details are available on the meta page. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 02:18, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
University of Hull
Psychology of Internet Behaviour. This is for final year undergraduate students on the following degrees: BSc Web Design and Developemnt, BA (Hons) Digital Arts, BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media, and BA (Hons) Digital Media Studies within the School of Arts & New Media. In the past both ToniSant and I have used the wiki platform to introduce students to examples of internet behaviour, observed through participation in the wiki context.
Like ToniSant's module above, the students are being assigned specific articles related to the subject (for the most part existing articles) and adding or fixing information within Wikipedia guidelines. The course ran in a similar vein last year and the staff involved (including me) plan to do something broadly similar this time around. See this page for further details.
approx 30
Jan 28-May 8 2013 (with practical work beginning mid Feb)
In my volunteer capacity, I've posted a draft Individual Engagement Grant proposal on Meta: meta:Grants:IEG/Wikipedia Massive Open Online Courses. If you're interested in the idea of a Wikipedia course on one of the new MOOC systems like Coursera or edX, please take a look and give feedback.-- ragesoss ( talk) 02:59, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
A new student group will edit pages on my watchlist, and they have started to present their plans. And everyday I find myself pleading to students (and their teacher) to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. Could you please help me make my text better so it gets really clear for the students why, and so I (and other editors) can just copy and glue it? This is what I wrote last time (and I am not very happy with this text):
All sources you mention are WP:primary sources, that is, results of single studies. In order to know if the results of these studies really represent encyclopedic information, you need to know if the results have been peer-reviewed and replicated. For that, you need WP:secondary sources, such as reviews (however, the introduction of a primary source can be a review-like, when the authors discuss numerous results of earlier studies). So please, reconsider your choice of journals and use secondary sources instead!
Thank you! Lova Falk talk 08:55, 17 February 2013 (UTC)
Very good point to omit the peer-reviewed part. Here comes the new text:
All sources you mention are WP:primary sources, that is, results of single studies. However, Wikipedia is not an academic paper or essay! Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources (for instance, reviews) and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources (such as professional or advanced academic textbooks -i.e. not undergraduate introductory textbooks). WP:MEDRS describes how to identify reliable sources for medical information, which is a good guideline for many psychology articles as well. So please, reconsider your choice of journals and use secondary sources instead!
Please comment! Lova Falk talk 10:13, 19 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you Colin and Tryptofish for your help! Unfortunately, I have already had several occasions today for pasting this text (sometimes with minor adjustments). Lova Falk talk 19:07, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
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Eric Phetteplace
Chesapeake College
"The Nature of Knowledge" is Chesapeake College's interdisciplinary capstone course that seeks to look at how different disciplines approach problem-solving. It is for sophomore students who have completed most of the other coursework for a two-year degree or in preparation of transferring to a 4-year institution. Our specific topic involves how knowledge changes when it becomes digitized and networked. As such, we're using Wikipedia as an example both of open and networked content. We're reading Good Faith Collaboration as a textbook. We will be focusing on editing pages related to our local area, the Eastern Shore of Maryland, including the page for Chesapeake College itself.
Our students will be editing Wikipedia articles related to Eastern Shore of Maryland topics, including Chesapeake College and possibly Wye Mills, MD. We will allow students to suggest articles to work on but will approve them based on how capable we think the students are of contributing; a high quality article is tougher to add to, so we will be more likely to approve shorter or lower quality ones. We will focus on research, finding sources, adding citations, and expanding content. Specifically, most of the pages we're targeting are stubs or poorly written, so we'll be lengthening low-quality articles and hopefully providing more sources. We are not necessarily aiming for Feature Article quality. We want to encourage students to act as part of the Wikipedia community so we will ask them to participate in Talk Page discussions, too.
We have about 20 students.
Class began January 22nd and ends May 13th, 2013. Our students are just starting to practice editing Wikipedia now and most editing won't happen until the last month of class.
-- Phette23 ( talk) 23:14, 28 February 2013 (UTC)
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Lynn Marie Hamilton, Ph.D.
University of Pikeville
Composition 11--a first-year, undergraduate course in academic writing that emphasizes research. The Wikipedia assignment will require students to contribute 1000 words to Wikipedia, whether in the form of a new article or development of a stub article. At GSU, Tony Yadro was my campus ambassador, but I would like to be assigned two or more on-line ambassadors.
The Wikipedia assignment will require students to contribute 1000 words to Wikipedia, whether in the form of a new article or development of a stub article. Because this is a writing course, students will be encouraged to pick a topic that represents a specific area of their interest. The writing they do must be carefully researched and documented (of course), attentive to the demands of the audience which could also be called compliance with Wikipedia policies, and compliant with the Wikipedia interface. Because one of the biggest challenges of this assignment has been, in my experience, finding the right topic, some time will be devoted to helping students find a topic that they are interested in and which also has sufficient research available and meets Wikipedia guidelines.
60
The class started in January and goes to May 20.
-- Georgiasouthernlynn ( talk) 15:24, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Hey Lynn! I have a question. If, for example, your class finds a 2000 word article that contains poorly written, unsourced, and unencylopedic prose, would you please also allow your students to completely rewrite the article with brand new prose, giving readers a well-sourced, fresh, and encyclopedic entry of 1000 words? Your students can do much more than simply build on top of what already exists. They can also copy edit, remove unnecessary text, and rewrite content to improve the encyclopedia. As you can see at Wikipedia:Backlog#Status, there are many articles already tagged for improvement! I'll see if I can help you find articles for your assignment. Would you like that kind of assistance? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:00, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Hello Biosthmors,
The work you describe sounds like it would be a good project. Could you link me to about twenty articles that are not too specialized that students could edit as you suggest? And, if possible, it would be really helpful if they could be linked to my talk page. I find it difficult to recover and work with threads of conversation like this one. For instance, I just tried to give you my email, and it got blocked.-- Georgiasouthernlynn ( talk) 15:29, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
The page Education Program:Davidson College/Cognitive Psychology (2013 Q1) doesn't have either Edit or View Source tabs and the history doesn't show the diffs. Therefore if the prof or their ambassador edit the page, I can't see what or when they made the change. This can be a problem if I comment on the course details (such as assignments being set the students) and then later I look and the text has changed. I can't see when or how it changed. Why do these pages work this way. I can understand protecting them in some way but there seems no good reason to hide the source or diffs -- it doesn't help transparency. Colin° Talk 12:41, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I am under the impression that our educational material (such as Wikipedia:Training/For students/Choosing articles 3) emphasizes quantity of new prose to the detriment of quality improvement (in terms of the opportunity cost). Quality could be improved by reducing word count through copy-editing and changing prose by updating sources when needed. For example, one of my best contributions last year was to review malaria (see Talk:Malaria/GA2). As you can see under the collapsed section "some addressed comments", there was a lot we did to improve the article. While it stayed a "B-Class" before and after (I was still finding problems with WP:V even at the end of the review), I think it went from a low-quality B-Class article to a high-quality B-Class article. Shouldn't students and professors be encouraged to engage on the talk pages of articles like this to improve important subjects? Along those lines, I am wary of any assignment that asks students to create new articles, unless they have been agreed upon by knowledgeable Wikipedians. Again, I feel this is a quantity over quality incentive we have currently baked into the system for ourselves. Thoughts? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:05, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
New user Psyc-mmills ( talk · contribs) has started producing articles labelled:
"NOTE: This is a stub, and it will be expanded as a university class project until May 10, 2013 under the auspices of the Association for Psychological Science Wikipedia Initiative."
I am not sure whether this is the instructor or just the first student out of the starting gate. I and others have given advice on the user talk page, including pointing to WP:SUP, but I don't know what should be done to plug this class into your new system. JohnCD ( talk) 21:20, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
There are two open Online Ambassador applications at Wikipedia talk:Online Ambassadors that could use some input (for TucsonDavid and Nerdfighter). I think it would make sense to start having those applications posted here (like we've been doing with instructor rights requests), in order to further consolidate the education sprawl and make sure applicants get feedback.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:09, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Why are there no diffs when editors edit course pages? Can we add this to the software? Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:51, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
After nominating Rational and Natural Theories of Management for deletion for being an essay, I decided to dig into the edit history and started to suspect sockpuppetry, as different users would insert large chunks of text into the vaguely defined. More searches led me to Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Macy's Management Practicses and Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Procter & Gamble Management Practices, and I started to get the 'Management' theme. Other articles of interest included IDEO and Inequality in the workplace. Through the works cited and a stray IP address, I started to connect the edits to Harvard University. Finally, I discovered this edit with the summary "Lenovo Management Practices for SOC 25 Assignment 2". Sociology 25: Sociology of Organizations is an introductory course taught by Frank Dobbin last Fall, although it doesn't look like he's teaching the course this semester. FallingGravity ( talk) 09:45, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
Welcome Lynn! (Whose assignment was archived here.) I have a question. If, for example, your class finds a 2000 word article that contains poorly written, unsourced, and unencylopedic prose, would you please also allow your students to completely rewrite the article with brand new prose, giving readers a well-sourced, fresh, and encyclopedic entry of 1000 words? Your students can do much more than simply build on top of what already exists. They can also copy edit, remove unnecessary text, and rewrite content to improve the encyclopedia. As you can see at Wikipedia:Backlog#Status, there are many articles already tagged for improvement! I'll see if I can help you find articles for your assignment. Would you like that kind of assistance? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:46, 4 March 2013 (UTC)
Several distinct users have been creating very similar articles about individual acts of Shakespeare plays, see e.g.:
Some suspect socking but based on the topics I think it's more likely this is a class assignment that we don't know anything about. I've messaged all the students asking them to inform their teacher that this assignment isn't appropriate and to contact me, but they've been nonresponsive so far. Dcoetzee 01:48, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
FYI, Sage has outlined a plan at Wikipedia talk:Training there to update the trainings, and there is a possibility the trainings will be translated. I would like to help with improving the trainings and education material also. Anyone else? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:29, 22 February 2013 (UTC)
See Education_Program:University_of_San_Francisco/Environmental_Law_(Spring_2013). Course description: "This is the second part of a two part course examining the basic legal setting for the protection and management of the environment. After learning the major federal statutes and constitutional principles of Environmental Law this course will explore species protection, toxic risk legislation, citizen actions, international law and emerging issues in the field. It discusses how environmental law is made and applied. The course also includes material on economic analysis, scientific and legal causation and expert testimony." Please feel free to just add yourself if interested using the "Become an Online Ambassador" button in the table at the bottom. Thanks! Dcoetzee 01:51, 6 March 2013 (UTC)
Hi, all!
Professor Lynn Hamilton is looking for an Online Ambassador for her Composition class. She has participated in the Education Program for a few semesters but is now at a new university (University of Pikeville) in Kentucky, where there are no trained Campus Ambassadors. She is going to have her students enroll on the Course Page as soon as the assignment starts, so perhaps an Online Ambassador particularly interested in writing (as this is a comp class and, I believe, the students can choose their article topic0 is available to support them. Please sign on if you are! Thanks, guys! JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 18:27, 8 March 2013 (UTC)
I applied, interviewed, and was accepted as a outreach:Regional Ambassadors/Current. I suppose someone (or me) should add myself to that list. (Is it otherwise updated, by the way?) From what Jami told me I think I'm more of an ambassador at large, though I am based in Atlanta if anything arises there. I do need the WP:Course coordinator right to grant rights to campus ambassadors, when that time comes. I'm currently a course campus volunteer and a course online volunteer. Thanks. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:24, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Just a little clarification... the user right referred to above is actually the Course coordinator right, which is not limited to Regional Ambassadors (although no one but Regional Ambassadors plus me and Jami have it right now, I think). If anyone else who isn't an admin (in which case, the coordinator right is superfluous) would like to help distribute the instructor right to users who request it (and do the same for new ambassadors / class volunteers), let's work out a procedure for requesting it. It could be as simple as posting a request on this page, and if there's consensus that the user is sufficiently clueful, that's it.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:25, 25 February 2013 (UTC)
Since we've started doing Online Ambassador applications here, might we also transition into doing at least part of a Campus Ambassador application here too? Biosthmors ( talk) 20:36, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
Some of you guys might want to check in on Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Theaterproject2013, which was filed against several users. I thought—and a couple checkusers agreed with me—that this is a class project and not socking. Maybe you could get in touch with the professor and steer them in the right direction? Thanks! Reaper Eternal ( talk) 12:02, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
My students in the global education program are not being allowed to create accounts. The problem appears to be that the entire university uses a single IP address. Who knew? We really, really cannot afford to create 55 accounts at the rate of only six per day--as I have been informed we will be required to do. That would set us hopelessly behind on the project timeline. Please help. My courses are duly registered with the global education program and everything. Georgiasouthernlynn ( talk) 18:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC)
Stuartyeates ( talk · contribs)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Hey guys. I've been away for a few months, so I'm not up-to-date on what's going on with the education program(s). But I just stumbled across Wikipedia:WikiProject Cricket and Englishness and I'm wondering if someone who is could take a look. It appears to be a page for a university class, but I'm pretty sure they shouldn't be located in WP space (and shouldn't be WikiProjects either)? Hope this is the right noticeboard, if not please do point me elsewhere. Cheers, Jenks24 ( talk) 16:54, 7 March 2013 (UTC)
This, currently featuring at WP:ANI is in fact a uni course project that has set itself up as a normal Wikiproject. Can someone talk to them? Johnbod ( talk) 15:35, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
With some reluctance, I have taken some of the issues raised here to ANI. Anyone is invited to comment there. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 20:17, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
Could the option for professors to add and remove students as reviewers be added to the course extension? Biosthmors ( talk) 19:25, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
This class is the second iteration of a previous The Rhetoric of Digital and Interactive Media Environments class. It's not an official Education Program class (although it does have Campus Ambassadors supporting it), but I wanted to highlight it as, from what I understand, it may have around 400 students.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 15:45, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
Why not encourage assignments where students open peer reviews on important topics? They could begin the peer review by saying,
I am opening this peer review for [[Course page|this assignment]], and my classmates will be commenting here. How well I address peer review comments, and how much I improve the article will be judged to help determine my grade. I would like to try to reach X-Class by the end of the review, thanks.
This way, I think we'd have a clear platform to encourage particpation, collaboration, and quality improvements where they are desired, instead of encouraging assignments that create unnecessary articles or dump large quantitites of poor-quality and unneccessary prose on obscure topics. Biosthmors ( talk) 03:31, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
I just copied the course page text of
Education Program:Saint Louis University/Signal Transduction (SP13) into a user subpage (
User:Biolprof/Signal Transduction Spring 2013) and then I replaced the content with {{User:Biolprof/Signal Transduction Spring 2013}}
so that I can edit the course page in a traditional larger format, see
WP:diffs, etc. Might have I created any new issues? And will the current fixes to the extension also show edit boxes inside the course page, so that I can select "edit" for individual sections, as I currently can at User:Biosthmors/Signal Transduction Spring 2013?
Biosthmors (
talk)
19:39, 5 March 2013 (UTC)
Is there any support for making this default for getting "Campus coordinator" rights? It seems redundant to add it after when people like myself can give a user the rights, but then need to find an administrator to add this right, and if possible, I was wondering if we could make this a right for them by default. I know there is the risk for abuse for this, but it is so small we would easily be able to monitor this. Kevin Rutherford ( talk) 20:37, 22 March 2013 (UTC)
This is just an FYI that I've marked the Education Working Group proposal as "historical." This is for three reasons: 1) Nobody from the working group has been editing it (and most never did), and there has been little to no response to comments on the talk page; 2) it's purpose was always unclear, and has only become more so; 3) it seems that the working group doesn't even exist any more, now that a subset of its members are calling themselves the "Education Board."
I'm not sure what venue there should be for community discussion of the Education Board's activity, which seems to continue from what one can gather. The lack of transparency and/or accountability is quite astounding. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 21:33, 23 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm going to try to be a bit more responsive on-wiki, but I am really busy in real life, so please feel free to poke me at my talk page or via email if I seem to be ignoring a discussion. I don't have a whole lot to add to the note Biosthmors linked to just yet -- we are still working on the tedious administrivia of starting up a 501(c)(3). If there are any specific questions, please post them here and I promise to respond as quickly as I have time for. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:10, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for citing those The Interior! To me, the following bullet point strikes me as problematic.
The organization will strive to sustain the successes of the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program at educational institutions in the United States and Canada. Members will recruit to expand the program and provide all volunteers, instructors, and editors with necessary resources. The organization and its members will strive to encourage greater use and understanding of Wikipedia at educational institutions. [27]
I think the words successes, expand, and greater use unfortunately all precede the word understand. The wording suggests that the group is confident that they have a good system and are eagerly awaiting the opportunity to "scale up". Shouldn't there be a mention of avoiding the problems, such as those identified in the RFC? I don't think the confident language is justified. In my opinion, this is a time when basic things should be re-evaluated to make there is a firm foundation, instead of concerning one's self with growth. I would like to see more of an explicit committment and willingness to improve upon the resources provided to instructors, students, and ambassadors, for example. As I mention here, I think there is room for improvement in the most basic instructions we are currently providing classrooms. So I recommend that this precept be modified to acknowledge the real need to improve, rather than focusing on the potential for expansion. I think we need a committment to quality, as the RfC identified that as a major problem from the community's view. Biosthmors ( talk) 02:45, 27 February 2013 (UTC)
The organization will strive to improve upon the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program in the United States and Canada. Members will support all stakeholders: readers, Wikipedia editors, students, and instructors to help the program succeed. Classrooms will be supported to leave behind quality contributions, so that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sister projects benefit from greater engagement.
Indeed. Mike said that when you met in Chicago you'd decide whether or not to make the proposal public. What was the decision? -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 22:40, 20 March 2013 (UTC)
The proposal is, as Mike has said, up on Meta. And there are some quite significant changes to the proposal, and indeed to the whole project of the proposed organization. Sadly, as it's on Meta, there are very few eyes there. I'd recommend anyone to go have a look at it, and the changes it's undergoing. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 19:04, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
There have been some comments, here and elsewhere, to the effect that it's not been very easy to see what's happening with the process started by the Education Program working group last year. We're going to try to post regular updates on this page to make the process a bit more transparent. To recap, for those unfamiliar with the background, that working group process led to a proposal to create a nonprofit, to be called the "Wiki Education Foundation -- USA and Canada": WEF-USCA for short; or just WEF.
The WEF has an interim board, the members of which are listed here. The board has been meeting by phone and will be meeting in Chicago on the weekend of the 23rd of March. Current tasks include getting the final form a grant proposal to the Grant Advisory Committee, getting an affiliation proposal to the Affiliations Committee, and working with a pro bono lawyer to set up the bye-laws for the new 501(c)(3) and incorporate the new entity. The budget includes funds for hiring staff for the WEF; we're still discussing exactly what qualifications are needed. Do we need someone who is very experienced at running a non-profit? Or do we want someone with lots of fund-raising experience? Or someone with a strong Wikipedia editing record? Rod Dunican will be at the Chicago meeting, and I expect that there will be further discussion of the role of the WEF and the input of the community in the form of the RfC.
Three members of the board -- me, Chanitra, and Pat -- are going to monitor this page and will add an update periodically. We'd like to do an update weekly, but there may be nothing happening on a given week, since the board is all-volunteer. We'll also try to respond in a timely way to comments here; and we'd like to get input and feedback on the updates we post here. If you have any questions, please post them, and we'll try to respond. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 21:45, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
(Outdenting) Jon, I'm going to break up your comments into bullets so I can answer them separately rather than running multiple answers inline, partly because it's easier for me and also in case we need to pursue one of these points further.
A brief update from Chicago, on a point I know Jon was curious about: the (draft) affiliation proposal is already public on meta, m:Wiki Education Foundation; and the grant proposal will also be public. The board also resolved to make all minutes public. I'll be posting the minutes later this week, I hope; they're not yet approved but should be this week. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 00:46, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Hanad Mukhtar ( talk · contribs)
(User:Hanad Mukhtar.)
Howdy, y'all! Recently, for the Schreiner University course, I created two YouTube tutorials related to moving an article from sandbox to mainspace—they can be viewed at [28], just in case you were, you know, planning on recording some tutorials about that kind of stuff. ;) — Theopolisme ( talk) 22:18, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
You should check out one of today's DYKs for Women in the Arab Spring, an article User:Nadhika99 created for her assignment at Rice. I added the page to the trophy case but thought I'd post a note here, in case anyone wanted to see it on the main page. Nadhika was in Diana Strassmann's class last Spring and took another one this term. Enjoy her interesting article! JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 19:47, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
An issue of secondary vs primary sourcing has come up for Education Program:Davidson College/Cognitive Psychology (2013 Q1). User:Garrondo and User:Lova Falk have suggested for students to follow WP:MEDRS and use primarily secondary sources. In some areas, secondary sources are somewhat lacking. For a number of the article additions, students have used primary sources from peer-reviewed journals to describe models proposed by these primary sources. The models are similarly described in other secondary material and by abstracts/discussions in other peer-reviewed primary journals. WP:MEDRS states:
Reliable primary sources may occasionally be used with care as an adjunct to the secondary literature, but there remains potential for misuse. For that reason, edits that rely on primary sources should only describe the conclusions of the source, and should describe these findings clearly so the edit can be checked by editors with no specialist knowledge. In particular, this description should follow closely to the interpretation of the data given by the authors or by other reliable secondary sources.
If secondary sources are hard to find/non-existent, or do not contradict/disavow the primary sources (the additions aren't 'wrong' per se) and the additions are new content (new articles, new sections), is the usage of primary sources an editorial judgement? This issue seems to exist more for certain areas in the social sciences where there appears to be fewer review journals than for chemistry/biology which have an abundance of secondary review material. Smallman12q ( talk) 02:40, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
As this is a perennial topic for the many Association for Psychological Science classes, and one that a lot of the professors push back against (see the discussion on page 9 of this forth-coming paper about the APS Wikipedia Initiative, in addition to the on-wiki examples we're familiar with), perhaps it would be useful to have an RfC about appropriate sourcing for psychology articles. We could reach out the APS editors and try to forge a consensus about where primary peer-reviewed literature is and is not appropriate.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 13:16, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
Health-related content in any English Wikipedia article (not just medicine, biology and psychology articles) must be supported by independent "secondary" or "tertiary" sources, such as expert reviews in high-impact peer-reviewed journals, university-level textbooks, professional guidelines, etc. "Primary" sources, such as reports of randomized controlled trials, case reports and comparative studies (even if they are published in a peer-reviewed journal) are rarely adequate support for assertions in this field. If health-related information is not covered in high quality independent secondary or tertiary sources, it is unlikely to be suitable for Wikipedia. The distinction between primary, secondary and tertiary sources is discussed at Primary, secondary and tertiary sources.
Students editing health-related content and those supervising or grading their work must read Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine).
I've just read that paper. Three brief responses. I think we should prepare a more substantial response. I see misunderstanding, poor science and propaganda.
Colin° Talk 14:49, 25 March 2013 (UTC)
Would you be interested in attending that conference, Colin, if the foundation covered your expenses? -- Anthonyhcole ( talk · contribs · email) 04:08, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Pages such as Special:OnlineVolunteers aren't self explanatory for users who follow such links from third party sites and who have no previous knowledge of the workings of wikipedia. There is no text explaining that this is part of the meta:Wikipedia Education Program rather than generic Wikipedia signups, there is no pointer on where to start, etc. Could some text be written please? Stuartyeates ( talk) 23:21, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Robert Kluijver
Paris School of International Affairs
Contemporary Art and Geopolitics in the Middle East. This is a 24-hour course given in English to the students of the International Master programme (MA) of the Instituten for Political Studies in Paris, better known as Sciences Po.
The objective of the course is to allow the students to gain fresh insights into current social and cultural developments in the Arab world, by way of an informed reading of its contemporary art production.
Being an enthusiastic user of Wikipedia myself, I have noticed how little coverage contemporary art gets in general, and that from the Middle East in particular. Impressed by the level of my students' papers in previous years, and convinced that the generation of knowledge in the academic sphere should be reformed in order to reach a wider audience, I decided to ask my students to write Wikipedia articles this year, instead of the usual persuasive papers. I hope to continue and expand on this experience in coming years.
This (first) year I need to experiment with Wikipedia assignments in class. I realize there are many dangers and pitfalls, and hope that with the guidance of the Wikipedia community, and intelligent input from my students, we can make this a success.
I have first asked all my students to create a user profile, start editing on the User Page and in their Sandbox, and start copyediting or providing references to existing pages to get a feel of how Wikipedia works. I have provided them with some basic tools but realize they need more yet. I then suggested a list of topics, based on existing coverage on Wikipedia; most students have chosen one of those I suggested, some have suggested their own.
In the meanwhile I have been discussing with Wikipedia community members such as Yunshui and Biosthmors, they have convinced me I better run this exercise through WEP; it is a bit late (student papers are due within a month) and I am aware I have made a few mistakes already, but I'm determined to see this through with success, and learn for next year.
18
25 January to 27 April 2013
-- RobertK Prods ( talk) 00:22, 27 March 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Due to length, part of this section is collapsed
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Our Timeline:
Wikipedia Project: Why do this real-world experiment in editing?
Grading (maximum 60 participation points):
Step 2. Vote for 10 sites in need of editing (due March 31 through the course website). You will vote for 10 sites (5 genes and 5 people) that you would like to edit based on the nominations you read.
Quality of citations
Originality (remember, we only report what has been shown; we do not introduce our own ideas).
Step 4. Critique another Wiki site. Individually, you will offer suggestions for improvements to an assigned Wiki site (due April 18 as a document submitted through Blackboard). Grading according to the “Grading Rubric for Wiki Critiques.” Step 5. Edit your first Wiki site AGAIN. Finally, you and your teammates will revisit your first Wiki site and make improvements (due April 25). Do your best to respond to the critiques provided by your peers. Grading same as Step 3. As a team, you will write a document that summarizes what you did using the “Wiki Project Grading Rubric” as a guide. Submit your team’s summary through Blackboard. Seek to comply with the following attributes of an informative wiki entry. Attributes of a good article on a circadian gene:
Attributes of a good article on a circadian researcher:
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-- Circadiansync ( talk) 00:14, 28 March 2013 (UTC)
The Wiki Education Foundation is the organization that is proposed to take over the coordination role of the US/Canada Education Program from the WMF after June of this year. It's applying for thematic organization status; the proposal is here.
There is a question I would like to get specific feedback on from the editors involved with the EP. The board is intended to be made of three people who represent the Wikipedia community, three who represent the educator community, one from the WMF, and one who represents chapters and any additional groups that form with a specific interest in education and Wikipedia (e.g. there might be a group that focuses on one university or one academic discipline). There are four more optional appointed seats.
It's going to be fairly easy to select Wikipedians -- some form of on-wiki election will work. But how should we plan to get educators on the board, and who should select them? Should the educators be elected by the Wikipedia community plus educators, or by educators only, or should they be selected by the board, or is there some other method we should follow? I can think of pros and cons for all three options. Allowing the community to vote on educator seats will almost certainly overwhelm the few votes of the educators, but on the other hand this is a role that will affect the community, so they should have a say. Voting by educators only is more likely to give us educators that have the support of the other educators in the community, and in any case they only constitute three of the eight to twelve seats, so they can't be a majority; on the other hand very few educators are sufficiently interested or knowledgeable about the program now and would have no basis for voting for any particular candidate. Selections by the board will solve the problem of there being a small group of educators involved, since the board can search out candidates with the skills it needs; but this is the least democratic approach (though the board, with multiple Wikipedians on it, will have that perspective in its selection process).
Any comments? The exact method of the elections doesn't have to be decided now -- it's more a question of what's the appropriate electorate for this group of board members. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:18, 31 March 2013 (UTC)
I'd have thought this would be fairly easy: have one election, on wiki, with the stipulation that three of the people elected must be educators (defined in some fashion or another: does this include librarians, contract staff, TAs, etc.). I can't say I like the sound of "pre-vetted candidates," especially as the board is self-selecting four additional members in any case. Those seats can be used for non-contributing faculty such as Bob and Diana, if the board feels it fit. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 21:39, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Go Phightins! ( talk · contribs)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Is the education program moving away from the word ambassador and towards the word volunteer? Special:CampusAmbassadors and Special:OnlineAmbassadors now appear as Special:CampusVolunteers and Special:OnlineVolunteers. Biosthmors ( talk) 18:19, 2 April 2013 (UTC)