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I have just relisted Wikipedia talk:URice University/Poverty, Justice, Human Capabilities Section 1 (Fall 2013)/WikiProject & Talk Contributions#Requested move 7 August 2017 and would welcome input there from those experienced in the Education program. TIA Andrewa ( talk) 08:06, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
"Move" is not support to/from the education program namespace. If this needs to be in the EP courses format, it will need to be recreated there. — xaosflux Talk 11:57, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:URice University/Poverty, Justice, Human Capabilities Section 1 (Fall 2013)/WikiProject & Talk Contributions#Affected pages, and more input appreciated. Andrewa ( talk) 23:40, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi all,
Just wanted to let you know that this week, Wiki Education Foundation published our last two months' worth of Monthly Reports. As always, they're available in three formats.
Let me know if you have any questions. -- LiAnna (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 16:20, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
115.164.91.48 ( talk · contribs)
115.164.91.48 ( talk) 05:41, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Vickythefamous ( talk · contribs)
Not done Insufficient experience to be granted this right -- There'sNoTime ( to explain) 11:49, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
41.77.91.207 ( talk · contribs)
Not done Unregistered users cannot be assigned this right -- There'sNoTime ( to explain) 11:48, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
41.77.91.203 ( talk · contribs)
Not done Unregistered users cannot be assigned this right --
There'sNoTime (
to explain)
11:49, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi all,
Let me start off with the TL;DR: We're no longer going to support large multi-section classes with TAs, and we've instituted internal monitoring and review processes for courses editing on controversial subjects.
For those of you who want a longer explanation, you may remember we had some challenges this spring with environmental justice classes at UC Berkeley. It was a large six-section class working on controversial subjects, and it resulted in several incidents. At the time, Wiki Education cleaned up the problematic student work and promised to spend some time in the summer evaluating our course selection processes to see if we could make some changes to head off problems like this from happening again.
There were a few factors that were potentially problematic about the class:
In July, we were grateful to have the professor, Michel Gelobter, join us in our offices to meet in person to discuss the class and what went wrong. We also dug into our records of courses we’ve supported in the last few years, looking at outcomes from large classes, classes split into sections led by TAs, and classes where students edited in controversial subject areas. We’ve supported dozens of courses in each scenario, and so we were able to look for patterns in what we saw. Based on the feedback from Michel and looking at the outcomes from a variety of classes, we have decided to make some changes.
First, we will no longer support extensive Wikipedia assignments in multisection courses where the sections are run by TAs or different instructors, regardless of the course's size. We've found that it's this factor, rather than just the size of the class, which is most likely to contribute to negative outcomes. Communication issues between instructors, TAs, and Wiki Education make these classes particularly challenging to work with, and the quality of content that has come from them does not justify the extra staff time we need to spend on them, nor the rate of incidents with students that community members have brought to our attention. They also become particularly challenging to manage when an incident arises because of the multiple instructors/TAs. We will support these classes only if instructors are asking students to make minor edits (e.g., copyediting, adding references, or adding images).
Second, we will continue to support multisection courses if every section is taught by the same instructor. In such cases, we will treat the class in the same way we do a single-section large class, which involves additional screening and monitoring. We will also continue to support courses with 100 students or fewer with TAs as long as the course is not broken into sections. Note that we still do not support extensive assignments for very large classes of more than 100 students, no matter the number of sections unless the extensive assignment is optional and only a handful of students undertake the larger project.
Finally, we have set up processes internally so that we can provide more oversight to classes working on controversial subject areas. Some of our students have made very well-developed, neutral, well-cited contributions to articles in controversial subject areas. But we need to be better about understanding the community's perspectives and concerns about topic areas students may edit, as well as the intentions and positions of the instructors and students. Thus, we have put a few things into place, including:
We’re also wrapping up projects to revise some of our training slides and handouts we provide students to ensure that they’re getting the best information possible about how to make positive contributions to Wikipedia.
We greatly appreciate the feedback we've received from community members and welcome any questions or comments you may have about these new guidelines. Improving the quality of Wikipedia content remains our chief goal, and we hope that these new guidelines will ensure that we only support courses well-suited for a Wikipedia assignment, who can help us all on our mission to improve the encyclopedia. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 19:57, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Hello educators. I came across User:PreranaD/sandbox, User:PreranaD/Mass Media in Canada (sandbox) and User:PreranaD/Mass Media in Canada which have text which was later used to create an article Mass media in Canada as part of a class assignment. Is there some reason that these old stale drafts should not be blanked? The text is well out of date now.— Anne Delong ( talk) 04:49, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
I am a history teacher who is in the process of having one of my classes create an article on our high school. Through this we are using several personal interviews from our principal, superintendent, etc. Whenever I use this they get flagged as not verifiable. Is there a way I can still use these sources for the project?
Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IsaacGoff ( talk • contribs) 13:43, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
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Moheen Reeyad ( talk · contribs)
~Moheen (keep talking) 21:38, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Done -- There'sNoTime ( to explain) 11:50, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
I've noticed that some users, who are obviously students in the Wiki Ed program, do not have their user pages tagged as such. An example is Ameliacanas, who is a part of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Boise State University/Introduction to Media (Fall 2017) and has edited the course page. – Train2104 ( t • c) 00:23, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Hey educators--see the user page. Apparently the instructor is telling them to work in teams, which is fine--but they shouldn't share an account, of course. Your help is appreciated. Drmies ( talk) 00:47, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
Right now, we're running the six-month ACTRIAL. It was announced at WP:VPT, but I decide to re-announce this here. How would the ACTRIAL impact student assignments? What will teachers and students who find out about the trial do about the temporary restriction on article creation? -- George Ho ( talk) 07:08, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi! I'm an old-timer -but inactive- wikipedian from es.wikipedia,org (very active for a few months, first in 2004, then again in 2010). Improving Wikipedia via assignments has always interested me, and indeed I was actually also a little involved in the early wikiversidad/wikiversity, back in 2004. I'm starting a small thing in the next few days: 40 Master students (Theoretical and Computational Chemistry), in groups of 5/6, and each group only editing a small article, so only 7/8 articles involved. My subject is tiny (6 hours!), and so will be the homework, so once the deadline comes near they won't edit for very long (unless they like the community and decide to stay on their own!). I understood (and heartfully agreed with) the pillars of Wikipedia from my first time here, so I think this will be non-problematic: the priorities of Wikipedia go first, so they will do all work on their user pages/sandboxes and only edit the real text (if at all, since this will not be required for grading) once I have verified its quality. Additionally, the class I coordinate is not about Chemistry but about Writing and Communication, so also from that point of view my priority is their ability to craft high-quality, concise texts, rather than quantity. Since I've been gone for such a long time, I only knew about WP:ASSIGN and outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org yesterday (we're in Europe, so this is the one we should use, right?). I'll be preparing a course page today and tomorrow and have the students sign in on Thursday. Is there anything else I need to urgently take into account? Thanks! 4lex ( talk) 06:04, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks again. It's so easy to recall why I loved it here: I leave for 7 years, come back, it's not even the same location and people still make me feel at home :) I created the course here: University_of_Valencia/XIIthTCCM-CS. I don't really know the tools I will be using, though, so I'll still be welcoming advice. I'll try to play around a bit tomorrow, and keep reading some more on the pitfalls to avoid. I do think I understand how to behave around here (as in: be useful rather than troublesome/disruptive). My only real worry is that it's 40 people I don't know and which I will meet only briefly, meaning I can't predict their reactions and personality, and I'll only have a limited influence on their behavior... 4lex ( talk) 20:31, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
{{
PD-chem}}
).Seppi333 ( Insert 2¢) 01:38, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Hi, I am running a student wikipage creation project at LIUC, Castellanza, Italy. This is the fourth year we've run this, and in the past it has resulted in some excellent new pages (not without some issues!). In a past year I had an educational course page. Last year I applied for one and flagged the request on the student draft talk pages, but never heard back about it. Is there anything anyone can do to help me here, so I can just flag the draft pages up as an educational project on the respective Talk pages? Many thanks! Limelightangel ( talk) 07:55, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Limelightangel
I realise that the creation of articles by students for some type of class project is beneficial to Wikipedia and instructional for the students. I am in favour of Wikipedia being used by students to further their education, but I am concerned by how some of their activities impact the rest of the community; in particular, when their activities seem to end up with the articles they have been working on being nominated to GAN or DYK.
With regards to GAN, an article produced by a student may not match up to the GA criteria. In particular, a class on say "Animal behaviour" is likely to produce articles heavy on behaviour and light on distribution, description etc., which is needed to fulfil the criterion 3a "addresses the main aspects of the topic" and 3b "stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail". A conscientious GA reviewer will likely fail their nomination as a result, but even worse, there being a considerable backlog at GAN, the student is likely to have moved on to other coursework by the time the review takes place and there will be nobody available to make any improvements necessary to attain the GA standard. For example, in the "Biology and medicine" section of GAN, a backlog of about ten articles awaiting review suddenly swelled to about forty a few months ago. This is discouraging for other members of the community who find their own nominations waiting for review for much longer periods than they otherwise would.
The situation at DYK is somewhat similar. Students do not have a QPQ requirement when they nominate their articles as they are first time nominators, so their nominations swell the backlog of large numbers of unreviewed nominations. The students do not know the DYK rules and therefore do not conform to them. Thirty or so nominations on some obscure topic (plate tectonics, social insects, etc.) tend to sit around unreviewed for some time, and when they do get reviewed, the students are no longer editing and therefore do not respond to concerns. The course requirement seems to have been nominating their articles for DYK, rather than piloting them through to promotion.
So I am fine with student projects using and contributing to Wikipedia, but find problematic the objective of nominating the articles for GAN or DYK as a course requirement. I would be interested in the views of others. Cwmhiraeth ( talk) 10:56, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm very glad to see this timely discussion and endorse the views and experiences of other GA and DYK editors, along with the practical and sensible replies of the WIKI Ed staff. I hope that these attitudes will be embedded in future courses. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 13:34, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
I added a DNAU tag to this section a while back pending an update. We're still in the [long] process of updating materials (instructor training is still in progress), but we've talked about this matter of DYKs and GAs quite a bit now. It looks like the primary impetus for this section was a class which did not indicate to us that all students would be going through DYK, but which then did. In general, however, we bring up DYK and GA in the training because we want to know who will be attempting these processes (which instructors often discover on their own anyway). When someone indicates interest, the class is flagged to us. Importantly, this is so that, in most cases, we can discourage them making it part of the assignment, and to ensure it's not part of students' grades (a condition that we will not support). In other words, by telling instructors about DYK/GA up front, we can intervene to ensure it's done responsibly, discourage it in many cases, and/or monitor submissions in others. When coached properly, there have been many students and instructors who have finished the class with DYKs and GAs. "Many" is relative, though, since it's uncommon they're attempted at all an even more uncommon that they're attempted without us knowing about it. As with any situation in which a class engages in an activity when we don't know about it, we can only try to then intervene with the instructor, try to help with any ongoing on-wiki issues, and try to take measures to avoid it happening again. If you see students submitting articles to DYK/GA -- or, even more importantly, if you see it built into an assignment -- please let us know here and/or ping the Content Expert linked from the course page. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 16:19, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
Today there was a brief flood of edits via dashboard.wikiedu.org that blanked article talk pages and replaced them with just a course assignment template. This was due to a bug, now fixed, that treated API failures the same way as blank pages, combined with a edit job queue that had built up because a process needed to be restarted: when I restarted the job queue processing, it resulted in a large number of edits and API activity in a short time, which resulted in hitting a rate limit for fetching page content, which in turn led to treating article talk pages as already blank, even though they were not. The dashboard had never hit that kind of rate limiting before, so this bug stayed hidden until now. Apologies for the disruptive edits! Wiki Education staff have cleaned all the ones that other editors didn't fix already. -- Sage (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 17:26, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
Hello is anyone from wikied able to get a dev to check in to phab:T166109, it was just reported again on WP:VPT. — xaosflux Talk 12:12, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi all,
In recent months, there have been a few discussions in which people made suggestions regarding the tools and materials Wiki Ed uses to support instructors and students editing Wikipedia. Since the discussions came up during the time when students are most actively editing, we pledged to return to them over the summer.
This week we begin the first phase of this process, looking at how the Dashboard timeline could be improved. The timeline acts as a sort of extension of a class's syllabus, breaking the assignment into a series of steps, incorporating milestones and supplemental assignments, linking to training and other resources. Please note that the timeline does not itself include the training or handouts, which will be the subject of subsequent threads.
An overview of the Dashboard timeline:
When an instructor creates a course on the Dashboard, they go through a series of steps to generate a timeline. Anyone so inclined can go through these steps by logging into the Dashboard using OAuth, though first-time users (almost always new instructors) have to go through an orientation. Here's the gist of the steps it involves: entering basic information about the course, selecting an assignment type (the standard "create or expand an article" can be supplemented or replaced by smaller assignments like an article critique, copyediting, or contributing to Commons), questions about assignment specifics like whether students will work in groups, and options for additional off-wiki assignments like a blog or reflective essay.
If you would just like to see a timeline with nearly every module included, here is an example on our Dashboard testing site.
Though any feedback regarding the timeline is appreciated, at this time we are looking for ways the text and/or organization of material could be improved in the timeline, rather than adding new technical features, etc.
Pinging users involved in semi-recent discussions. Apologies if I omit anyone, and please let me know if you would rather not be pinged in the future. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 17:36, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Pings
|
---|
@ Bri, David Tornheim, Excirial, Fuhghettaboutit, I am One of Many, Jytdog, Kingofaces43, Marchjuly, NewsAndEventsGuy, Opabinia regalis, and RexxS: @ Robert McClenon, Seraphim System, Seraphimblade, The Wordsmith, TonyBallioni, Train2104, and Tryptofish: |
Every article has a Talk page where Wikipedia editors discuss changes. This is where students can propose edits, ask questions, and get feedback."
I don't have time to review the whole thing, and I've forgotten which discussion I participated in that would have put me on the ping list :) But if you want a general opinion, I think the most common problem with student editing (admittedly a biased sample of what I happen to notice) is not that they're unfamiliar with Wikipedia mechanics, but simply that they don't know their topic well. They tend to get a lot of templates and talk page lectures and whatnot, but the underlying problem isn't "you used a primary source and should have used a secondary one" or "your references aren't formatted right" or whatever, it's that they don't know enough about the subject to choose a source other than "I Googled and this is what I found" or "it was in the course reading list". I know that this is supposed to be the "how to edit Wikipedia" component and the instructor is responsible for content, but I really think that part of the guidance for instructors should encourage them to get students to write about parts of the course they've mastered, rather than content they'd never heard of till last week's lecture.
On the stuff in the timeline...
Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:30, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
@ Jytdog: I left the DNAU tag in this thread because you gave a lot of thoughtful feedback about the instructor orientation before we were ready to start the process of updating it and I didn't want to lose it. Student training and the timeline was the priority, but we'll likely be able to make minor changes to the instructor orientation soon. This message is just to let you know that I'm removing the DNAU tag (this page is getting a little long), but I've gone through your feedback in detail and have pulled some concrete suggestions as well as topics for discussion from your notes. I'll give you a heads up when we follow through. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 15:44, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
Please remind students explicitly that article evaluations belong in sandboxes, and that only completed articles are to be moved to mainspace. I must have moved back over a dozen article evaluations since this semester started. – Train2104 ( t • c) 03:10, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
students keep creating essays that don't even pretend to be articles on their user sandboxs. Some do pretend to be articles. And I've been deleting then per U5.03:58, 16 October 2017 (UTC) Dlohcierekim ( talk) 03:58, 16 October 2017 (UTC) Someone, for instance, submitted this via AfC-- User:Idlc123/sandbox Dlohcierekim ( talk) 04:14, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
@ Samantha (Wiki Ed):. I'm sorry. I will retrive and post here,as I should have in the first pace, 23:07, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
If the user page has a link to the WikiEdu dashboard, can I assume they know how to constructively edit? Dlohcierekim ( talk) 06:20, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
A few days ago, I was checking my watchlist and found this edit to the French Polynesia article, in which a user replaced a citation needed tag with a circular reference that had copied its text from Wikipedia. I initially thought it was reference spam, but after a bit of digging, I found out that it was a student at the course University of California, Berkeley/Berkeley Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy - Coleman Lab (Fall 2017) using Citation Hunt. I'm concerned about the use of this tool by Education Program students. I found the following similar edits from the same course:
Then, the very next day, I found this edit to Kangaroo Island from a student at the course California State University, East Bay/Medical Humanities (Fall 2017). It's a resonable source except it doesn't even mention the 2005 report that is prominently mentioned in the article text.
In general, I'm very concerned about the accuracy rate of these edits (one in six in this case) and the suitability of this tool for newer editors when used outside of their subject areas of study. Even as an experienced editor, I wouldn't feel comfortable adding citations to a random statement in an unfamiliar subject area unless it was very obvious and uncontroversial (for example <randomperson> attended XXX High School). I therefore don't think students should be given the option of using this tool (as they are on the two course pages linked above), or if they do an exercise like this, they should be steered towards subjects they know something about. I'd appreciate any thoughts on this. Graham 87 06:15, 9 October 2017 (UTC) +
{{
citation needed}}
" or "{{
Unreferenced}}
" would solicit more generally. These kinds of mistakes, in my opinion, should be prompting questions like "Why don't more of our readers "get" what kind of source material we use?" and "Why don't new editors know what is appropriate to site?". As I
have argued elsewhere (
slides), Verifiability is something we value quite widely in our community, yet is something we don't communicate very well to our audience.
Astinson (WMF) (
talk)
17:19, 10 October 2017 (UTC)I've just found another student editor, this time from the course Lakehead University/Global Africa (Fall 2017), trying to add exactly the same reference to the French Polynesia article that sparked this concern in the first place. Graham 87 06:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
Not entirely sure where to post this, but it probably affects a lot of references and article space content on biomedical research. prokaryotes ( talk) 21:31, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Sometimes it involves semi-private companies that refuse to disclose anything for fear of reputation or financial damage. The biggest factor by far is pride and fear of reputation damage. Another contributing issue is pressure to publish, with researchers not having the time or money to verify their cell cultures adequately before they begin their research.
Over 30,000 Published Studies Could Be Wrong Due to Contaminated Cells
I propose that Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Incidents be made a redirect to this page, Wikipedia:Education noticeboard.
@ Jbmurray: established the "incidents" page from the main education noticeboard in November 2013. At the time, the Wiki Education Foundation had recently incorporated and there were many new classes coming to Wikipedia. There was hardly any training and coordination and responding to all the students and classes was impossible with the on-wiki volunteer resources at hand. Wiki Education suddenly brought lots of new classes to Wikipedia, and in fearful anticipation, the community asked them to arrange for notices to appear at the education noticeboard for each class. Since the community had been unable to adequately manage the classes already on wiki, there was great worry that an organization bringing even more classes in could do so without major community disruption. At first it was possible to look at all classes doing Wikipedia projects, but now after 4 years there are so many thousands of students participating at any time that no single human can monitor them all. Wiki Education has since moved all class notices to Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Wiki Ed course submissions because the main noticeboard had become unusable with all the bot notices. So far as I know, no one reads that page just because problems are fairly uncommon and Wiki Education oversees the groups which they recruit to Wikipedia.
Because Wiki Education class notices no longer appear at the main noticeboard, there is not much traffic there. Because of this, I would like to propose a return to Wikipedia noticeboard norms, where there is one noticeboard for any kind of general discussion. The main board and the incidents board should merge to become one discussion forum. If in the future that gets too complicated, anyone can propose to split noticeboards again. Problem incidents of the sort which the incidents noticeboard was made to identify are best on the main page, which is how most noticeboards work.
Also, to confirm, the education noticeboard should be for discussion of any class engagement in English Wikipedia, regardless of country. Wiki Education is focused on the United States and Canada, but from a community volunteer perspective, we support any class in any country which is improving English Wikipedia. Thoughts from others? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:39, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
I see that the bot archived the proposal to merge WP:ENI into this page, before an outcome was determined. It seems to me that there was a clear consensus to do that, so maybe someone, preferably an admin, should go ahead and enact that. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:35, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
Goes to the defunct Ambassadors page. I wonder if it shouldn't to Wikipedia:Student assignments instead? Jytdog ( talk) 20:49, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
Dear all:
In keeping with the idea of involving students with the Wikipedia, I have been encouraging some of my journalism students at the Goa University to share (assignment-based) images they have created related to literature, books and authors via Wikimedia Commons.
They have been doing a good job in my view, there is no copyright violation, and I'm sure this would be a useful asset to create and add to pages both in the English Wikipedia and also in smaller, fledgling initiatives like the Konkani Wikipedia [4].
Unfortunately, some bots have been knocking off such content, which is really demoralising to the students who are trying their best. One case in point is Saiee D. on the page below [5] who writes: "I uploaded pictures of printing presses and bookstores in Panjim [Goa]. But though I uploaded more than 16 pics, it went down to 12 and now there are only four remaining. Why are these getting removed, sir?"
Please could you help to encourage well intentioned young contributors? They are our future...
Frederick Noronha +91-832-2409490 On Wikipedia: Fredericknoronha (user since circa 2006)
Dear all: I could take care of any copyright violations. But please could someone help with the somewhat arbitrary deletion of photos? Do I need to alert someone about our students' involvement? Isn't it worth encouraging students to contribute? fredericknoronha ( talk) 13:44, 29 October 2017 (UTC) Fredericknoronha
There are multiple IP accounts editing at that page, who appear to be in an unregistered class project: [6], and who seem to be having a tough time of it, largely because they seem unaware of how things work here. It would be great if WikiEd would look into this and reach out to the class. Thanks. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:25, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
There appears to a course at University of Kentucky pharmacology school that has a class assignment.
are the ones I have come across so far. Perhaps folks from the education program could reach out to the instructor? Jytdog ( talk) 17:55, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
Generally I think the education outreach is fantastic idea. However, the FAQ and other materials that provide guidance on designing assignments should include a section on Things to Avoid When Designing Assignments. For example, instructors should make certain students do nothing at article talk - zip zero nada - unless the assignment involves sticking around the article to make changes to article text, which may involve back-and-forth dialog with established eds who have the article watch-listed. Per the established talk page guidelines, an article talk page is only for discussions that genuinely seek to improve article text. Collecting drive by homework assignments in the form of suggestions from people who have no skin in the game of article text is outside the scope of article talk. In my view, such homework can be deleted as WP:SPAM because the ed who posts them is WP:NOTHERE to build article text but to check a box off on their class assignment. Students are not acting in bad faith of course but the practice inadvertently abuses the volunteer time being invested by real editors who have the talk pages watchlisted. Here is a current example (apologies for picking on this class and instructor... by this criticism I mean to welcome and improve your course experience and hope you do another in the future!)
On one hand many new sets of drive by suggestions may turn up important things to work on. The problem, however, is assigning the posting of a driveby remark is very annoying and sucks enormous time from established eds who expect to engage people who are going to actually work on articles. Alternative 1 Have students post these sorts of suggestions on their own user talk. They can still do peer review/grading of the posted suggestions. Alternative 2 Have students post proposed edits at article talk and have them graded on their follow through, however it unfolds, in the WP:BRD process. Alternative 3 in the example course I am picking on (sorry about that once again) reverse the order of the Week 4 and Week 5, to extent students could first make article edits, and later defend them if they are reverted via BRD process, or if the edits are not reverted, students could find some current WP:RFC, load the debate into their brain, and then cast a well reasoned WP:NOTVOTE. Conclusion There are probably many more alternatives, but I do think we need a Things to Avoid When Designing Assignments section and in that section frown on using article talk to post homework in the form of driveby "suggestions". Unless pagewatchers will receive salary as teaching assistants, then I might feel differently about it. NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 14:09, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
Appreciate this being moved here for wider input. I'm not deep into this project. One thing should be simple- Adding to the first stuff any intstructor sees concise bold statement that
The only opposing argument I have heard is that potentially valuable ideas posted in student driveby remarks would be lost. We can solve that without cramming driveby reviews down regular editors throats and robbing them of valuable time. Simply have students include the right template or tags in their one-off comments in their userspace. If they format them correctly with the article name, we should be able to code a log of student name, course, article, and DIFF with the one-off remark, and let the header of the article talk page get an automatic template that such material exists. In this way, its all indexed and eds who want to review such material can easily find it. Sort of like an article specific hashtag "#StudentDriveBy". If these templates and tags do not yet exist, maybe an outline of the desired behavior could be posted to the technical side of VPump or other venue, trying to get help from the coders among us. Thanks for listening. The climate pages are popular target areas for this sort of thing, and that's one of my main interests so I do see this a lot. Hence my effort at reforming the way this is done. Thanks to all of you for your effort on this awesome project! I am a big fan, despite all my words over this one pet peeve. NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 22:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC) NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 22:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi everyone. For those interested, Wiki Education's Monthly Report for September 2017 is now available on Commons as a PDF, on Meta, or on our blog. Please let me know if you have questions. -- Cassidy (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 18:52, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Please see User talk:Dodger67#"Insufficient context for those unfamiliar": what's missing?, I'd be grateful if you can give some advice to the OP as it's quite outside my comfort zone. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 07:22, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
I've just placed 2 weeks of ECP on:
due to repeated copyvios resulting from what appears to be a class assignment. As far as I can tell, it's only spread to a few articles so far but I don't know how widespread this is -- I vaguely remember bits and pieces popping up on CopyPatrol. MER-C 12:20, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
One of the things I do is check for article categories that contain non-articles (e.g. pages in the Wikipedia namespace). I'm repeatedly finding that pages such as Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UMBC/Language in Diverse Schools and Communities (Fall 2017) are being inadvertently placed in article categories. When a talk page (for example) is inadvertently placed in an article category this only needs to be fixed once - however, these Wiki Ed pages are repeatedly being pasted in with the inadvertent category tag (why does this copy-pasting need to be done? has the en wp community given approval to it?). This causes unnecessary work for editors who fix categorization problems as well as potentially confusing anyone using these Wiki Ed pages. Please can you ensure that an appropriate change is made to technology/processes to ensure that adding incorrect references to categories in these pages is stopped. DexDor (talk) 06:30, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello! I'm afraid there have been some serious WP:COPYVIO issues with this course. I'm hoping that the folks here at WikiEd would perhaps provide some more guidance to the students and instructor. Besides the COPYVIO issues there is a quality issue to the articles they are moving into main space. Many of these wouldn't pass at WP:AFC. These articles read more like essays than encyclopedic entries. Of particular note Am12827 just recieved their final warning for COPYVIOs from Oshwah despite multiple warnings on their talk page. I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of oversight this class appears to have. Can y'all address these issues before more work is created for editors like Chrissymad who appear to be cleaning up after this course? -- Cameron11598 (Talk) 18:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)(UTC)
Hi, I'm the professor of the class. I wish you'd be a little less snarky in your comments about my work with the class. It's the third time I've taught with Wikipedia, and I recently moved to a new institution where students are clearly struggling to conform to Wikipedia standards. Like you, I'm trying to think about how to do a better job in preparing students to become Wikipedia editors. And now I feel quite discouraged that my students and I will be publicly shamed for our efforts. I'm doing the best I can and have carefully attempted to walk students through the protocols of using Wikipedia. It's a bit discouraging when you act like we're just creating problems for you as the 'cleanup crew.' I await more productive dialogue. Cz17 ( talk) 20:00, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
I do not find it discouraging that Wikipedia has no wiggle room for copyright violations. That is as it should be. I had more of a problem with the "coming out swinging" attitude but I have heard that this can be an issue among Wikipedia editors. Not a problem, I am now in conversation with Shalor and thank you for your contributions to the Wikipedia community. Cz17 ( talk) 20:45, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi! I'm one of the project's typo fixers. I've noticed that about 100 course pages have appeared on my latest work list because they contain the grammar error Leave suggestions on on the Talk page of the article, with an extra "on" ( example). Apparently this is copied in from dashboard.wikiedu.org somehow. Does anyone know how to correct the master copy of this text? -- John of Reading ( talk) 18:22, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
These articles have all been recently moved by students into mainspace with some glaring issues:
(Possible info to be contained in my article intro. Still very rough because I have not narrowed down what exactly I want/need to cover. To my peer reviewer: if you have any insight on other topics I should research for this article, feel free to suggest!))
These seem to be coming from Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Carleton University/COMS4407 Critical Data Studies (Fall 2017), and there are many more elsewhere (I don't really have the time right now to go through all of them and discern what is viable). However, I am concerned with the apparent lack of oversight on these ill-advised page moves. Why are these not going through the WP:AFC process? Shalor (Wiki Ed), can you possibly expand on this? Nihlus 23:00, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I've recently seen a few users come into #wikipedia-en-help with the same problem. They're creating articles as their final assessment for a History 5B class at Yuba College, which requires that their articles be published to receive a grade. Obviously, the large backlog at AFC isn't helping with that, and a deadline of November 30th is causing the students to ask for faster reviews in IRC. With 26 students in the class, working in groups of 2 to 3, this problem will only magnify as time goes on. The two students I have interacted with on IRC are L3nn1e ( talk · contribs · count) and Pet Shopper ( talk · contribs · count), both creating articles about slave traders. There's also a few other users in the edit history that are likely a part of the class. It's a bit late for training and proper course design at the moment, but if someone more involved in teaching with Wikipedia could try to contact the professor, I think it would help prevent the students from having negative interactions here and prevent future issues with the same class. -- AntiCompositeNumber ( Ring me) 03:35, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
This draft was brought to my attention on IRC as a possible copyvio. I asked the author, Vladimirfedun about it, and he told me it was an assignment for a class. I asked him to ask his professor to reach out here, but is there anything else I should be doing? It's definitely over the WP:NOTAWEBHOST line, and if there's more coming I'd prefer to nip it in the bud. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 06:53, 28 November 2017 (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 10 | ← | Archive 15 | Archive 16 | Archive 17 | Archive 18 | Archive 19 | Archive 20 |
I have just relisted Wikipedia talk:URice University/Poverty, Justice, Human Capabilities Section 1 (Fall 2013)/WikiProject & Talk Contributions#Requested move 7 August 2017 and would welcome input there from those experienced in the Education program. TIA Andrewa ( talk) 08:06, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
"Move" is not support to/from the education program namespace. If this needs to be in the EP courses format, it will need to be recreated there. — xaosflux Talk 11:57, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:URice University/Poverty, Justice, Human Capabilities Section 1 (Fall 2013)/WikiProject & Talk Contributions#Affected pages, and more input appreciated. Andrewa ( talk) 23:40, 16 August 2017 (UTC)
Hi all,
Just wanted to let you know that this week, Wiki Education Foundation published our last two months' worth of Monthly Reports. As always, they're available in three formats.
Let me know if you have any questions. -- LiAnna (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 16:20, 25 August 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
115.164.91.48 ( talk · contribs)
115.164.91.48 ( talk) 05:41, 28 September 2017 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Vickythefamous ( talk · contribs)
Not done Insufficient experience to be granted this right -- There'sNoTime ( to explain) 11:49, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
41.77.91.207 ( talk · contribs)
Not done Unregistered users cannot be assigned this right -- There'sNoTime ( to explain) 11:48, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
41.77.91.203 ( talk · contribs)
Not done Unregistered users cannot be assigned this right --
There'sNoTime (
to explain)
11:49, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi all,
Let me start off with the TL;DR: We're no longer going to support large multi-section classes with TAs, and we've instituted internal monitoring and review processes for courses editing on controversial subjects.
For those of you who want a longer explanation, you may remember we had some challenges this spring with environmental justice classes at UC Berkeley. It was a large six-section class working on controversial subjects, and it resulted in several incidents. At the time, Wiki Education cleaned up the problematic student work and promised to spend some time in the summer evaluating our course selection processes to see if we could make some changes to head off problems like this from happening again.
There were a few factors that were potentially problematic about the class:
In July, we were grateful to have the professor, Michel Gelobter, join us in our offices to meet in person to discuss the class and what went wrong. We also dug into our records of courses we’ve supported in the last few years, looking at outcomes from large classes, classes split into sections led by TAs, and classes where students edited in controversial subject areas. We’ve supported dozens of courses in each scenario, and so we were able to look for patterns in what we saw. Based on the feedback from Michel and looking at the outcomes from a variety of classes, we have decided to make some changes.
First, we will no longer support extensive Wikipedia assignments in multisection courses where the sections are run by TAs or different instructors, regardless of the course's size. We've found that it's this factor, rather than just the size of the class, which is most likely to contribute to negative outcomes. Communication issues between instructors, TAs, and Wiki Education make these classes particularly challenging to work with, and the quality of content that has come from them does not justify the extra staff time we need to spend on them, nor the rate of incidents with students that community members have brought to our attention. They also become particularly challenging to manage when an incident arises because of the multiple instructors/TAs. We will support these classes only if instructors are asking students to make minor edits (e.g., copyediting, adding references, or adding images).
Second, we will continue to support multisection courses if every section is taught by the same instructor. In such cases, we will treat the class in the same way we do a single-section large class, which involves additional screening and monitoring. We will also continue to support courses with 100 students or fewer with TAs as long as the course is not broken into sections. Note that we still do not support extensive assignments for very large classes of more than 100 students, no matter the number of sections unless the extensive assignment is optional and only a handful of students undertake the larger project.
Finally, we have set up processes internally so that we can provide more oversight to classes working on controversial subject areas. Some of our students have made very well-developed, neutral, well-cited contributions to articles in controversial subject areas. But we need to be better about understanding the community's perspectives and concerns about topic areas students may edit, as well as the intentions and positions of the instructors and students. Thus, we have put a few things into place, including:
We’re also wrapping up projects to revise some of our training slides and handouts we provide students to ensure that they’re getting the best information possible about how to make positive contributions to Wikipedia.
We greatly appreciate the feedback we've received from community members and welcome any questions or comments you may have about these new guidelines. Improving the quality of Wikipedia content remains our chief goal, and we hope that these new guidelines will ensure that we only support courses well-suited for a Wikipedia assignment, who can help us all on our mission to improve the encyclopedia. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 19:57, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
Hello educators. I came across User:PreranaD/sandbox, User:PreranaD/Mass Media in Canada (sandbox) and User:PreranaD/Mass Media in Canada which have text which was later used to create an article Mass media in Canada as part of a class assignment. Is there some reason that these old stale drafts should not be blanked? The text is well out of date now.— Anne Delong ( talk) 04:49, 12 September 2017 (UTC)
I am a history teacher who is in the process of having one of my classes create an article on our high school. Through this we are using several personal interviews from our principal, superintendent, etc. Whenever I use this they get flagged as not verifiable. Is there a way I can still use these sources for the project?
Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by IsaacGoff ( talk • contribs) 13:43, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
{{ User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}
Moheen Reeyad ( talk · contribs)
~Moheen (keep talking) 21:38, 20 August 2017 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Done -- There'sNoTime ( to explain) 11:50, 6 September 2017 (UTC)
I've noticed that some users, who are obviously students in the Wiki Ed program, do not have their user pages tagged as such. An example is Ameliacanas, who is a part of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Boise State University/Introduction to Media (Fall 2017) and has edited the course page. – Train2104 ( t • c) 00:23, 21 September 2017 (UTC)
Hey educators--see the user page. Apparently the instructor is telling them to work in teams, which is fine--but they shouldn't share an account, of course. Your help is appreciated. Drmies ( talk) 00:47, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
Right now, we're running the six-month ACTRIAL. It was announced at WP:VPT, but I decide to re-announce this here. How would the ACTRIAL impact student assignments? What will teachers and students who find out about the trial do about the temporary restriction on article creation? -- George Ho ( talk) 07:08, 22 September 2017 (UTC)
Hi! I'm an old-timer -but inactive- wikipedian from es.wikipedia,org (very active for a few months, first in 2004, then again in 2010). Improving Wikipedia via assignments has always interested me, and indeed I was actually also a little involved in the early wikiversidad/wikiversity, back in 2004. I'm starting a small thing in the next few days: 40 Master students (Theoretical and Computational Chemistry), in groups of 5/6, and each group only editing a small article, so only 7/8 articles involved. My subject is tiny (6 hours!), and so will be the homework, so once the deadline comes near they won't edit for very long (unless they like the community and decide to stay on their own!). I understood (and heartfully agreed with) the pillars of Wikipedia from my first time here, so I think this will be non-problematic: the priorities of Wikipedia go first, so they will do all work on their user pages/sandboxes and only edit the real text (if at all, since this will not be required for grading) once I have verified its quality. Additionally, the class I coordinate is not about Chemistry but about Writing and Communication, so also from that point of view my priority is their ability to craft high-quality, concise texts, rather than quantity. Since I've been gone for such a long time, I only knew about WP:ASSIGN and outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org yesterday (we're in Europe, so this is the one we should use, right?). I'll be preparing a course page today and tomorrow and have the students sign in on Thursday. Is there anything else I need to urgently take into account? Thanks! 4lex ( talk) 06:04, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
Thanks again. It's so easy to recall why I loved it here: I leave for 7 years, come back, it's not even the same location and people still make me feel at home :) I created the course here: University_of_Valencia/XIIthTCCM-CS. I don't really know the tools I will be using, though, so I'll still be welcoming advice. I'll try to play around a bit tomorrow, and keep reading some more on the pitfalls to avoid. I do think I understand how to behave around here (as in: be useful rather than troublesome/disruptive). My only real worry is that it's 40 people I don't know and which I will meet only briefly, meaning I can't predict their reactions and personality, and I'll only have a limited influence on their behavior... 4lex ( talk) 20:31, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
{{
PD-chem}}
).Seppi333 ( Insert 2¢) 01:38, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)
Hi, I am running a student wikipage creation project at LIUC, Castellanza, Italy. This is the fourth year we've run this, and in the past it has resulted in some excellent new pages (not without some issues!). In a past year I had an educational course page. Last year I applied for one and flagged the request on the student draft talk pages, but never heard back about it. Is there anything anyone can do to help me here, so I can just flag the draft pages up as an educational project on the respective Talk pages? Many thanks! Limelightangel ( talk) 07:55, 5 October 2017 (UTC)Limelightangel
I realise that the creation of articles by students for some type of class project is beneficial to Wikipedia and instructional for the students. I am in favour of Wikipedia being used by students to further their education, but I am concerned by how some of their activities impact the rest of the community; in particular, when their activities seem to end up with the articles they have been working on being nominated to GAN or DYK.
With regards to GAN, an article produced by a student may not match up to the GA criteria. In particular, a class on say "Animal behaviour" is likely to produce articles heavy on behaviour and light on distribution, description etc., which is needed to fulfil the criterion 3a "addresses the main aspects of the topic" and 3b "stays focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail". A conscientious GA reviewer will likely fail their nomination as a result, but even worse, there being a considerable backlog at GAN, the student is likely to have moved on to other coursework by the time the review takes place and there will be nobody available to make any improvements necessary to attain the GA standard. For example, in the "Biology and medicine" section of GAN, a backlog of about ten articles awaiting review suddenly swelled to about forty a few months ago. This is discouraging for other members of the community who find their own nominations waiting for review for much longer periods than they otherwise would.
The situation at DYK is somewhat similar. Students do not have a QPQ requirement when they nominate their articles as they are first time nominators, so their nominations swell the backlog of large numbers of unreviewed nominations. The students do not know the DYK rules and therefore do not conform to them. Thirty or so nominations on some obscure topic (plate tectonics, social insects, etc.) tend to sit around unreviewed for some time, and when they do get reviewed, the students are no longer editing and therefore do not respond to concerns. The course requirement seems to have been nominating their articles for DYK, rather than piloting them through to promotion.
So I am fine with student projects using and contributing to Wikipedia, but find problematic the objective of nominating the articles for GAN or DYK as a course requirement. I would be interested in the views of others. Cwmhiraeth ( talk) 10:56, 9 August 2017 (UTC)
I'm very glad to see this timely discussion and endorse the views and experiences of other GA and DYK editors, along with the practical and sensible replies of the WIKI Ed staff. I hope that these attitudes will be embedded in future courses. Chiswick Chap ( talk) 13:34, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
I added a DNAU tag to this section a while back pending an update. We're still in the [long] process of updating materials (instructor training is still in progress), but we've talked about this matter of DYKs and GAs quite a bit now. It looks like the primary impetus for this section was a class which did not indicate to us that all students would be going through DYK, but which then did. In general, however, we bring up DYK and GA in the training because we want to know who will be attempting these processes (which instructors often discover on their own anyway). When someone indicates interest, the class is flagged to us. Importantly, this is so that, in most cases, we can discourage them making it part of the assignment, and to ensure it's not part of students' grades (a condition that we will not support). In other words, by telling instructors about DYK/GA up front, we can intervene to ensure it's done responsibly, discourage it in many cases, and/or monitor submissions in others. When coached properly, there have been many students and instructors who have finished the class with DYKs and GAs. "Many" is relative, though, since it's uncommon they're attempted at all an even more uncommon that they're attempted without us knowing about it. As with any situation in which a class engages in an activity when we don't know about it, we can only try to then intervene with the instructor, try to help with any ongoing on-wiki issues, and try to take measures to avoid it happening again. If you see students submitting articles to DYK/GA -- or, even more importantly, if you see it built into an assignment -- please let us know here and/or ping the Content Expert linked from the course page. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 16:19, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
Today there was a brief flood of edits via dashboard.wikiedu.org that blanked article talk pages and replaced them with just a course assignment template. This was due to a bug, now fixed, that treated API failures the same way as blank pages, combined with a edit job queue that had built up because a process needed to be restarted: when I restarted the job queue processing, it resulted in a large number of edits and API activity in a short time, which resulted in hitting a rate limit for fetching page content, which in turn led to treating article talk pages as already blank, even though they were not. The dashboard had never hit that kind of rate limiting before, so this bug stayed hidden until now. Apologies for the disruptive edits! Wiki Education staff have cleaned all the ones that other editors didn't fix already. -- Sage (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 17:26, 10 October 2017 (UTC)
Hello is anyone from wikied able to get a dev to check in to phab:T166109, it was just reported again on WP:VPT. — xaosflux Talk 12:12, 12 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi all,
In recent months, there have been a few discussions in which people made suggestions regarding the tools and materials Wiki Ed uses to support instructors and students editing Wikipedia. Since the discussions came up during the time when students are most actively editing, we pledged to return to them over the summer.
This week we begin the first phase of this process, looking at how the Dashboard timeline could be improved. The timeline acts as a sort of extension of a class's syllabus, breaking the assignment into a series of steps, incorporating milestones and supplemental assignments, linking to training and other resources. Please note that the timeline does not itself include the training or handouts, which will be the subject of subsequent threads.
An overview of the Dashboard timeline:
When an instructor creates a course on the Dashboard, they go through a series of steps to generate a timeline. Anyone so inclined can go through these steps by logging into the Dashboard using OAuth, though first-time users (almost always new instructors) have to go through an orientation. Here's the gist of the steps it involves: entering basic information about the course, selecting an assignment type (the standard "create or expand an article" can be supplemented or replaced by smaller assignments like an article critique, copyediting, or contributing to Commons), questions about assignment specifics like whether students will work in groups, and options for additional off-wiki assignments like a blog or reflective essay.
If you would just like to see a timeline with nearly every module included, here is an example on our Dashboard testing site.
Though any feedback regarding the timeline is appreciated, at this time we are looking for ways the text and/or organization of material could be improved in the timeline, rather than adding new technical features, etc.
Pinging users involved in semi-recent discussions. Apologies if I omit anyone, and please let me know if you would rather not be pinged in the future. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 17:36, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Pings
|
---|
@ Bri, David Tornheim, Excirial, Fuhghettaboutit, I am One of Many, Jytdog, Kingofaces43, Marchjuly, NewsAndEventsGuy, Opabinia regalis, and RexxS: @ Robert McClenon, Seraphim System, Seraphimblade, The Wordsmith, TonyBallioni, Train2104, and Tryptofish: |
Every article has a Talk page where Wikipedia editors discuss changes. This is where students can propose edits, ask questions, and get feedback."
I don't have time to review the whole thing, and I've forgotten which discussion I participated in that would have put me on the ping list :) But if you want a general opinion, I think the most common problem with student editing (admittedly a biased sample of what I happen to notice) is not that they're unfamiliar with Wikipedia mechanics, but simply that they don't know their topic well. They tend to get a lot of templates and talk page lectures and whatnot, but the underlying problem isn't "you used a primary source and should have used a secondary one" or "your references aren't formatted right" or whatever, it's that they don't know enough about the subject to choose a source other than "I Googled and this is what I found" or "it was in the course reading list". I know that this is supposed to be the "how to edit Wikipedia" component and the instructor is responsible for content, but I really think that part of the guidance for instructors should encourage them to get students to write about parts of the course they've mastered, rather than content they'd never heard of till last week's lecture.
On the stuff in the timeline...
Opabinia regalis ( talk) 21:30, 12 July 2017 (UTC)
@ Jytdog: I left the DNAU tag in this thread because you gave a lot of thoughtful feedback about the instructor orientation before we were ready to start the process of updating it and I didn't want to lose it. Student training and the timeline was the priority, but we'll likely be able to make minor changes to the instructor orientation soon. This message is just to let you know that I'm removing the DNAU tag (this page is getting a little long), but I've gone through your feedback in detail and have pulled some concrete suggestions as well as topics for discussion from your notes. I'll give you a heads up when we follow through. -- Ryan (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 15:44, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
Please remind students explicitly that article evaluations belong in sandboxes, and that only completed articles are to be moved to mainspace. I must have moved back over a dozen article evaluations since this semester started. – Train2104 ( t • c) 03:10, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
students keep creating essays that don't even pretend to be articles on their user sandboxs. Some do pretend to be articles. And I've been deleting then per U5.03:58, 16 October 2017 (UTC) Dlohcierekim ( talk) 03:58, 16 October 2017 (UTC) Someone, for instance, submitted this via AfC-- User:Idlc123/sandbox Dlohcierekim ( talk) 04:14, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
@ Samantha (Wiki Ed):. I'm sorry. I will retrive and post here,as I should have in the first pace, 23:07, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
If the user page has a link to the WikiEdu dashboard, can I assume they know how to constructively edit? Dlohcierekim ( talk) 06:20, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
A few days ago, I was checking my watchlist and found this edit to the French Polynesia article, in which a user replaced a citation needed tag with a circular reference that had copied its text from Wikipedia. I initially thought it was reference spam, but after a bit of digging, I found out that it was a student at the course University of California, Berkeley/Berkeley Interdisciplinary Research Group on Privacy - Coleman Lab (Fall 2017) using Citation Hunt. I'm concerned about the use of this tool by Education Program students. I found the following similar edits from the same course:
Then, the very next day, I found this edit to Kangaroo Island from a student at the course California State University, East Bay/Medical Humanities (Fall 2017). It's a resonable source except it doesn't even mention the 2005 report that is prominently mentioned in the article text.
In general, I'm very concerned about the accuracy rate of these edits (one in six in this case) and the suitability of this tool for newer editors when used outside of their subject areas of study. Even as an experienced editor, I wouldn't feel comfortable adding citations to a random statement in an unfamiliar subject area unless it was very obvious and uncontroversial (for example <randomperson> attended XXX High School). I therefore don't think students should be given the option of using this tool (as they are on the two course pages linked above), or if they do an exercise like this, they should be steered towards subjects they know something about. I'd appreciate any thoughts on this. Graham 87 06:15, 9 October 2017 (UTC) +
{{
citation needed}}
" or "{{
Unreferenced}}
" would solicit more generally. These kinds of mistakes, in my opinion, should be prompting questions like "Why don't more of our readers "get" what kind of source material we use?" and "Why don't new editors know what is appropriate to site?". As I
have argued elsewhere (
slides), Verifiability is something we value quite widely in our community, yet is something we don't communicate very well to our audience.
Astinson (WMF) (
talk)
17:19, 10 October 2017 (UTC)I've just found another student editor, this time from the course Lakehead University/Global Africa (Fall 2017), trying to add exactly the same reference to the French Polynesia article that sparked this concern in the first place. Graham 87 06:13, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
Not entirely sure where to post this, but it probably affects a lot of references and article space content on biomedical research. prokaryotes ( talk) 21:31, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
Sometimes it involves semi-private companies that refuse to disclose anything for fear of reputation or financial damage. The biggest factor by far is pride and fear of reputation damage. Another contributing issue is pressure to publish, with researchers not having the time or money to verify their cell cultures adequately before they begin their research.
Over 30,000 Published Studies Could Be Wrong Due to Contaminated Cells
I propose that Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Incidents be made a redirect to this page, Wikipedia:Education noticeboard.
@ Jbmurray: established the "incidents" page from the main education noticeboard in November 2013. At the time, the Wiki Education Foundation had recently incorporated and there were many new classes coming to Wikipedia. There was hardly any training and coordination and responding to all the students and classes was impossible with the on-wiki volunteer resources at hand. Wiki Education suddenly brought lots of new classes to Wikipedia, and in fearful anticipation, the community asked them to arrange for notices to appear at the education noticeboard for each class. Since the community had been unable to adequately manage the classes already on wiki, there was great worry that an organization bringing even more classes in could do so without major community disruption. At first it was possible to look at all classes doing Wikipedia projects, but now after 4 years there are so many thousands of students participating at any time that no single human can monitor them all. Wiki Education has since moved all class notices to Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Wiki Ed course submissions because the main noticeboard had become unusable with all the bot notices. So far as I know, no one reads that page just because problems are fairly uncommon and Wiki Education oversees the groups which they recruit to Wikipedia.
Because Wiki Education class notices no longer appear at the main noticeboard, there is not much traffic there. Because of this, I would like to propose a return to Wikipedia noticeboard norms, where there is one noticeboard for any kind of general discussion. The main board and the incidents board should merge to become one discussion forum. If in the future that gets too complicated, anyone can propose to split noticeboards again. Problem incidents of the sort which the incidents noticeboard was made to identify are best on the main page, which is how most noticeboards work.
Also, to confirm, the education noticeboard should be for discussion of any class engagement in English Wikipedia, regardless of country. Wiki Education is focused on the United States and Canada, but from a community volunteer perspective, we support any class in any country which is improving English Wikipedia. Thoughts from others? Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:39, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
I see that the bot archived the proposal to merge WP:ENI into this page, before an outcome was determined. It seems to me that there was a clear consensus to do that, so maybe someone, preferably an admin, should go ahead and enact that. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:35, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
Goes to the defunct Ambassadors page. I wonder if it shouldn't to Wikipedia:Student assignments instead? Jytdog ( talk) 20:49, 23 October 2017 (UTC)
Dear all:
In keeping with the idea of involving students with the Wikipedia, I have been encouraging some of my journalism students at the Goa University to share (assignment-based) images they have created related to literature, books and authors via Wikimedia Commons.
They have been doing a good job in my view, there is no copyright violation, and I'm sure this would be a useful asset to create and add to pages both in the English Wikipedia and also in smaller, fledgling initiatives like the Konkani Wikipedia [4].
Unfortunately, some bots have been knocking off such content, which is really demoralising to the students who are trying their best. One case in point is Saiee D. on the page below [5] who writes: "I uploaded pictures of printing presses and bookstores in Panjim [Goa]. But though I uploaded more than 16 pics, it went down to 12 and now there are only four remaining. Why are these getting removed, sir?"
Please could you help to encourage well intentioned young contributors? They are our future...
Frederick Noronha +91-832-2409490 On Wikipedia: Fredericknoronha (user since circa 2006)
Dear all: I could take care of any copyright violations. But please could someone help with the somewhat arbitrary deletion of photos? Do I need to alert someone about our students' involvement? Isn't it worth encouraging students to contribute? fredericknoronha ( talk) 13:44, 29 October 2017 (UTC) Fredericknoronha
There are multiple IP accounts editing at that page, who appear to be in an unregistered class project: [6], and who seem to be having a tough time of it, largely because they seem unaware of how things work here. It would be great if WikiEd would look into this and reach out to the class. Thanks. -- Tryptofish ( talk) 21:25, 28 October 2017 (UTC)
There appears to a course at University of Kentucky pharmacology school that has a class assignment.
are the ones I have come across so far. Perhaps folks from the education program could reach out to the instructor? Jytdog ( talk) 17:55, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
Generally I think the education outreach is fantastic idea. However, the FAQ and other materials that provide guidance on designing assignments should include a section on Things to Avoid When Designing Assignments. For example, instructors should make certain students do nothing at article talk - zip zero nada - unless the assignment involves sticking around the article to make changes to article text, which may involve back-and-forth dialog with established eds who have the article watch-listed. Per the established talk page guidelines, an article talk page is only for discussions that genuinely seek to improve article text. Collecting drive by homework assignments in the form of suggestions from people who have no skin in the game of article text is outside the scope of article talk. In my view, such homework can be deleted as WP:SPAM because the ed who posts them is WP:NOTHERE to build article text but to check a box off on their class assignment. Students are not acting in bad faith of course but the practice inadvertently abuses the volunteer time being invested by real editors who have the talk pages watchlisted. Here is a current example (apologies for picking on this class and instructor... by this criticism I mean to welcome and improve your course experience and hope you do another in the future!)
On one hand many new sets of drive by suggestions may turn up important things to work on. The problem, however, is assigning the posting of a driveby remark is very annoying and sucks enormous time from established eds who expect to engage people who are going to actually work on articles. Alternative 1 Have students post these sorts of suggestions on their own user talk. They can still do peer review/grading of the posted suggestions. Alternative 2 Have students post proposed edits at article talk and have them graded on their follow through, however it unfolds, in the WP:BRD process. Alternative 3 in the example course I am picking on (sorry about that once again) reverse the order of the Week 4 and Week 5, to extent students could first make article edits, and later defend them if they are reverted via BRD process, or if the edits are not reverted, students could find some current WP:RFC, load the debate into their brain, and then cast a well reasoned WP:NOTVOTE. Conclusion There are probably many more alternatives, but I do think we need a Things to Avoid When Designing Assignments section and in that section frown on using article talk to post homework in the form of driveby "suggestions". Unless pagewatchers will receive salary as teaching assistants, then I might feel differently about it. NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 14:09, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
Appreciate this being moved here for wider input. I'm not deep into this project. One thing should be simple- Adding to the first stuff any intstructor sees concise bold statement that
The only opposing argument I have heard is that potentially valuable ideas posted in student driveby remarks would be lost. We can solve that without cramming driveby reviews down regular editors throats and robbing them of valuable time. Simply have students include the right template or tags in their one-off comments in their userspace. If they format them correctly with the article name, we should be able to code a log of student name, course, article, and DIFF with the one-off remark, and let the header of the article talk page get an automatic template that such material exists. In this way, its all indexed and eds who want to review such material can easily find it. Sort of like an article specific hashtag "#StudentDriveBy". If these templates and tags do not yet exist, maybe an outline of the desired behavior could be posted to the technical side of VPump or other venue, trying to get help from the coders among us. Thanks for listening. The climate pages are popular target areas for this sort of thing, and that's one of my main interests so I do see this a lot. Hence my effort at reforming the way this is done. Thanks to all of you for your effort on this awesome project! I am a big fan, despite all my words over this one pet peeve. NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 22:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC) NewsAndEventsGuy ( talk) 22:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
Hi everyone. For those interested, Wiki Education's Monthly Report for September 2017 is now available on Commons as a PDF, on Meta, or on our blog. Please let me know if you have questions. -- Cassidy (Wiki Ed) ( talk) 18:52, 9 November 2017 (UTC)
Please see User talk:Dodger67#"Insufficient context for those unfamiliar": what's missing?, I'd be grateful if you can give some advice to the OP as it's quite outside my comfort zone. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 07:22, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
I've just placed 2 weeks of ECP on:
due to repeated copyvios resulting from what appears to be a class assignment. As far as I can tell, it's only spread to a few articles so far but I don't know how widespread this is -- I vaguely remember bits and pieces popping up on CopyPatrol. MER-C 12:20, 10 November 2017 (UTC)
One of the things I do is check for article categories that contain non-articles (e.g. pages in the Wikipedia namespace). I'm repeatedly finding that pages such as Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UMBC/Language in Diverse Schools and Communities (Fall 2017) are being inadvertently placed in article categories. When a talk page (for example) is inadvertently placed in an article category this only needs to be fixed once - however, these Wiki Ed pages are repeatedly being pasted in with the inadvertent category tag (why does this copy-pasting need to be done? has the en wp community given approval to it?). This causes unnecessary work for editors who fix categorization problems as well as potentially confusing anyone using these Wiki Ed pages. Please can you ensure that an appropriate change is made to technology/processes to ensure that adding incorrect references to categories in these pages is stopped. DexDor (talk) 06:30, 6 November 2017 (UTC)
Hello! I'm afraid there have been some serious WP:COPYVIO issues with this course. I'm hoping that the folks here at WikiEd would perhaps provide some more guidance to the students and instructor. Besides the COPYVIO issues there is a quality issue to the articles they are moving into main space. Many of these wouldn't pass at WP:AFC. These articles read more like essays than encyclopedic entries. Of particular note Am12827 just recieved their final warning for COPYVIOs from Oshwah despite multiple warnings on their talk page. I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of oversight this class appears to have. Can y'all address these issues before more work is created for editors like Chrissymad who appear to be cleaning up after this course? -- Cameron11598 (Talk) 18:19, 13 November 2017 (UTC)(UTC)
Hi, I'm the professor of the class. I wish you'd be a little less snarky in your comments about my work with the class. It's the third time I've taught with Wikipedia, and I recently moved to a new institution where students are clearly struggling to conform to Wikipedia standards. Like you, I'm trying to think about how to do a better job in preparing students to become Wikipedia editors. And now I feel quite discouraged that my students and I will be publicly shamed for our efforts. I'm doing the best I can and have carefully attempted to walk students through the protocols of using Wikipedia. It's a bit discouraging when you act like we're just creating problems for you as the 'cleanup crew.' I await more productive dialogue. Cz17 ( talk) 20:00, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
I do not find it discouraging that Wikipedia has no wiggle room for copyright violations. That is as it should be. I had more of a problem with the "coming out swinging" attitude but I have heard that this can be an issue among Wikipedia editors. Not a problem, I am now in conversation with Shalor and thank you for your contributions to the Wikipedia community. Cz17 ( talk) 20:45, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
Hi! I'm one of the project's typo fixers. I've noticed that about 100 course pages have appeared on my latest work list because they contain the grammar error Leave suggestions on on the Talk page of the article, with an extra "on" ( example). Apparently this is copied in from dashboard.wikiedu.org somehow. Does anyone know how to correct the master copy of this text? -- John of Reading ( talk) 18:22, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
These articles have all been recently moved by students into mainspace with some glaring issues:
(Possible info to be contained in my article intro. Still very rough because I have not narrowed down what exactly I want/need to cover. To my peer reviewer: if you have any insight on other topics I should research for this article, feel free to suggest!))
These seem to be coming from Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Carleton University/COMS4407 Critical Data Studies (Fall 2017), and there are many more elsewhere (I don't really have the time right now to go through all of them and discern what is viable). However, I am concerned with the apparent lack of oversight on these ill-advised page moves. Why are these not going through the WP:AFC process? Shalor (Wiki Ed), can you possibly expand on this? Nihlus 23:00, 16 November 2017 (UTC)
I've recently seen a few users come into #wikipedia-en-help with the same problem. They're creating articles as their final assessment for a History 5B class at Yuba College, which requires that their articles be published to receive a grade. Obviously, the large backlog at AFC isn't helping with that, and a deadline of November 30th is causing the students to ask for faster reviews in IRC. With 26 students in the class, working in groups of 2 to 3, this problem will only magnify as time goes on. The two students I have interacted with on IRC are L3nn1e ( talk · contribs · count) and Pet Shopper ( talk · contribs · count), both creating articles about slave traders. There's also a few other users in the edit history that are likely a part of the class. It's a bit late for training and proper course design at the moment, but if someone more involved in teaching with Wikipedia could try to contact the professor, I think it would help prevent the students from having negative interactions here and prevent future issues with the same class. -- AntiCompositeNumber ( Ring me) 03:35, 23 November 2017 (UTC)
This draft was brought to my attention on IRC as a possible copyvio. I asked the author, Vladimirfedun about it, and he told me it was an assignment for a class. I asked him to ask his professor to reach out here, but is there anything else I should be doing? It's definitely over the WP:NOTAWEBHOST line, and if there's more coming I'd prefer to nip it in the bud. ♠ PMC♠ (talk) 06:53, 28 November 2017 (UTC)