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We have this page Social_determinants_of_health_in_poverty. This user from the Rice University did a number of things right. They posted to WT:MED before beginning however did not follow up much of the feedback [1]. They have unfortunately added some images that are copyright infringement. I posted here on April 10th User_talk:Lbockhorn#WHO_images and I removed the images in question. [2] They returned them. [3] I posted to their talk page again April 17th User_talk:Lbockhorn#The_images_you_are_using. They have responded once but have not removed the images they returned. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 22:11, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes the user in question decided to start a new page as the one on Social determinants of health was of poor quality. [5] We will need to get people improving existing content eventually. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 01:40, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
Considering the fundamental differences (that we have discussed above) between most academic writing, and writing for Wikipedia, what has the WMF or the Online Ambassadors or whatever or whomever is in charge of this business done to address the problem most seriously impacting Wikipedia in student editing: the fundamental issue of the correct use of primary and secondary sources in writing for Wikipedia? I doubt that most of our professors know the difference, and this is one of the most pressing issues resulting in most of the problems leading to AFDs, merge proposals, faulty DYKs, etc. (the others being copyvio/plagiarism and lack of responsiveness from students and professors, as well as ill-equipped online ambassadors). If the WMF wants to unleash a bunch of students on Wikipedia who have access to university journal databases, at least they could make a better effort to advise professors about the differences in writing primarily from secondary sources from the type of writing that is more typical of academia considered original research on Wikipedia.
It might also let the professors know that they have some obligation to follow their students' talk pages and their own course pages, and respond promptly to community concerns. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:21, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Frank that this program needs to be data driven. I think the development of how this data is collected and analysed need to have more community input though. We need to be looking at the actual individual edits rather than the amount of "texts that remains in Wikipedia". Is there some place that this is taking place or is here a good place to discuss? Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 01:34, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
There's a mess of moves to the wrong places in the student contribs here, from one of those problematic personality courses where a boatload of similar articles were created. I think it's going to need an admin to sort it out. It looks like s/he moved the article to an invalid user name. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:06, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
When Wikipedians nominate articles for DYK, GAN, FAC it is expected that they follow through. If real life events take precedence we have the decency to respond and express remorse as Anthony has done here [7] and would not consider further nominations before the previous one is settled.
This student nominated patient participation for DYK on April 4th. [8] and then does not respond to the request for further details both on the DYK page and their talk page. One April 18th they then begin a GAN of the same page [9]. I have started a brief GA review pending a response [10].
The question is what should be done to address this issue? I have seem multiple cases of the same last year. Should we require a minimum number of edits / duration of an account before people can apply to the review processes (500 edits or 2 months which ever is less)? This could than be programmed into the GA bot. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 17:16, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
The group we are having difficulty with are the ones that show up and start a DYK / GAN in there first 50 edits / first week of editing. I did not figure out that we had GAN until being here for a few months. I did not nominate my first GA until after editing for 6 month and making more than 4000 edits. This would address that issue. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 18:05, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
The suggestion of prohibiting DYK noms by students is silly. If there's a problem with floods of DYK noms about the same topic, alter DYK's rules to make no more than two related DYK's per front page batch or something like that. If there's a problem with DYK noms of shitty stubs, alter DYK's rules to prohibit shitty stubs. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 19:57, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
We agree that students are the victims in WMF's misguided venture (where professors and WMF employees are the problem, and hapless ambassadors-- the few of them we have-- can't cope), but students are not the only victims. The encyclopedia and editors who have to do the cleanup are the others.
"In case you want to talk directly to one of the victims", I'll write up my experiences. The only reason I haven't catalogued the extreme disruption I've encountered is that to do so, I have to point at the other victims making the faulty edits-- the students-- and it doesn't quite seem fair to make an example of student editors by creating a record of the issues. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 14:40, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Sigh, we should probably tone this down a few notches. We are all here to make Wikipedia better. I have not seen the above write up mentioned by Frank and will take some time to review them.-- Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:16, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
On average, these students added 1855 bytes of content that stayed on Wikipedia, compared to only 491 for a randomly chosen sample of new users who joined English Wikipedia in September 2011. These numbers establish that students who participate in the Wikipedia Education Program contribute significantly more quality content that stays on Wikipedia than other new users.
DYK is change resistant; their problems are their fault. The underlying dynamic there is that no one is "in charge" at DYK, like at FAC, no one is accountable, and so many are involved and no consensus for change is ever formed. I doubt we can affect anything at DYK, which is a forum that drives poor editing throughout Wikpedia, not only wrt the Education Program. It's "reward" aspects promote copyvio, forking of content to obscure topics, and quick-and-dirty poorly sourced articles of dubious notability. I don't believe we can change that, since the complaints have endured for years. The students are victims, granted credit for getting content displayed on the mainpage in a forum that should have been disbanded long ago.
The problem with your suggestion of creating a handout is that it doesn't address the problem at its core, as mentioned by Choess. Students are creating tangential articles, poorly sourced, based on primary research, term papers so that they have their "own" article, when what we need is article improvement more than dubious new content. I don't see JMH's proposal as addressing the issue at its core, but neither do I see your proposal doing that. The core problem is that professors are not well versed in writing for Wikipedia, based on secondary sources, and this problem is particularly crucial in the psych realm, where people's health is impacted, core articles aren't improved, and student essays and term papers using primary sources are promoting professors' research agendas.
By focusing on the core problems, we might better generate solutions, but DYK is its own problem. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:28, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
I like the GAN process and find that having a semi structured review process to verify quality is good for Wikipedia's quality of content and improves the credibility of the site in the eyes of others. And GA and FAs are definitely "rewards". Thus I do not believe all rewards are bad. It is similar to peer review in the academic press. Writing something that is peer reviewed is a greater academic reward than writing something that is not peer reviewed and most of the time is of better quality.
We just need to verify that the people applying to these processes are serious. If you where to write an article for the NEJM and did not reply to the subsequent peer review your reputation would be tarnished and you would lose your application fee. There are a number of measures we could introduce to verify that the people applying to DYK, peer review, and GAN are serious. We could require
But of course if those within these processes do not see there as being any problem than carrying on with the status quo until such time as change is desire is probably the best. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:45, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
OK, alternate proposal. Professors are advised that, when students are selecting topics, the first step is for them to do more background work than they are currently doing. If students, profs or online ambassadors had checked the contrib history on Klazomania or Echopraxia or Sociological and cultural aspects of autism, they would have seen I'm the main editor there. If they had asked if there was enough written on either of those topics to warrant expansion (on echopraxia, the specific topic selected was "in schizophrenia"), I could have told them there wasn't. And I could have guided them to a better area where they might have contributed. Suggest that they do a contrib history check on their selected topic, post to talk, post to WIkiProjects linked on talk, and post to contributing editors requesting feedback. If this proposal gains any traction, I'll offer other implementation ideas. This will also help address the problem that we rarely know when we're dealing with students, since they don't template article talk, and would bring in the assistance of experienced editors earlier in the process, so less time is wasted for everyone. If I know before they waste everyone's time that students want to work on X topic, I can guide them in ways that won't waste my time or their time. Further, that would put me in a position to counsel them as to whether their final product was a candidate worthy of GAN, DYK whatever. It might be a way to bring in experienced editors sooner-- right now, we have a mystery where articles and experienced editors are sandbagged, since they (Education Projects) are NOT templating talk pages as they should be, and they waste a lot of time in sandbox before presenting unacceptable text. Also, deal with the issue of who should be templating article talk-- I suggest it should be the professor, as that will also force them to engage more, as User:Jbmurray did. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 19:22, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
CBT has evidence equivalent to SSRIs for many conditions. I will leave it to you to decide how good that is :-) Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:55, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
I think there's a misunderstanding here. The problem of "some conflict between the research writing required by a lot of uni courses and encyclopedic writing", that "the articles that led to this discussion from that Personality course are an example. Original research and synthesis is the norm in the psych realm: it's a big problem ..." This is being misinterpreted. Papers written in a US university for a course are not meant to be encyclopedia articles and the standards are quite different. I think you'd find that the standards for peer-reviewed published articles in psychology are the same as in medicine. Graduate level psychology candidates write lots of "papers", which typically medical students don't. Top level psychology programs follow the Scientist–practitioner model also known as the Boulder model, a training model for psychology graduate programs that focuses on creating a foundation of research and scientific practice. However. there's lots of psychology programs that are not APA approved and don't teach the scientific method. There are Psy.D degrees and others that don't provide rigorous scientific training but focus on clinical practice. Does WMF (or whomever) check to see the educational objectives of the programs they allow to participate? A psych program emphasizes psychotherapy only would not be emphasizing the scientific method as accredited programs are required to do. MathewTownsend ( talk) 21:02, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
While I have been advising students not to attempt DYK or GA submissions, and would advise faculty not to encourage that type of submission except with exceptionally motivated students, even students who don't make such submissions sometimes have issues engaging with the community, e.g. if someone identifies issues with their article. I think campus/online ambassadors have the opportunity to play a valuable role here; students don't take random Wikipedians seriously because they have no connection to the course or to their final grade. One way to address the general issue is to have a small portion of their grade (say 5%) based on responsiveness to community engagement, and make the CA/OA personally responsible for evaluating this component of their grade. If a student is nonresponsive, the CA/OA can nudge them and remind them to respond, and because the student knows the CA/OA is evaluating them on this (and may directly contact their professor) they will be more inclined to listen. (If the student happens to have no interaction with the community they just get these points for free.)
More generally, I think we should apply pressure by contacting the teacher by talk page or e-mail when students are nonresponsive - if the teachers are themselves nonresponsive or uncooperative, that's a higher-level issue that can be backed up where necessary by threats of blocks/deletion (if students are ignoring policy/producing bad content). Ideally things would not get to that point, but I think forcing engagement with the community by whatever means necessary is essential. Dcoetzee 21:05, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Let me point out that we need to be careful about the distinction between copyvio and plagiarism. The latter is what's generally sanctioned. as far as I know, by schools. Straight cut-and-paste, as Sandy just mentioned, constitutes both copyright violation and plagiarism. However, I'd argue that student work off-Wikipedia probably includes a great deal of what we'd consider copyright violation here, such as certain uses of non-free multimedia content, or close paraphrasing. These are probably generally accepted in student papers or presentations for a class, first, because they might not be easily detected, and second, because the limited distribution of that material allows more latitude in terms of fair use. So a student committing copyright violation here might well be doing so inadvertently, and might not be in violation of academic practices in their schools. (By contrast, incorporating public domain text without attribution, which is not a copyright violation and seems to be acceptable, if not a good practice, on Wikipedia, would be considered plagiarism.)
There's no excuse for cutting and pasting copyrighted text into Wikipedia, much less edit warring to keep it, and I don't want to stand in the way of that (which seems to be the main subject here). But it would be wise to show a little more restraint in dealing with the other categories. Choess ( talk) 16:33, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
This is symptomatic of the way we see the laypress, PR, and unreviewed primary sources used to promote inaccurate information in Wikipedia articles:
Let's stick to the facts. Article quality improves by 64%, participants add three times as much quality content as regular new users ... Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) ( talk) 14:30, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Frank, I hope you have the analytical background to understand the flaws in this data, and why you shouldn't use them to assert fact. Further, how meaningful is it even if participants were adding quality content, considering the time this project is draining from established and knowledgeable editors, who could be adding even more and better content, if they weren't having to deal with the faulty editing? Once the term ends, and there is a good deal of time between when students are graded and when I summarize the issues I've seen so that students aren't affected by my criticism, I'd be happy to summarize the issues I've seen over the last year, and how much time it has costed me.
I'd much rather be spending my time on important unfinished or poor medical/psych topics that I've tackled of late-- PANDAS, cognitive behavioral therapy, endometriosis-- articles that actually matter to individuals' health-- then dealing with faulty student editing on obscure little viewed unimportant articles like klazomania, echopraxia, and autism spectrum disorders in the media. In the type of faulty data analysis you all are hyping, have you considered lost editor time, and that an article like klazomania only resulted because it's on my watchlist, and when the students mucked it up, I was obliged to fix it, even though no one ever reads or cares about that article? How exactly is the WMF measuring "quality" and "quantity"? Never mind, I've long had a good sense of who and what they value, and medical FAs ain't it. It would be wonderful if, whatever you come up with to deal with the issues that surfaced this term, they will deal with promoting the addition of well sourced valuable content, not articles that push one professor's POV towards the new version of DSM-5.
Here are the page views on the articles I'd like to be working on:
and here are the page views of articles that were on my watchlist before student editing affected them, so that I had to clean up:
It's good that these obscure articles provide a place for students to learn about Wikipedia: I'd be much more interested in seeing how many of these students who are "compulsory editors" actually stick around to add any meaningful content, and how WMF relates this to the time established editors could be spending creating meaningful content. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:51, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Am I allowed to ask here what is the process for dealing with a student editing project that has not joined the WMF Education Program, or will that add to my disruptive editcountitis because I so often encounter these issues that it is overwhelming staffers? What do I advise this professor, if anything? It's a problematic article, and the prof seems to have no idea what a secondary source is. This is an issue I encounter frequently (articles edited by students without enrolling in the program, or articles whose talk pages are not tagged as part of the US or Canada Education Program). Also, will WMF staff deal with this matter, or will that fall to Nikkimaria, who is already quite overworked? Are unenrolled student editing projects to be dealt with on this board, and if not, where? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:05, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Nikkimaria, for the attention to issues and responses above. As term-end approaches in Universities, my work to keep medical articles clean of information that has the potential to harm individuals escalates. What does the WMF prefer regular editors do to consolidate data in one place or bring to whomever's attention those courses, profs, and OAs who have not been responsive, in fact appear to be completely disengaged with Wikipedia? Do you have a centralized place for this kind of reporting, or will this board serve for that? It should not be "my job" to supervise this program, but because there is a huge number of psych courses introducing faulty text into medical articles (that affect real people, akin to WP:BLP), I am constantly faced with this, and would be happy if there were some central place-- such as this board-- for asking the WMF to deal with the situation of missing profs and OAs, so I don't have to struggle to educate all of their students when the prof doesn't respond on talk or the course page. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:08, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I really appreciate everyone participating in discussions here - it seems like the new noticeboard really fills a needed role and will enhance participation and transparency. However, I've noticed that there are two different types of discussion occurring here - general criticism of the education program, with broad, potentially disruptive suggestions for improvement, and reports of specific incidents requiring urgent attention. I originally imagined this board filling the latter role, and I want to figure out going forward whether we believe this board will be most useful serving both roles, or whether it should be divided into two forums for these two distinct categories of discussion (since some people may only be interested in one or the other). Even if it were split, it would still be possible to leave notifications here of relevant discussions occurring elsewhere. If the forum is split, I wonder whether a new forum should be created for general discussion (and if so where), or if an existing forum should be used.
My personal opinion is that (as on WP:ANI) discussion of incidents inevitably leads to discussion of general ideas and that attempts to relocate that type of discussion would be ultimately fruitless as it would creep back in. I also think there aren't enough volunteers with an interest in the education program at the moment that we could sustain two separate forums with a critical mass of participation. So I would elect to maintain this single noticeboard for the purpose. However I am a bit biased as I'm not as turned off by the general discussion and resulting watchlist spam as some others might be. Thoughts? Dcoetzee 22:03, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
I've just found this handout, which is probably one source of many of the problems I'm encountering on medical articles-- it does not explain the difference between primary and secondary sources, and doesn't mention WP:MEDRS at all, which is interesting considering the high number of psych courses or other courses whose topic areas included editing medical articles. I hope the sourcing handout will be updated for the next term. Finding secondary reviews of primary studies for medical articles in PubMed is not that hard, particularly for students who have access to journal databases, but we do need to explain the correct use of primary studies vs. secondary reviews to the professors and students. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-06-30/Dispatches Many of the profs seem to think that because journals are peer-reviewed, that means articles are secondary reviews. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:12, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
After multiple discussions on this page of the issues occuring in medical topics, I located a referencing handout that is linked to now, this term, in several courses that are editing medical articles (incorrectly), and made a concrete suggestion that it could be updated to include better information about how to edit medical topics. Several exchanges later, where it was denied that the lack of such info is part of the problem, it was eventually revealed that this information is, in fact, being updated-- information that might have been stated first, without all the interim denials of the problem. Yes, such communication style is bogging down this page's effectiveness. Yes, the "regular editor" (moi) has no means of knowing the PDFs are being updated since a lot involving the Education Program does not happen on wiki where all can see and follow, this information is coming from two editors whose involvement with the Education Program is unclear (yet they appear to speak with authority), and to date as far as I know, no WMF staff has weighed in on or even acknowledged the discussion or the problem. These kinds of issues have affected the Education Program since its inception. How are regular editors, non-staff or not part of these programs, to make suggestions for improvement? To avoid the denials and indirects that resulted above from a simple request to get better referencing information in to the hands of students and profs, can any WMF staff or person answer the query-- is there a plan or a way to get these handouts updated to include information about editing medical topics, so that the experience can be less frustrating for students, regular editors, and result in better content? Is there a role for an udpated guide specific to medical articles? Is there any reason for me to work on something like that, and with whom would I work and where? I would appreciate if those who don't or can't answer the question cease the indirects, in the hopes that WMF staff will respond. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:08, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
OK, ready to start on this now. My plan is to come up with a sentence or three, that Kevin could bomb as he mentions, and could be raised at that psych initiative, and might be added to the MediaWiki extension. (The psych articles are not the only problem: there are also issues with a Genetics class and multiple other medical classes that I can't identify at the moment-- it's also affecting plain vanilla medical articles.) Should I model the addition needed on what is currently at File:WikipediaReferencing.pdf, or is that not the best starting place? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:27, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
I think we have three main question 1) what do we expect from students / profs 2) what can we do to help guide students / profs in this direction 3) what actions do we wish to take with those who do not achieve our expectations after a reasonable effort.
This of course will be the most controversial and some may feel we do not need any additional tools to address concerns
Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 13:13, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Unless it's an IEP type situation, I cannot see rolling back an entire classes contributions without individually evaluating them. Likewise I can't see blocking an entire class. I would encourage quickfails at GAN and DYK, and have quickfailed some edu DYK's myself in the past. Stuart: unless all students in a class happened to be editing the same article, referring to them as meatpuppets would be greatly straining the ordinary definition of meatpuppet. In what other situation have we blocked 20+ good faith editors at a time whose editing patterns did not overlap just because they know each other irl and have a poor understanding of policy? Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:32, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I only recently started following this fascinating intersection of worlds—apologies for any redundancy. If it were me developing policy, I'd strongly discourage professors from involving any of Wikipedia's evaluation mechanisms (DYK, GA, C vs B class [lol]). It is enough for newcomers under deadlines to understand Wikipedia and develop articles consistent with WP's purpose. The "lesser" of the evaluation mechanisms I mentioned (and really, DYK isn't one anyway) may be arbitrary, subject to gaming, and aren't that meaningful; they are not in the least a replacement for independent evaluation in a course. The better of the evaluation mechanisms appear as a bridge too far given the very uneven results of these "education programs". Highlighting GAs or FAs as models for article development is one thing, but pushing students towards submitting to these projects may be unfair both to the student and to Wikipedia. A professor might say, "without reference to Wikipedia's methods of article evaluation, how will I know what's been accomplished?" Yet if these courses aren't about Wikipedia editing, then course evaluation must have much more to do with mastery of the subject than of Wikipedia policy, citation templates and wiki-code. Second, this seems really obvious, but it's not apparent from a quick scan of various courses that anyone is vetting them in advance for an answer to a simple question: will you be writing impersonal reports based on existing literature—suitable for an encyclopedia—or developing theses? Such consultation beforehand is the key, no? Riggr Mortis ( talk) 07:29, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=489488812#Possible_class_project_creating_essay-like_articles SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:05, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Here's a big ball of wax for contemplation.
So, OA not fully identified on the course page, passing one of the student's DYKs for that course. This is the kind of manipulation of consensus at review processes that has been discussed elsewhere. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:09, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Gotta go with Sandy here. :( If the Ambassadors do not understand the process, if they are intentionally passing content they should not, if the ambassadors are doing this because students are compelled to edit as grades matter, then there should absolutely be strong ambassador oversight for a classroom with Wikipedia project space. If the ambassador is not doing their job and students are moving content over and nominating content with ambassador approval (though consent or by not paying attention), the ambassador needs to undue it and bear the responsibility. This is NOT the fault of the students. This is the fault of the instructor and the fault of the ambassador. Given the examples we're getting, we should seriously consider blocking instructors and ambassadors who are asleep at the wheel, and give students topic area blocks where they cannot edit inside their assigned coursework area but explain we welcome their contributions elsewhere. -- LauraHale ( talk) 21:49, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Back to this topic, I also disagree with the moves to get students not to submit DYKs. In many cases, without DYK, the wider community would not have become aware of just how bad some of these student articles are. I suggest we should stop shooting ourselves in the foot by encouraging them not to submit: DYK can be a good first place to spot problems, and we should instead ask that DYK solve its long-standing quality control problems, that have been discussed at length for YEARS on talk. As long as DYK has no means of checking what it puts on the mainpage, and relies entirely on Nikkimaria to catch mistakes, we should 1) remind them that this is their problem, too and 2) not discourage students from using DYK, because it's the first stop where we're finding the extent of the problems in many courses. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:55, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
I do think that "students" should be treated just like any other editors. All that course stuff is for the Online Ambassadors, the Professor and others directly concerned with those education programs to take care of. Why are these editors considered a special group? Plenty of new editors edit every day. Why should those in the Education Program treated with kid gloves? Especially since they all ready have Online Ambassadors, Campus Ambassadors etc. to help them? Why? MathewTownsend ( talk) 21:46, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Later today when I'm at my real computer, I'll write up a bit more of what has been expected of the existing roles (CA, OA, etc) in the program as best I can. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 23:14, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
So far, the vast majority of negative stuff that has been brought up that deals with more than a single class or single incident has been related to sourcing standards on medical articles. Obviously, we currently have a hole in the way we present medical sourcing guidelines to classes. To make sure that other valuable feedback is not getting lost in the conversation about medical articles: has anyone else seen any other specific content related areas that we have similar systemic holes in? Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:39, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I had to move two articles (articles Mental health of refugee children and Mental health reform in North Carolina) as their article titles in the past didn't comply with Wikipedia standards. Reason? Overcapitalisation. If those people who lack the time to read Wikipedia's own rules and policies edit like this and cause disputes, this would happen:
• Edit warring and students who become edit warriors
• Move warring
• Conflicts with experienced users who knows more of the policies
• Personal attacks on experienced users and talk page misconduct (i.e. for example, "YOU REVERT MY EDITS? WHAT ARE THE RULES AGAIN, YOU TRASH!")
• Students getting topic-banned, banned and then blocked
• involvement of the MedCom and the ArbCom
• Sock puppetry by banned/blocked students
and all the others.
Wikipedia needs to have users and editors that follows policies. Hill Crest's WikiLaser (Boom). ( talk) 17:17, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm way too broad at things. I'm under legal adult age (don't guess it, or I'd get on the IRC and request oversight) And apparently, I'm using the IAR policy. My huge problems which get me embarrassed are biting newcomers and getting screwed up in front of professionals.
Here are the issues I intended to address:
• The article title disputes. I meant that the students learn from mistakes. However, the students almost never respond via their talk pages. Then they never respond... and never. I have no other way to contact any students. Gorman, that's how students learn Wikipedia policy (i.e. learn from mistakes). Since I notice I'm a <redacted personal info>, I get embarrassed if I was unclear. I may seem that I stress the facts. However, if conflicts do occur, a simple edit war doesn't show that productive activity but interruption and distraction from actually contributing to a potentially perfect article.
• Manual of Style. Right now, if conflicts occur, flaming on the MoS could be done by unexperienced users who rely on the academia for Wikipedia editing style.
• <pointless statement>
Even though this may seem unclear, I need some assistance to actually present this info to mean what I intend to say.
My argument in a nutshell: Edit and move warring, plus loss of consensus by any editor for adverse periods for the latter isn't doing anything to improve Wikipedia. It just springs a lot more conflicts into existance. Hill Crest's WikiLaser (Boom). ( talk) 03:18, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
Editors more experienced with the Education Program may want to take a look at this ANI thread; Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboard/Incidents#Uncommunicative school project. There appears to be a class from the University of Portsmouth in the UK working on articles on English villages for an assignment. The students have not been willing so far to let us know which class this is. I know that the UK chapter has been very active in working with academia so perhaps someone from the UK chapter might be able to connect with this class. GabrielF ( talk) 17:43, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
Developing a metric for determining student impact on Wikipedia processes.
1. Identify classes that have been involved on English Wikipedia. Divide them into five groups: A) Classes that participated within the USA/Canada framework who had a campus or online ambassador. B) Classes that participated within the USA/Canada framework who had an instructor who had extensive editing experience on Wikipedia. C) Classes that participated within the USA/Canada framework who had a zero guidance and the who did not use an ambassador. D) Classes that participated independently where their work was clearly structured around an instructor user page or some other instructor created space outside of the programme. E) Classes that neither utilized the programme, nor utilized other space.
These groups will be used for comparisons to measure the relative success of each group.
2. Amongst these five groups, identify if a class was involved in any of the following processes: In The News, Did You Know, Good Article, Featured Article, Featured Picture, Peer Review, in Wikiproject assessment, Articles for Creation and Articles for Deletion. In these categories, do the following:
A) For instructors:
i) Get the instructor's instructional objective and lesson plans specifically as they pertain to this assessment task. This includes criteria used for measuring this objective. Analyze specific instructional objective for how it aligns with the objectives of the assessment process. How well do they align? Compare the differences across all five groups.
ii) Get the instructor's syllabus, the whole course objectives and as possibly the curriculum standards for the course. Analyze the instructor's instructional objectives for the assessment process as it relates to the overall syllabus and curriculum standards. How well do they align? Compare the differences across all five groups.
iii) Find instructor's Wikipedia account. Track the volume of instructor edits during the period when their course was live, after and before overall. Track the number of edits made by instructors in the assessment processes, how many were made to their student related pages and to other pages.
iv) Survey the instructor asking how the they felt English Wikipedia assisted them in meeting core instructional objectives for their course. Also ask about their editing experiences in assessment processes.
v) Chart how instructors were involved with student work that was involved with assessment. How often did the ambassador edit the articles? Did they review a GA/DYK? If yes, what was the pass/fail rate by the assessment type? Was the instructor overturned? (GA pass taken to GAN. DYK ending up rejected. C class taken down to start. Tags removed by an instructor put back.)
vi) Chart how often instructor voted in things related to student work and how often this supported or opposed the final consensus view. (AfD, Merge, etc.)
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
B) For students:
i) Get all the support materials students were given prior to being required to work on an assessment related task from the instructor. Ask students what they were given.
ii) Track student edits before, during and after the course.
iii) How many total edits did a student make to their user page, to article specific talk page, and to article before submitting it for the assessment.
iv) Track the success percentage of students going through an assessment process. (Did their DYK appear on the main page? Did their GA pass?) If failed the assessment process, identify the cause. For example: Asssment process malformed, article had copyvios, article was not long or new enough, article not fully source, article not reliably sourced, article not notable enough.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
C) For ambassadors:
i) Graph their edits to various assessment processes before, during and after the course.
ii) Chart how ambassadors were involved with student work that was involved with assessment. How often did the ambassador edit the articles? How many comments did they make to a student's talk page? How many comments did they make to an article talk page? Did they review a GA/DYK? If yes, what was the pass/fail rate by the assessment type? Was the instructor overturned? (GA pass taken to GAN. DYK ending up rejected. C class taken down to start. Tags removed by an ambassador put back.)
iii) Chart how often ambassadors voted in things related to student work and how often this supported or opposed the final consensus view. (AfD, Merge, etc.)
iv) Survey ambassadors for their views on the various assessment processes, how often they participated prior to the class.
v) Collect all materials the ambassador were given before and during the course by the instructor to help the ambassador support the class.
vi) Ask ambassadors if they believe the student work helped students meet the stated course objectives. Ask ambassadors what percentage of student contributions they feel worked towards Wikipedia's ideals for content improvement.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
D) For people involved with assessment processes:
i) Get a list of people involved in an assessment area at the time a class was active. Find out which percentage of these editors were involved in classroom work. Find out the editing patterns for people involved in an assesment process: Which percentage of their assessment work involved students? What was the percentage before the class was involved? What was the percentage afterwards? What were the edit counts in their main contribution periods before, during and after a class was active? This is trying to determine the impact of student involvement on normal editing processes. (Did they neglect others because of students? Did they contribute less because of student supervision? Did they decrease editing as a result?)
ii) Survey people people involved with assessment and ask their feelings about being involved with coursework. Survey what they feel like it did to their other editing. Ask if about their motives and if it changed because of possibility of a student being given a grade for the assessor's work.
iii) Determine how often the person passed/failed a student's work. Track the reasons why it they did not pass a student's work.
iv) Compare the assessor's student pass/fail rate to the assessor's non-student pass/fail rate. Track the reasons they did not pass a contributor's work.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
E) Other contributors:
i) Identify contributors to articles used in the assessment process by students. Track the edits by those contributors to those articles before, during and after course involvement. Purpose is to determine local article specific editing changes.
ii) Track these contributors overall edit count totals to all articles before, during and after a course for contributors who had edited now student being worked on articles. Purpose is to measure how this impacted on their overall editing.
iii) Survey these contributors to ask how a class working on the article impacted their willingess to edit the article.
iv) Ask contributors where they would find information on student coursework if a contributor had questions about what was happening to an article.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
F) The assessment space:
i) Identify the volume of contributions to an assessment before, during and after an assessment process for totals. What percentage was student work?
ii) Identify lengths of times for assessment for student work and non-student work. How long before a work was assessed and by whom was it assessed? How long did the assessment take from start to finish?
iii) Identify at the overall pass/fail rate for articles before, during and after for student versus non-student work.
3. Analyze the above by comparing the five different groups with in specific assessment types and based on the different groups involved.
This will give an idea on if students are disruptive, how they are potentially disruptive, which groups are the least disruptive, how normal assessment compares to assessment done of student work, and how this impacts other contributor edits.
Is this a lot of work? Yes, but anything less than this really does not address the fundamental problems of how students disrupt community processes while at the same time measuring student success and instructor preparedness. -- LauraHale ( talk) 09:35, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Over the past several days, I've seen a number of new botany articles appearing from new accounts that appear to be part of a class project. Users in question seem to be:
Most have been working in sandboxes first, and I haven't seen any serious issues, other than some patches of copyvio on one of the articles (which have been fixed). I put one of the nicest articles through DYK. Still, there hasn't been much engagement (although I saw one come back to add a reference when a "citation needed" template was placed), and it would be nice if we had a point of contact to offer support. Choess ( talk) 16:06, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I just happened to see this on my watchlist, from a course that has given me fits. Wikipedia talk:United States Education Program/Courses/Writing As Communication Spring 2012#Gender representation in video games. I haven't looked any further into this-- just happened to see it because I've posted twice to that talk so it's on my watchlist, so posting it here (because profs don't seem to follow their course pages). I've discussed several of their other problematic articles in sections above, and there seems to be an absence of ambassadorship in that course. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 14:36, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
Anyone interested in the question of what the costs and benefits are of the education program may wish to look at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research and the associated talk page. I've posted an abbreviated version of my comments above at the talk page there. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:36, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
A key discussion taking place here is "Are the benefits of the Education Program outweighed by the problems it has caused?" Several editors have pointed out cases where the students have caused additional work for existing experienced editors, taking those editors away from the work they might otherwise have been doing. The Education Program also has its success stories -- articles that have been significantly improved by student contributions. We need to be able to measure both the quality of the students' work, and the burden they place on the community, if we want to understand whether the Education Program is a net benefit to Wikipedia. In addition, if it is a benefit to the encyclopedia, we'd like to understand what classes work well, and why, so that we can work to increase the quality of student work from each class, and decrease the burden placed on existing editors.
LiAnna Davis of the WMF asked Doc James and I to meet with her to come up with ideas about how to improve the metrics for the Education Program. Here are some suggestions as a result of that meeting. We'd like to get feedback: are these the right things to measure? And will this approach give us useful numbers?
First, article quality. Did a student's edits improve article quality or not? We suggest re-using the metric from the Public Policy Initiative. Two or three articles will be selected at random from each class in the EP, and an assessment page created. Volunteer editors will measure the article quality before and after. Doc and I have both volunteered to do this, but others would be welcome to help; it's not as timeconsuming as you would expect. The rubric for scoring is here, and an example assessment page is here.
The articles would be assessed at two different points: first, the "Pre" state, just prior to the student's first edit; second, the "Post" state, as it was after the student's last edit. This will give an initial estimate of how much value was added by the student.
The second metric is community burden. We propose to post a note on the article talk page, at the end of the semester, saying: "This article was edited by students as part of the Education Program. If you were involved in editing the article during the time the students were working on the article, we would like your evaluation of the students' involvement with the article." There would be a link to an assessment page where editors could record their opinion of the burden placed on them by the students' work on this article. We're thinking of a scale something like this (and the wording is very much a draft):
We could also post an invitation to this assessment on the talk pages of any editors who edited the article or article talk page after the student began editing. Note that the quality metric and burden metric would both be assessed on the same articles: that is, if an article is randomly selected to have a quality assessment it would also get a burden assessment.
We also discussed the relationship between a professor's understanding of Wikipedia and the likelihood that their class would be successful. We felt that it was likely that professors who are good content editors would be well positioned to design successful classes, but if we want to proselytize this point of view we need to gather data to prove that it's the case. The simplest relevant metric seems to be the article space edit count for the professor. We propose to track this number as well, and look for a correlation between this and student success.
Overall, a student's involvement with the Education Program would be regarded as a success if it gains significantly on the quality metric and does not bring with it a measurable burden on the community.
We'd like to get feedback on this approach. Should we go ahead and assemble draft assessment pages? Are there better ways to measure what needs to be measured? Are we measuring the right things? Please comment. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 15:57, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm going to write a combined response to the above, to save time and wordage. Laura, I have no credentials in education -- perhaps I should have made that clear to start with. I can tell you what my background is if you like, but rather than rely on credentials I'd prefer to argue, as you are doing, on the basis of the pros and cons of the suggested approaches. I agree with many of your points but my feeling is that, as with so much else on Wikipedia, we have to tailor the specifications to the labour force available, and although I think the metric program that you outline further down this page would provide very useful data I don't think it's feasible. The question is whether there is any overlap between what is feasible and what is worth doing. You seem to be saying that there is no overlap; I disagree -- I think it's possible to define a simpler set of data that is collectible and useful.
I should also have mentioned in my post that the WMF is plannning to gather some of the data you mention regarding the classes -- I would call this data about the inputs to the program: class sizes, class year, prior experience of professor, support available from OAs and CAs, and so on. If we can find a way to usefully measure the impact, or output, then there may be some interesting correlations there. LiAnna might be able to add some detail; I don't know any more about it than this but I was glad to hear that this data is being gathered.
To respond to some specific points:
To summarize: James, LiAnna and I met to talk about metrics because we wanted to quantify the complaints we are seeing on this board. Nobody wants the education program to continue if it's harmful to Wikipedia, but we need to have some kind of metric. Laura's proposal is, I think, far more work than the community can undertake. If the proposal I outlined above is not possible, can someone suggest a better approach that doesn't require drastically more labour? Or is it simply useless to try to support the arguments made on this page (on either side of the case) with data? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 02:17, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
Emphasis on by the student, mine, that is wrong. Sample. Article is on my watchlist, students edit it and add faulty text, it takes me ten edits plus a lot of research to clean up, lather rinse and repeat ten times over the term, by the time the course ends, they've added faulty text a dozen times, I've got hundreds of edits into cleanup (because I edit in small pieces, hoping they are following and reading each edit and learning, but they aren't)-- the article is decent because I spent boatloads of time cleaning up an article that no one cared was a stub because no one read it anyway (per page views). You cannot say that article was improved by students by looking at their first and last edits-- I did because I had to repair their damage. Example, of which I've got dozens-- klazomania. Who the heck cares about klazomania? Negligible page views, obscure topic about which nothing is written. At a time I coulda been writing real articles, I had to clean that up. If you're going to evaluate the first and last student edit as if they added value-- they didn't. What they added was work for me to an article of zero consequence. Similar across every student-edited article I've encountered-- the article improvement between first and last student edit is because I had to invest time to keep the articles clean, which would be fine if they were typically articles worthy of the time invested in them (in terms of importance and page views)-- instead, they are obscure topics like klazomania, which sound sexy and fun (oh, compulsive shouting, cool, let's edit that!) Klazomania was last term-- same thing this term with echopraxia where the students are just determined to write about schizophrenia in the echopraxia article, Autism spectrum disorders in the media (which was unnecessarily spun off from another article and has taken tons of edits to keep clean and has added nothing new of substance, in fact, has copied text from other articles), Bipolar disorder not otherwise specified (would my time not be better spent cleaning up bipolar rather than one obscure offshoot that no one reads?), separation anxiety disorder, and then the infamous Internet relationship where the student repeatedly plagiarized but the professor couldn't be bothered to follow student contribs where the copyvio removed is clear in edit summaries (is it my job to do the prof's grading???)-- when these articles are evaluated as some sort of improvement between first and last student edit, how are all of my interim edits to clean up and remove copyvio accounted for? That rubric doesn't work-- unless I was supposed to let medical articles languish until the term ends and do cleanup then-- in between the first and last student edit are experienced editors being burdened to clean up, and we would have been better with a stub in most of these cases, leaving experienced editors to work on articles of substance rather than being drug into obscure topics ... sorry if others have already pointed this out, I'm just home and didn't have time to read the whole thing. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 02:45, 3 May 2012 (UTC)The articles would be assessed at two different points: first, the "Pre" state, just prior to the student's first edit; second, the "Post" state, as it was after the student's last edit. This will give an initial estimate of how much value was added by the student.
Hi all, thanks for these comments. I completely agree with much of the sentiment above, that establishing a baseline for how much new editors in general impact experienced editors is important for comparing to student editors. I'm open to any ideas of how to measure how much our students are impacting resources more than any other new editors.
With respect to the quality stats Mike Christie mentioned above, we want to establish a general quality impact for each class so we can figure out what patterns emerge from those classes we see as successful (again, our primary definition of success is improving the quality of Wikipedia articles, not adding new editors). We're kicking off a research project to collect data we think may or may not have some impact on what makes classes successful. We have a list of questions available at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research, and I encourage anyone interested in research to take a look at the questions. We're trying to identify common markers across successful courses, so that we can be more selective about which courses to work with in the future, targeting courses that have markers that we have seen have led to success in the past. Please take a look at the questions and add anything you think we've missed that might contribute to the success or failure of a class. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 23:14, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
We have a class of masters students adding content pertaining to physiotherapy. There additions are however supported by primary research and are often of to great of depth for a general overview article. Articles they have been working on include stroke and Parkinson disease. I do not know who the prof in question is. I have created them a subpage here so that they can than write in greater detail Rehabilitation in Parkinson's disease. Assistance would be appreciated.-- Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 00:23, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
Earlier in this noticeboard ( #New_botany_class.3F) User:Choess noted that he had identified a large number of students contributing as part of an unaffiliated course, and had created an ad hoc course page at User:Choess/BIO341 to help track them. I took the liberty of adding notices to student user pages to indicate that they were contributing as part of this class. However, I've received e-mail from the instructor indicating "[s]ome asked me not to identify them in this public context as a Stony Brook student". My response was essentially that this information is not personally identifying and is relevant to their contributions and our interactions with them, and that students who used their real name as a username could request a rename, but because this is a serious concern I want to establish that there is consensus around this. Although the amount of information supplied could potentially be reduced, I can't really imagine a way of providing contact information for the instructor that does not expose the identity of the class indirectly (because the instructor does not yet have an account). Thoughts? Dcoetzee 21:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Maintaining a list such as User:Choess/BIO341 seems appropriate to me. So does reaching out to the group and identifying a point of contact who will be responsive to wiki talk page comments (or emails). – SJ + 07:33, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I agree strongly with maintaining a list such as User:Choess/BIO341. Without knowing that some cactus articles were being created by students for an assignment, I would have reverted wholesale and then asked for a block if the editor(s) persisted, since they were creating articles without understanding synonyms (at least one still contains information based on two different species). We need to know that a class is editing, and what user names they are editing under so that we can avoid being too heavy handed. We don't want to put them off continuing to work on Wikipedia. Ideally we need to know when the assignment finishes, so we can then go back and fix things up. If we don't have such lists, then students' work will suffer constant interference. Peter coxhead ( talk) 08:41, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Discuss here. Pine (talk) 07:09, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
We're replacing the course page system currently in use for the U.S. and Canada Education programs. Please see WT:Ambassadors#Replacing the course pages and place followup comments there. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 18:10, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
As a response to some of the discussions here (and elsewhere) about quality metrics for the work done by the students in the Education Program, the WMF has created a set of assessments to evaluate the impact of the courses on the articles they have modified. Here is an example of a completed assessment page from a year ago. If you would like to contribute assessments, please take a look at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Article quality and do as many assessments as you have time for. Please also let anyone else know who you think might be interested in assessing articles.
These assessments are an important part of the program. Regardless of whether you think the education program is having a good or bad effect on the encyclopedia, measuring the impact of the students' work on Wikipedia articles is the best way to determine the value of the program. There are too many courses and too many students for the community to be able to rely on examples to decide the future of the program. We need data to make decisions, and these assessments are part of the process of gathering that data. Please consider helping by assessing a few articles. If you have any questions, please post them here. Thanks -- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 10:38, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
There appears to be a class assignment that requires peer reviews [28] but it appears that comments are going ignored. [29] The two links go to related articles, I think they are from the same class. Does anyone have details to see if there is a class that is requiring peer reviews and what class/professor/ambassador is providing instruction/requirements? If requiring peer reviews without requiring editors address them is occurring, I think it should stop. Biosthmors ( talk) 02:08, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Please accept this page of the school — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chitra sivakumar ( talk • contribs)
A professor who is not involved with the Education Program just emailed the gender gap listserv to request help for her students who will be posting articles this week. I'm copying her message here:
If anybody is interested in helping these students, please keep an eye out for those new articles/updated articles. Sorry I don't have usernames! Thanks for any help you can give, and I'll also direct them to Teahouse for technical questions. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 17:05, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
(repost) Sorry I couldn't post on a more specific talk page, only the talk-page banner for the article in question, text annotation ( review), didn't give any details. Anyway, there were some fairly big concerns with the article (but nothing particularly unusual). The nominator hasn't yet replied or edited and I wondered whether anyone in the Education project had any ideas or wanted to do anything about that. I've placed the article formally on hold today. Grandiose ( me, talk, contribs) 17:52, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
Just linking to the topic from here since this is a fairly central place: WT:Ambassadors#Farewell! Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 02:52, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
I've just opened up a request for comment on whether to enable the Education Program extension for managing and monitoring courses, both within the Wikipedia Education Program, and potentially for other classes working independently as well. If it does get enabled, there are related technical (user rights) and policy (who should be able to use it, and how will user rights be assigned?) issues that will need to be sorted out. It looks like this wasn't ready soon enough to use this coming term for most classes, but if the community wants the extension, it should be ready to go for the next term.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 13:39, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
The RfC has closed, and based on the result, we should be turning on the Education Program extension soon (with user rights to be controlled by admins, and the extension available for use by classes in the US and Canada Education Programs as well as other classes working independently).-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 14:56, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
User:NerdyNole has introduced some copyright violations such as [30] from [31]. How can we let the instructor know this happened? Marcus Qwertyus ( talk) 02:47, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
I've come across an IP user purposely adding incorrect information to Wikipedia, who claimed that it was for a class project [32]. Regardless of the truth of the IPs statements, am I safe in assuming that isn't permitted and they should inform their teacher (if he/she exists)? Also, apologies if this isn't the right board to broach such topics. It was the one that seemed the most correct to me. RA0808 talk contribs 16:16, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
An RfC has been initiated Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/RfC by the Education Working group on the future of the US Canada Education program. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 13:26, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
I've been recommended to post about this here, so just have a look at this ANI thread to see what I'm referring to. The editors here will have a better handling of the situation and what to do in this case than I. -- Jethro B 05:54, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
The Education Program extension for structured course pages for classes is now live. (It's actually been deployed for a few weeks, but unrelated platform updates introduced a critical bug that it took us a little while to fix.) Per the RfC on using the extension, it's now available for use by US and Canada Education Program, as well as whatever other courses the community chooses to use it for. See Special:SpecialPages#Education for the various features and lists of courses.
Admins now have the ability to create (and delete) institutions and courses, and to assign the user rights for "course coordinators" (non-admins who will be able to create and remove courses, mark people as instructors or volunteers, and use the rest of the extension features), "online volunteers" or "campus volunteers" (people helping out with courses, such as Online and Campus Ambassadors), and "course instructors".
I'll be beta testing it with one of the current classes, Education Program:University of Guelph-Humber/Currents in Twentieth Century World History (2012 Q4), as well as building up the documentation for course pages. Now's also the time to figure out how we want to use this for independent classes; it should make it easier to keep tabs on classes and catch problems early, so trying it out by offering it to a few classes that we discover editing on their own might be a good first step.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 17:52, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
It appears that when I found Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a topic on my course page ( User:Biosthmors/Intro Neuro), I seem to notice a funny pattern. Biosthmors ( talk) 21:10, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
I'm under the impression that telling students to generate an outline before editing a Wikipedia article might be a bad thing (if it is used as the basis to create sections and subsections). I think it serves as an incentive to create articles with excessive amounts of subsections that create a troubling experience for readers. See here for example. Biosthmors ( talk) 16:44, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
See Talk:Gathering hypothesis and the article, and the article Hunting hypothesis. American Psychological Association Wikipedia initiative. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 20:18, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
It looks like a whole bunch of articles from the Behavioral Ecology class were just nominated for GA (see all the recent nominations in Biology and medicine). From what I've seen, the articles from this class are quite strong and the students are very active, so it'd be worthwhile to give them timely reviews. Anyone up for reviewing a few biology articles?-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 03:00, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
I saw there was an RfC. Where is the program headed? I don't need many details, I'd just like to get a main idea. It appears the WMF wants to limit future involvement, though I'm not sure to what extent. Thanks. Biosthmors ( talk) 20:36, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
Essays are great places to collect/develop wisdom. Maybe we can develop guidance essays on topics such as WP:Student assignments, or WP:Supporting a Professor during an assignment, or WP:How to support a classroom assignment. Maybe we can start with one central page then split as necessary. Any preferences on titles/a title? Or do essays already exist? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:01, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
How would y'all feel about the idea of education program specific admins? There is no technical mechanism to do this, so what I mean by it is pretty much someone going through RfA making a pledge to only use the toolset in situations specific to educational assignments - e.g., revdeling student copyright violations, histmerging moves mucked up by students, and issuing preventative blocks against education program editors, enforceable via revocation of the bit if significantly broken.
The reason this idea occurred to me is because I have encountered a number of situations related to the education program where being able to use an admin toolset would've been useful (and due to some on the ground stuff I'm in the process of setting up, I expect I will encounter many more in the future,) but don't think that I would currently pass an RfA as a standard candidate, and I also don't desire to use the admin toolset broadly anyway. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of education program who is in a similar situation.
I know there would be a risk of someone who made such a pledge going berserk, misusing their tools, and, say, banning a bunch of random people, but I think the standard for "we trust you not to go berserk, and trust you to clean up education program stuff" isn't as high a standard as "we trust you to appropriately use administrative tools in every area of Wikipedia." (This is a very tentative idea; I've not decided whether I like the idea myself or not yet, but wanted to see what other people thought. I'm not intending to do this myself for the foreseeable future, so this isn't intended as some sort of weird pre-RFA canvassing.) Kevin Gorman ( talk) 04:23, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
That all said, I do like the idea of dedicated EP "cleanup" personnel. It would take a lot of the burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' learning curves, if you had people waiting in the wings to mop up spots where the learning went wrong. I don't think this calls for specially-appointed admins, though, so much as 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), or perhaps non-ambassadors who volunteer to go through EP work in hazmat suits so the rest of the community doesn't have to. If someone does the rest of the work, it's not too hard to find an admin to actually mash buttons for something like a histmerge. It's the finding the pages involved, figuring out what goes where, figuring out how it was messed up, etc that takes the real time. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 15:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
It would take a lot of the burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' learning curves,...Don't you think a more accurate statement would be
... burden off the community, which strains under the weight of. Problematic student classes indeed concentrate things in a way that makes them more visible, but collectively I suspect there's just as much burden on the entire community associated with the learning curves of all new editors, its just not as visible or concentrated in one spot. Point being, I don't think there's any more or less burden associated with education related editors. New editors place a burden on the community, why because the community has norms that requires it to welcome new contributors and deal with them in positive and constructive ways. And we all know the learning curve can be high--we all experienced it in some way. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 16:26, 7 December 2012 (UTC)EP classes'all new editors' learning curves,...
Thanks for the answers, y'all. I don't follow RfA closely enough to have been aware that such things had previously been suggested and rejected. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 16:45, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
There were a bunch of articles (or sections added to articles) started for one psych class in Spring 2012, all on the Big Five:
Many of these (and others) were nominated for DYK at the same time. I think there was agreement then that professors should not require students nominate articles for DYK or GA. (I don't have the diffs as Educational Program discussions aren't collected in one area.)
Here is a sample Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dimensional approach to personality disorders which demonstrates how exhausting the process was. As you can see, the article was kept but continues in a disreputable state (as do all the other articles mentioned above). No one has cleaned them up. I've stayed away from the EP courses since so I'm not familiar with the current situation.
Hopefully this kind of thing no longer happens. Best, MathewTownsend ( talk) 19:50, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
FYI: there is a discussion about new articles created as part of a classroom project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There are a number of recent pages about participants in the Federal Writers' Project which appear to be outside the scope of WP. I've offered to contact the instructor and if needed transwiki import the pages to Wikiversity. It may also be desirable to contact the instructor about any potential future projects to insure that new content is within our guidelines and to offer assistance. -- mikeu talk 20:37, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Sorry the following text is so long. The two formal student analyses are given so much weight by the Education Program that I think it is worth investigating them seriously. I hope you can bear with me.
I've been investigating the impressive soundbite: "Our data shows that students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent." which is listed at the Common misconceptions about the Wikipedia Education Program as a fact rather than a misconception. But it is the latter. The figure comes from the Public Policy Initiative assessment. Their results are shown here: Student Contributions to Wikipedia. They summarise this as
The exercise was repeated for Spring 2012 United States and Canada students( results here) with a different set of student work. They summarise this as
The articles were assessed on a point scale here that looked at Comprehensiveness (1-10), Sourcing (0-6), Neutrality (0-3), Readability (0-3), Formatting (0-2) and Illustrations (0-2). The total score can range from 1-26.
These scores are essentially subjective though there is guidance on what sort of score would be expected for each metric category. However, there is a tendency to bump up the score for any perceived shift in an area. Adding a point for Comprehensiveness when actually the increase in topic covering was negligible or even unchanged (just more noise). The score for Sourcing might improve because the added text was sourced but overall the article was still in a poor shape and its sourcing score should have remained. Adding one image to an unillustrated article could shift the score from 0 to 1 when in fact it should still have scored 0 on the scale. This natural bias to want to indicate the change on a crude scale can only be avoided by having the pre and post articles reviewed by different people. And since there is a big variation in scores by the reviewers, one would need a very large number of reviewers to average the results.
The articles are reviewed by non-subject experts. It is very difficult for a non-expert to judge the comprehensiveness, sourcing and neutrality of a topic. This is highlighted by some of the scoring for medical articles.
Since the scores are looking at different aspects of an article, adding them all together produces quite an arbitrary quality score. A different score could arise by a different weighting of the various scores or by including other metrics. For example, neutrality is a score point but not generally an issue with many of these articles. Far more likely an issue is WP:WEIGHT (which is part of NPOV) which concerns the balance of the article wrt topic issues. Are we writing too much about one aspect and not enough about others? The assessment didn't look at plagiarism which is a huge problem and very hard to analyse with out good access to the sources and a lot of time. The assessment didn't look at Wikipedia's comprehensiveness on the topic outside of the one article.
Looking at the raw data for Spring 2012 United States and Canada students one can see a large variation student improvement scores depending on what they start with. It is very easy to score a high delta when working on a stub or start class article but much harder for C or B class articles. None of the students worked on GA, A or FA class articles. The average point improvement ranged from 4 down to 0.5 depending on what class you begin with.
For existing articles, the PPI assessment found a 4.8 point improvement and US&Canada found a 2.94 point improvement. However, all I think one can honestly retrieve from this is that both are above 0. If many students had picked C or B class articles to begin with, then the improvement would probably be less than 1 point on average. If they had all expanded stubs and starts, the improvement might be 50% higher. If the scoring system had been stricter or differently weighted or included other factors, the numbers would shift again.
For new articles, it makes absolutely no sense to compare total scores. Of the 26 points, half (sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting) make no sense for a non-existent article. The other points (comprehensiveness, illustrations) could be rated at 0 for non-existent articles though this rather assumes the information wasn't on Wikipedia anywhere before the article was created. Which in fact is a big problem for new student articles and article expansion, and something the assessment didn't look at. Therefore the statements that there was a 5.8 point and 6.5 point improvement in all articles seen by these two assessments is nonsense. The former figure is behind the "students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent" which is a mathematically naive calculation totally at the mercy of the mix of new and existing articles in the dataset: the percentage improvement tends towards infinity as you remove existing articles from the dataset.
These analyses have essentially concluded that students wrote stuff about a topic. When expanding missing or short articles, they could write unreadable, inaccurate, unsourced text and still improve their score. When expanding long articles, they could have written "Jason is gay" and not changed the score. Their text could be completely plagiarised and still improve the score. Their "new material" could already be present on Wikipedia and still improve the score.
I think the Education Program should be asked to remove their "improved 64 percent" statement as mathematical nonsense, and the other numbers should be treated with scepticism. Further analysis of the student edits is required:
I am concerned that the student work appears most effective when the create new articles or expand stubs. Sooner or later, the psych undergrads are going on run out of ways of entitling their essay on the Big 5 or colour perception as a "new article". The effect is a fragmentation and duplication of information on Wikipedia. The emphasis on a self-contained piece of writing goes against the hyperlinked collective work that makes Wikipedia strong. That the students also fail to interact with other editors or join projects exacerbates the silo effect. Add to this the problems MathewTownsend notes above when trying to AfD these unneeded duplicate articles. For an example of these issues see Talk:Myoclonic epilepsy#Big problems with this article where student edits would have been scored very highly on the above assessments but in fact had extensive copyvios, duplicated existing better material or were completely off-topic. Colin° Talk 13:48, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I'm one of the coordinators of the Canadian Education Program. Some of my colleagues and I are currently reviewing recent discussion on this board. While I appreciate the engagement, and the clear desire to improve the Education Program, there are concerns about the way some editors have gone about presenting their criticism. In particular (and this is not intended to be threatening) there are concerns that parts of this discussion have violated WP:CIVIL, WP:GOODFAITH, WP:BITE and perhaps (most concerning) WP:PERSONAL and WP:HARASS. I would appreciate if those involved could post links to the primary concerns, in particular:
I recognize that this is a discussion board, and that opportunity should be allowed for extensive comment; however, for this thread, if you wouldn't mind, please keep answers as brief as possible. Please refer to as many concrete examples as possible. Please also refrain from adding additional anecdotal criticism.
Thank you for your help with this.
Sincerely, Jaobar ( talk) 16:30, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Jaobar: I suspect that part of the reason you posted is related an email I sent to a colleague of yours a couple days ago. I've reviewed the email I sent, and although the tone of it was probably grumpier than was necessary (and it probably wasn't a good idea for me to write a grumpy email while on a lot of cough syrup/while with pneumonia, though that certainly doesn't excuse a grumpier than necessary tone) I don't think that it violates any of the policies you linked - and I stand by its contents. I'll be in private contact with you in the immediate future to explain further the particular situations that led me to send it. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:20, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
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Greetings. As of this evening, I see little evidence to justify the previous discussion. Hopefully this will change by tomorrow.
For example, User:slimVirgin stated "I alerted the teacher, and he said that checking for plagiarism was not something he did. He suggested I handle it myself, and said he would give students who had posted copyvios an F." So far I see no evidence of this. Please point me to this conversation.
User:MelanieN, as far as I know, all individuals with profiles are considered editors, not just Wikipedians. Please point me to examples of students (editors) requesting that course material remain unaltered during the semester.
As far as copyright violations, I see one thread where concerns were raised, to which the professor responded. I also see claims of 4 alleged copyright violations. I am hoping that this potentially damaging set of discussion posts (damaging to the Education Program) has not been the result of an over-reaction. Please provide evidence. Jaobar ( talk) 04:49, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
I provided you with conclusive evidence of a student repeatedly infringing copyright via email earlier today, before your most recent post. As I said in my email, I'll be getting some other diffs to you that show such problems in the relatively near future. All of the other diffs that you have requested are already present on this page as far as I can tell. (Although I would certainly invite other people to provide additional evidence of student copyright infringement here, as requested.) Kevin Gorman ( talk) 07:22, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
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Jaobar, I am happy to encounter an education program professor who has actually edited articles; having engaged Wikipedia, I'm sure you realize your demanding tone isn't helpful here-- a board where we are seeking solutions to a a problem that is deep and wide.
I have said it before, here and elsewhere, but I'll repeat this for your benefit. It is not my job to be an unpaid TA for a professor who has never edited any article, doesn't check or know how to check edit history, doesn't look at article talk, and wants me to blow the whistle on a student, causing the student to get an F for plagiarizing. Those professors-- who haven't given adequate instruction to their students and are using established Wikipedians as unpaid TAs-- shouldn't be unleashing their students' work on Wikipedia. If they are too lazy or unknowledgeable about how to check an article history to find my very clearly marked edit summaries indicating removing plagiarism, see talk or to follow the link to talk, it's not my job to notify them or to be fingerpointing at any specific examples here. If we were dealing with editors who would be sticking around, I would be dealing with the plagiarism as I would any other editor; since these students leave as soon as their course is done meaning there is no educational benefit in helping the student learn how to be a real Wikipedian, I have no reason to pursue the copyvio matters, other than removing the plagiarism as soon as I find it. I do not intend to be pointing out where I've found plagiarism; it is the professor's job when grading to look at edit history, where they can find clearly marked edit summaries. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 13:34, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
Jonathan, the gist of the discussion is that plagiarism (copy-paste editing from sources cited in footnotes) was found in several articles being edited as part of a Canadian course, and the teacher has left it to Wikipedians to deal with it. [42] My view is that teachers should check for plagiarism themselves, for a number of reasons, including (a) it's part of the job, (b) unpaid volunteers shouldn't be burdened with the extra work, (c) where the sources are books, they're probably in the university library, whereas we might have to rely on inter-library loans (which apart from the hassle factor could take weeks to arrive), and (d) volunteers shouldn't be responsible for deciding, in effect, which students get an F. As one of the program coordinators, what's your view on this? SlimVirgin (talk) 02:08, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I don't want to put words in your mouth, Jaobar, so please correct where I'm misreading you (because I assume I am), but to me right now it looks sort of like you're hoping to keep EP-related Wikipedia stuff a sort of "not the real world" sandbox where students/professors not adhering to the rules doesn't count. What some of the people here are trying to communicate is that to them - to many of us - it does count, and that while seeing someone appear out of the blue and dump a copyvio in an article is bad, it is in some ways worse to see someone appear because they were sent here and go on to dump a copyvio in an article. So to you it seems unnecessarily aggressive for people to go to students and professors and ask them to fix their mistakes and not commit more of them, because why are we persecuting these people who are donating their time and efforts to Wikipedia? To others, it seems like asking non-student editors to clean up and maintain students' work is an unnecessary drain on everyone else who's donating their time and efforts to Wikipedia.
There's probably a point to be made here about how to engage with students and professors in a non-offputting manner, but that point is weakened when the reason the offputting manner is being deployed is because the more understated manner doesn't seem to have worked. Wikipedia does have a reputation for being prickly to newcomers, and it's something we can stand to work on, but the people who feel pricked need to meet us halfway as far as at least attempting to fit in. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 18:14, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
What I realized after talking it over with Sage, however, is that there's another level that can be read in Kevin's comment, basically saying, "I not only intend to report plagiarism from students on Wikipedia, but I intend to pursue the matter until I can be sure they are punished, no matter how high I have to go to accomplish that." I don't think that's an appropriate stance to take - the responsibility of someone who encounters student plagiarism is to report it to the professor, not to be Dirty Harry about making sure the student "pays" for it. If reporting the matter to a professor doesn't get the problem dealt with, in my opinion the problem has ceased to be with a student, and begun to be with the professor, because it is the responsibility of a professor who assigns extracurricular work (in the sense of "sending students to work on something that's a separate, non-school entity") to make sure that work is done in a manner that isn't damaging to the entity they're sending students to work on. If, for example, a veterinary professor was assigning students to volunteer at an animal shelter, it would fall to the professor to make sure that the students he sent weren't causing problems there. It's the student's responsibility if one of them decides go all PETA and release the dogs, but once the professor knows about that behavior, he would be responsible for making it clear to his class that that wasn't ok, and if he refuses to do that, the shelter would be correct to hold the professor, not just the students, responsible for future jailbreaks.
The other issue here is the idea of off-wiki consequences. Wikipedia usually frowns on "reporting" editors to real-world supervisors, teachers, etc. It can have an incredibly chilling effect to basically threaten someone's livelihood/future for something they did on a website. However, in the case of EP classes, I think it is reasonable in some cases to pursue off-wiki consequences for student misconduct. There need to be limits - certainly no calling up anyone's mom or internship or something - but if a student is editing on behalf of Class Y at University X, they are accountable to that class, and possibly to that university. If you're doing an assignment for Class Y here, and you perpetrate some serious academic dishonestly, like plagiarism, it is appropriate (in my mind) for your professor to be informed. It is not appropriate for a Wikipedian to try to take on the role of the professor and actually deal with the dishonesty by disciplinary means of some kind, like contacting a dean. But again, it's not appropriate for an editor to do this because it's the professor's job, not because students somehow shouldn't be held accountable for misconduct. We really, really need professors to be working with us on this. We, the community, can't end the EP, or fire a professor from the program, or even fire a student who doesn't get it. That means that when we report problems to the EP, or to a professor, we need them to be willing and able to address the issues, because they're the ones who can handle it. We can't; we can only clean up the messes that are left behind. In the future, in cases where a professor isn't taking responsibility for his students' conduct on Wikipedia, there needs to be a way to deal with that, because otherwise you end up with desperate Wikipedians trying any and all measures, some wise and some overkill, to do the professors' jobs and make the pain stop. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 20:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
To clarify, my comment was made before I was aware of any particular class with problems. It was not intended as a threat directed towards anyone in particular, and isn't (or at least the escalation bit) something that I ever anticipate having to pursue. I have in the past and will in the future report students' plagiarism to their professors. Every professor who I have approached has understood the issue, and has addressed the issues appropriately. I understand that some people have concerns about any sort of off-wiki consequences for on-wiki actions, but when Wikipedia is edited in the context of an academic assignment plagiarism should absolutely be taken every bit as seriously as it is for a 'real-world' academic assignment. If professors choose to fail, honor code, or otherwise punish students who have blatantly plagiarized, then I have no problem with it - students understand plagiarism, and if they choose to commit blatant plagiarism anyway, they deserve whatever punishment they get. If they choose not to do so, then as long as the professors take action to ensure that the plagiarism doesn't recur on Wikipedia, I have no problem with that either. (And I understand that due to the privacy policies at most schools, I'll never be made aware of whether or not a student is punished. I'm completely fine with that, and would be dismayed if I was made aware.)
When I suggested that I would have no problem escalating beyond the level of an individual professor, I did not anticipate ever having to do so. I still don't anticipate ever having to do so. I literally cannot imagine approaching a professor with conclusive evidence that one of their students has plagiarized work and not having them take some sort of action. However, if there is ever an education program class that has a massive issue with plagiarism and an unresponsive professor, then I will absolutely consider contacting other people at the participant university, including the professor's departmenthead, if (and only if) it appears that that is the best way to mitigate damage to Wikipedia and to the education program. I do not anticipate ever having to do this. If a situation arose where I did do this, I would bring the issue here for discussion first. I view this situation - which I never anticipate happening - as analogous to contacting the abuse department at an ISP or the network administrator at an K-12 school with evidence of abuse of their network (both of which are things that I have seen done on Wikipedia with regularity,) or analogous to publicly calling out paid editing shills (which is also something that happens regularly, and not infrequently results in negative international news coverage directed towards the shills.) And to reiterate: I cannot imagine this situation ever actually occurring.
The damage that will occur to the education program if the perception of Wikipedia's broader community continues to be that education program participants are unresponsive to the concerns of the broader community will be incalculable. I think the education program has the potential to be massively beneficial both for academia and for Wikipedia, and if its potential is limited because Wikipedia's broader community views it as a liability and places severe restrictions on it (such as sandbox-only editing, which has recently been suggested on this page,) I'll view it as a tragedy. One way to mitigate this perception is for education program participants to make clear that issues like blatant plagiarism are not acceptable, and will be dealt with strongly. If my words or this particular situation drive away one or more professors from the education program, that's unfortunate, and I would regret it. But professor recruitment is not an issue with the education program at present - any professor who drops out of the program can be replaced with two more next semester. At this stage in the program, it's infinitely more important that the education program is run as a tight - and well accepted - ship, then as a gigantic ship. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:15, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
There seems to be a lot of agreement above that students should use sandboxes. One of the brochures for the program ( here) suggests that students move their work out of the sandbox as soon as possible, shortly after they start writing it. I'd like to propose that this advice be changed.
Even experienced Wikipedians often work in sandboxes, and if it's a contentious article we might ask for consensus before moving it in place. It would be a good idea to regard all student essays as contentious in the same way, and to ask that they wait for a Wikipedian to move it into the encyclopaedia. As well as protecting Wikipedia, this would have the added benefit of not requiring them to release their work, which is something we should definitely not be forcing on them. Wikipedia functions on the basis that we're all here as free actors, and that if we choose to edit, we know our work is being released. But the students are not free actors, and are not choosing this for themselves, so editing direct to mainspace is neither in their interests nor in Wikipedia's. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:24, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
Specifically, the proposal is that students editing as part of the education program be asked to write their material in sandboxes. If they're editing part of an existing article, they can copy and paste that article into the sandbox and work on it there. Teachers are asked to provide a grade based on the student's changes to the sandbox version. This would mean that plagiarism and poor quality work would be entirely for the teacher to deal with.
Once the course is over (or once the material has been graded), if the students want to, they can ask that their work be moved into mainspace by a Wikipedian – who would say no if any plagiarism or poor use of sources is found, without having to search to find it all – and at that point if the students want to pursue DYK, GA or FA, that would be fine. With the course over and the article in mainspace, they'd be working on it as regular Wikipedians. The process would provide a good transition for them, from students forced to be here, to Wikipedians choosing to stay.
If it's an existing article, they could ask on the article's talk page whether there are objections to moving in the new version and wait for someone there to do it. Or the education program could set up a board similar to the one we use for paid advocates, where students ask that their work be moved over. This would mean the students would not be forced to release their work, and could request its deletion from their userspace when the course ends. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:50, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
I recently stumbled across the idea behind this project - professors assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. I came across it when one of the resulting articles was nominated for deletion. I have a real problem with the whole concept. I raised my concerns here Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine#Brain-disabling psychiatric medical treatment, and several people have responded, including one who pointed me to this page. It seems to me that posting student term papers into Wikipedia mainspace violates several Wikipedia principles, including WP:ESSAY, WP:SYNTHESIS, and WP:OWN. (What happens to a student's work - and their grade - if someone comes along and does a major edit or rewrite, which is perfectly possible in mainspace?) A very good suggestion was made at that discussion, namely, that students should post their articles to WP:Articles for Creation instead of directly to mainspace. They would have much better control of their material there - they could "own" it - and only the articles which were really encyclopedic and about notable subjects would get promoted to mainspace. What do you all think of the AFC idea? -- MelanieN ( talk) 21:03, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
There's a major difference between professors assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their course work and professors having students posting term papers in mainspace. Most classes participating in the education program or otherwise using Wikipedia-based assignments recognize the difference between a Wikipedia article and a term paper and instruct their students accordingly. (I'd like to say all classes do, but in an open ecosystem that ideal will never be reached.) Many professors that I have worked with in the program have not only recognized the difference between an encyclopedic article and a research paper, but have been excited about having their students participate on Wikipedia specifically because of that difference. One class I worked with last semester dedicated around five hours of in-class time specifically to how to write in an encyclopedic style and to covering Wikipedia's important cultural norms and policies. That's way more training of that nature than any normal new non-student editor would receive.
In much the same way that not all new non-student editors are able to successfully create high (or even acceptable) quality content, not all student assignments are successful. Sometimes individual students' articles are bad. Sometimes this is because individual students have failed to pay attention to the instruction they have received, and sometimes this is because the quality of their instruction was poor (or, in some circumstances, both.) If a student posts an article that violates our normal content policies in a major way, then it should be handled in pretty much the same way as if a non-student posted an article that violated our normal content policies. If the problems are fixable via normal editing processes, then they should be fixed via normal editing processes in the same fashion a problematic non-student contribution would be fixed. If the problems aren't fixable via normal editing processes (for instance, if the topic is non-notable or is an unsalvageable violation of WP:ESSAY) then the articles can go through our ordinary deletion processes, including WP:AFD, WP:SD, etc. If the same student has recurring competence issues, then they can be blocked or banned in the same way as any other editor. I would suggest approaching someone's ambassador before going through most of these steps, in the same way that I would suggest approaching the mentor of an editor who had one before going through most of these steps. In the linked thread, you ask how someone can be aware that they're dealing with a student and thus that they shouldn't 'bite or be uncivil' to them if their articles are simply posted in mainspace. Biting and civility are not student specific issues. You don't have to know that you're dealing with a student in order to be civil to them or to avoid biting them, that's just what you should do with everyone by default.
Most instructors are perfectly aware that the content their students submit to Wikipedia can be edited by people other than their students. (Again, I'd like to say all, but in an open ecosystem some will always slip through the cracks.) Generally, professors keep this in mind when coming up with their grading metrics. For a decent number of professors, interaction with the community is an actual *desired* result. Since it's pretty easy to track (either via direct diffs or via one of the tools designed to do so) the exact contributions any particular student has made, subsequent editing by other users does not represent a substantial obstacle to grading individual students. Even if a student's article goes to AfD it can very easily be userfied by any administrator, which would allow for the instructor to still see what exactly each of their students did.
I generally agree with The Interior that it is a best practice for undergraduate students with no prior Wikipedia experience creating a new article to do so in a sandbox, and to run the article by their ambassador before moving it live. There are some professors who have had significant success without the use of sandboxes (like Brian Carver,) but mostly when dealing with graduate students. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 06:17, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
When 30 students are told to edit articles (not invited to volunteer), the teacher is essentially the editor of all 30 articles and ought to make sure that Wikipedia isn't harmed. Volunteers not connected to the university shouldn't have to sort out the problems. SlimVirgin (talk) 17:59, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
Melanie: I don't actually see any place where this professor has complained about their students work being edited. Could you post a diff to where they said something like this? (I actually see them thanking someone on their talk page for reverting a copyright violation.) Obviously if this is what their expectation was, their expectation was wrong. Any professor who expects their students' work to go unedited has not listened to what anyone involved in the education program has told them. Professors who have this expectation should have this expectation corrected. No one should feel under any obligation to listen to a professor who wants to WP:OWN their students' articles any more than they would feel about any other editor who has WP:OWN problems.
Wikipedia has tons of problematic editors. Most of them are non-students, but some of them are bound to be students. Problematic editors in the education program can be dealt with just like problematic editors outside of the education program. Protocol for dealing with copyright violations should be the same, student or non-student. If you're uncomfortable dealing with problematic students, post here when you find 'em, and let one of us deal with it. I have absolutely no problem being responsible for a student receiving a failing grade if they have plagiarized - I've done so before, in non-Wikipedia contexts. All of these students know why they shouldn't plagiarize, and know what to expect if they get caught doing so. (I'll be looking over the students from the linked class myself as I have time, though unfortunately as I have pneumonia and am in finals, that'll be limited this week. Normally, I'd have a lot more time available to do so.)
Remember that these students are new editors, and the content they produce should be compared more closely with the content that is produced by new editors not in the education program than with experienced editors. Mistakes are inevitable, but I think the overall quality of content of new student editors is higher than the overall quality of content of new non-student editors, and I don't think that new student editors are problem editors at a higher rate than new editors are in general.
For those of you wondering why I think assignments like this are not only appropriate, but actively worth advocating, take a look at the list of articles on Brian Carver's user page to see one reason. All of those articles have been improved by students from one professor's classes - and they're all encyclopedic, and many are of high quality. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 00:39, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
I’ve followed this discussion with interest because I wanted to learn more about how the problems came about. I think there are two concerns here that the new Education Program needs to work on. First, the editing behavior of the students wasn’t up to WP standards, but not unexpected of new editors. Two, the sub-standard behavior was associated (adversely) with the WP Education Program, because there was a Professor and 41 students involved. However, when one examines the history, two things become evident. One, the Professor, although a Wikipedian for about a year had really only made edits to the Canada Education Program courses page and his user page. Although the professor knows how to edit WP technically, there’s little evidence that the Professor understands article editing norms. Also, there is little evidence, if any that the Professor was formally recruited by the WMF into the Education Program, but rather self-enrolled by merely adding his course to the course page. It would be interesting to learn how the Professor became associated with the Education Program. Second, although there are Online Ambassadors identified, there is little evidence that there was any serious mentoring of the Professor by the ambassadors. Since there was no identified Campus Ambassador, one must assume the Professor got zero face-to-face mentoring by an experienced Wikipedian. It can be difficult for even experienced Wikipedians to mentor even one new editor successfully, let alone having an inexperienced editor (the professor) responsible for managing the edits of 41 other new, inexperience editors in the context of highly constrained classroom time.
I agree completely with those above who say students are editors and every Wikipedian was a new editor at one time. I think it is also important to understand that the Education Programs are Outreach programs designed to improve content in WP because of the enormous untapped academic and scholarly resources within the higher education community. Many believe, as I do, that this type of outreach is essential for the future growth of WP. As this case shows, I think we all should take care not to indict the Education Program for problems like this, when there is little evidence that the Education Program had anything to do with causing the problems. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 02:58, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
I find it troubling that SlimVirgin and MelanieN are raising the same issues that many medical editors have been raising here and everywhere for several years, and getting the same pat answers and faulty data analysis in response. (See Colin's data analysis, which differs from the WMF data analysis-- I have been told that WMF's analyses fail to look for or account for plagiarism at all.) Plagiarism and copyvio by students are still rampant, we have many instructors who have never edited Wikipedia and can't explain Wikipedia policies to their students anyway, we have classes editing articles without tagging article talk which would help us know which professor to contact, we have term-end crunch revert wars, we have established editors having to clean up multiple essays at the end of every term, we are not gaining new editors via outreach because the students are only here for a grade and rarely continue editing after the class ends, the students don't know correct sourcing or indeed most Wikipedia policies ... in other words, all still the same, and yet Slim and Melanie are getting the same pat answers we medical editors have been given for several years now. Student editing under profs who have no knowledge of Wikipedia forcing students to edit a project that they have no long-term commitment to is a problem and it's getting worse, not better. Why is the approach/response here unchanged and why is the problem downplayed in light of Slim's and Melanie's concerns? I was previously given to believe it's a big problem in the psych realm but there were less problems in other content areas: from the examples here, that doesn't seem to be the case. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:18, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Note that while these aren't geared toward exactly the purpose you had in mind, we have these: {{ welcome teacher}} and {{ welcome student}}. Maybe the best approach would be to edit those make them useful for situations where you're trying to figure out what the student or professor is up to. I'm not sure how widely they are used, but I know at least that User:Pharaoh of the Wizards uses them pretty regularly.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 16:13, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
First, as the point of the program seems to have been to find new editors, can someone say how many students have stayed on to become regular Wikipedians?
Also, I'm confused about the status of the program. It seems to have official status. An enormous amount of money has been spent on it, I believe it has its own namespace, its own templates, and Foundation employees dedicated to overseeing it, and it extends a protective mantle over its participants (which is one of the reasons the students can't be compared to regular new editors). Yet when I asked above whether poorly administered courses could be excluded in future, Kevin said no, anyone can set up a course and there is no way to stop them from registering as part of the program. So the question is: given that this program has some form of official recognition, why are the people overseeing not able to deny registration to institutions that perform under par? SlimVirgin (talk) 03:25, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Instead of having all these thoughts shared and then lost to an archive, please share them at WP:Assignments for student editors ( WP:AFSE or WP:A4SE). Best. Biosthmors ( talk) 16:42, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Also
Wikipedia:Recruiting those in academia (
WP:RECRUIT or
WP:RECRUITING).
Biosthmors (
talk) 19:22, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Moved to
Wikipedia:Recruiting subject-matter experts.
Biosthmors (
talk)
23:04, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Some of the instructions professors give seem like they are contrary to wikipedia practices.
For example, for Wikipedia:USEP/Courses/Cognition and the Arts (Greta Munger) Assignment one:
Isn't there a danger such instructions will send a flock of new students to that article who will introduce material that won't follow WP:MEDRS? e.g. recent primary research? MathewTownsend ( talk) 18:46, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
There are a number of ethical issues involved here, and I wonder whether the ethics committees of the universities have been consulted. Some of my concerns are:
To what extent, if any, were the ethical issues discussed with outside bodies when the program was set up? If those discussions didn't take place, does that need to be rectified by (for example, and this is just a suggestion) inviting comment from the universities? SlimVirgin (talk) 04:58, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
It's difficult to see how students are taught those skills by being told they can choose their own topic (vaguely within field X) and their own sources, which are often websites, then adding a few paragraphs to articles that already exist. SlimVirgin (talk) 16:24, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Regarding your second point (and to some extent your first), I got the ethical willies when I discovered that students in at least one class are REQUIRED to edit under their real names. See User talk:Biosthmors/Intro Neuro#AFC or not?. [49] Is that appropriate? [50] -- MelanieN ( talk) 17:08, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
( edit conflict)@Slimvirgin - First I would challenge your characterization that this is a list of ethical issues, but rather is a list of pedagogical issues that every instructor must deal with. These discussions are difficult in a way because the WMF is indeed transferring management of the US/CAN EP to an independent entity. The planning for that entity is still on-going, but it involves a diverse group of seasoned Wikipedians and academics. But out of that planning has come the realization that the use of WP in the classroom as a teaching tool is here to stay for one reason: the movement within academia for Information Fluency is strong and WP is a tool perfectly suited to advance it. The new EP recognizes that and captures that in this statement within its strategy: Enterprise Purpose. I personally believe the early years of the EP haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to using WP as a tool in the classroom. As we move forward with the new EP, we have to find and employ the most effective pedagogy using WP to help professors, librarians and other academics achieve their learning objectives without overburdening WP itself. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 17:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
I despair when I read glowing language like this discussing the program goals, so out of touch with what so many established editors are experiencing, particularly when these kinds of posts end with one minor recognition of the serious "overburdening" of established Wikipedian editors.. So I would ask, on a personal level: What specifically would ease your despair, ease your frustration? Over the next few months, my fellow MSU Campus Ambassadors and I will be working with two MSU professors to plan the use of WP in their courses for the Spring term. What should I be doing with these professors that I haven’t already done in previous terms to ease your despair since I am so out of touch with the issues facing the EP? As for glowing language and program goals, I am all about solutions. Recognizing problems is the easy part, it is the solutioning that is challenging. So help me support next terms MSU Wikipedia related classes without overburdening the Wikipedia community by telling me how to ease your despair.-- Mike Cline ( talk) 18:25, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
(comment from above) "In fact this was the core reasoning behind a suggestion I've heard from a couple of academics that on-campus knowledge about editing Wikipedia should reside in writing centres, which I gather exist at a lot of US universities, rather than within specific academic disciplines." I've never heard of "writing centres" at US univeristies. Is this true? And is this where editing wikipedia is taking place? MathewTownsend ( talk) 22:28, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
We are planning on launching an elective at UCSF where 3/4th year medical students will be editing Wikipedia as per here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/UCSF. I will be heading down their to give a week of lectures / editing sessions to students and staff on how we work and will be involved in supervising the students. We will see if this works with a small number of students and than see if it is scalable. The hope is that students who get involved in the first year will provide supervision is subsequent years and that is the only way this can really grow. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:51, 13 December 2012 (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 |
We have this page Social_determinants_of_health_in_poverty. This user from the Rice University did a number of things right. They posted to WT:MED before beginning however did not follow up much of the feedback [1]. They have unfortunately added some images that are copyright infringement. I posted here on April 10th User_talk:Lbockhorn#WHO_images and I removed the images in question. [2] They returned them. [3] I posted to their talk page again April 17th User_talk:Lbockhorn#The_images_you_are_using. They have responded once but have not removed the images they returned. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 22:11, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Yes the user in question decided to start a new page as the one on Social determinants of health was of poor quality. [5] We will need to get people improving existing content eventually. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 01:40, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
Considering the fundamental differences (that we have discussed above) between most academic writing, and writing for Wikipedia, what has the WMF or the Online Ambassadors or whatever or whomever is in charge of this business done to address the problem most seriously impacting Wikipedia in student editing: the fundamental issue of the correct use of primary and secondary sources in writing for Wikipedia? I doubt that most of our professors know the difference, and this is one of the most pressing issues resulting in most of the problems leading to AFDs, merge proposals, faulty DYKs, etc. (the others being copyvio/plagiarism and lack of responsiveness from students and professors, as well as ill-equipped online ambassadors). If the WMF wants to unleash a bunch of students on Wikipedia who have access to university journal databases, at least they could make a better effort to advise professors about the differences in writing primarily from secondary sources from the type of writing that is more typical of academia considered original research on Wikipedia.
It might also let the professors know that they have some obligation to follow their students' talk pages and their own course pages, and respond promptly to community concerns. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:21, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
I agree with Frank that this program needs to be data driven. I think the development of how this data is collected and analysed need to have more community input though. We need to be looking at the actual individual edits rather than the amount of "texts that remains in Wikipedia". Is there some place that this is taking place or is here a good place to discuss? Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 01:34, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
There's a mess of moves to the wrong places in the student contribs here, from one of those problematic personality courses where a boatload of similar articles were created. I think it's going to need an admin to sort it out. It looks like s/he moved the article to an invalid user name. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:06, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
When Wikipedians nominate articles for DYK, GAN, FAC it is expected that they follow through. If real life events take precedence we have the decency to respond and express remorse as Anthony has done here [7] and would not consider further nominations before the previous one is settled.
This student nominated patient participation for DYK on April 4th. [8] and then does not respond to the request for further details both on the DYK page and their talk page. One April 18th they then begin a GAN of the same page [9]. I have started a brief GA review pending a response [10].
The question is what should be done to address this issue? I have seem multiple cases of the same last year. Should we require a minimum number of edits / duration of an account before people can apply to the review processes (500 edits or 2 months which ever is less)? This could than be programmed into the GA bot. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 17:16, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
The group we are having difficulty with are the ones that show up and start a DYK / GAN in there first 50 edits / first week of editing. I did not figure out that we had GAN until being here for a few months. I did not nominate my first GA until after editing for 6 month and making more than 4000 edits. This would address that issue. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 18:05, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
The suggestion of prohibiting DYK noms by students is silly. If there's a problem with floods of DYK noms about the same topic, alter DYK's rules to make no more than two related DYK's per front page batch or something like that. If there's a problem with DYK noms of shitty stubs, alter DYK's rules to prohibit shitty stubs. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 19:57, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
We agree that students are the victims in WMF's misguided venture (where professors and WMF employees are the problem, and hapless ambassadors-- the few of them we have-- can't cope), but students are not the only victims. The encyclopedia and editors who have to do the cleanup are the others.
"In case you want to talk directly to one of the victims", I'll write up my experiences. The only reason I haven't catalogued the extreme disruption I've encountered is that to do so, I have to point at the other victims making the faulty edits-- the students-- and it doesn't quite seem fair to make an example of student editors by creating a record of the issues. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 14:40, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Sigh, we should probably tone this down a few notches. We are all here to make Wikipedia better. I have not seen the above write up mentioned by Frank and will take some time to review them.-- Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:16, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
On average, these students added 1855 bytes of content that stayed on Wikipedia, compared to only 491 for a randomly chosen sample of new users who joined English Wikipedia in September 2011. These numbers establish that students who participate in the Wikipedia Education Program contribute significantly more quality content that stays on Wikipedia than other new users.
DYK is change resistant; their problems are their fault. The underlying dynamic there is that no one is "in charge" at DYK, like at FAC, no one is accountable, and so many are involved and no consensus for change is ever formed. I doubt we can affect anything at DYK, which is a forum that drives poor editing throughout Wikpedia, not only wrt the Education Program. It's "reward" aspects promote copyvio, forking of content to obscure topics, and quick-and-dirty poorly sourced articles of dubious notability. I don't believe we can change that, since the complaints have endured for years. The students are victims, granted credit for getting content displayed on the mainpage in a forum that should have been disbanded long ago.
The problem with your suggestion of creating a handout is that it doesn't address the problem at its core, as mentioned by Choess. Students are creating tangential articles, poorly sourced, based on primary research, term papers so that they have their "own" article, when what we need is article improvement more than dubious new content. I don't see JMH's proposal as addressing the issue at its core, but neither do I see your proposal doing that. The core problem is that professors are not well versed in writing for Wikipedia, based on secondary sources, and this problem is particularly crucial in the psych realm, where people's health is impacted, core articles aren't improved, and student essays and term papers using primary sources are promoting professors' research agendas.
By focusing on the core problems, we might better generate solutions, but DYK is its own problem. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:28, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
I like the GAN process and find that having a semi structured review process to verify quality is good for Wikipedia's quality of content and improves the credibility of the site in the eyes of others. And GA and FAs are definitely "rewards". Thus I do not believe all rewards are bad. It is similar to peer review in the academic press. Writing something that is peer reviewed is a greater academic reward than writing something that is not peer reviewed and most of the time is of better quality.
We just need to verify that the people applying to these processes are serious. If you where to write an article for the NEJM and did not reply to the subsequent peer review your reputation would be tarnished and you would lose your application fee. There are a number of measures we could introduce to verify that the people applying to DYK, peer review, and GAN are serious. We could require
But of course if those within these processes do not see there as being any problem than carrying on with the status quo until such time as change is desire is probably the best. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:45, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
OK, alternate proposal. Professors are advised that, when students are selecting topics, the first step is for them to do more background work than they are currently doing. If students, profs or online ambassadors had checked the contrib history on Klazomania or Echopraxia or Sociological and cultural aspects of autism, they would have seen I'm the main editor there. If they had asked if there was enough written on either of those topics to warrant expansion (on echopraxia, the specific topic selected was "in schizophrenia"), I could have told them there wasn't. And I could have guided them to a better area where they might have contributed. Suggest that they do a contrib history check on their selected topic, post to talk, post to WIkiProjects linked on talk, and post to contributing editors requesting feedback. If this proposal gains any traction, I'll offer other implementation ideas. This will also help address the problem that we rarely know when we're dealing with students, since they don't template article talk, and would bring in the assistance of experienced editors earlier in the process, so less time is wasted for everyone. If I know before they waste everyone's time that students want to work on X topic, I can guide them in ways that won't waste my time or their time. Further, that would put me in a position to counsel them as to whether their final product was a candidate worthy of GAN, DYK whatever. It might be a way to bring in experienced editors sooner-- right now, we have a mystery where articles and experienced editors are sandbagged, since they (Education Projects) are NOT templating talk pages as they should be, and they waste a lot of time in sandbox before presenting unacceptable text. Also, deal with the issue of who should be templating article talk-- I suggest it should be the professor, as that will also force them to engage more, as User:Jbmurray did. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 19:22, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
CBT has evidence equivalent to SSRIs for many conditions. I will leave it to you to decide how good that is :-) Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 21:55, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
I think there's a misunderstanding here. The problem of "some conflict between the research writing required by a lot of uni courses and encyclopedic writing", that "the articles that led to this discussion from that Personality course are an example. Original research and synthesis is the norm in the psych realm: it's a big problem ..." This is being misinterpreted. Papers written in a US university for a course are not meant to be encyclopedia articles and the standards are quite different. I think you'd find that the standards for peer-reviewed published articles in psychology are the same as in medicine. Graduate level psychology candidates write lots of "papers", which typically medical students don't. Top level psychology programs follow the Scientist–practitioner model also known as the Boulder model, a training model for psychology graduate programs that focuses on creating a foundation of research and scientific practice. However. there's lots of psychology programs that are not APA approved and don't teach the scientific method. There are Psy.D degrees and others that don't provide rigorous scientific training but focus on clinical practice. Does WMF (or whomever) check to see the educational objectives of the programs they allow to participate? A psych program emphasizes psychotherapy only would not be emphasizing the scientific method as accredited programs are required to do. MathewTownsend ( talk) 21:02, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
While I have been advising students not to attempt DYK or GA submissions, and would advise faculty not to encourage that type of submission except with exceptionally motivated students, even students who don't make such submissions sometimes have issues engaging with the community, e.g. if someone identifies issues with their article. I think campus/online ambassadors have the opportunity to play a valuable role here; students don't take random Wikipedians seriously because they have no connection to the course or to their final grade. One way to address the general issue is to have a small portion of their grade (say 5%) based on responsiveness to community engagement, and make the CA/OA personally responsible for evaluating this component of their grade. If a student is nonresponsive, the CA/OA can nudge them and remind them to respond, and because the student knows the CA/OA is evaluating them on this (and may directly contact their professor) they will be more inclined to listen. (If the student happens to have no interaction with the community they just get these points for free.)
More generally, I think we should apply pressure by contacting the teacher by talk page or e-mail when students are nonresponsive - if the teachers are themselves nonresponsive or uncooperative, that's a higher-level issue that can be backed up where necessary by threats of blocks/deletion (if students are ignoring policy/producing bad content). Ideally things would not get to that point, but I think forcing engagement with the community by whatever means necessary is essential. Dcoetzee 21:05, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Let me point out that we need to be careful about the distinction between copyvio and plagiarism. The latter is what's generally sanctioned. as far as I know, by schools. Straight cut-and-paste, as Sandy just mentioned, constitutes both copyright violation and plagiarism. However, I'd argue that student work off-Wikipedia probably includes a great deal of what we'd consider copyright violation here, such as certain uses of non-free multimedia content, or close paraphrasing. These are probably generally accepted in student papers or presentations for a class, first, because they might not be easily detected, and second, because the limited distribution of that material allows more latitude in terms of fair use. So a student committing copyright violation here might well be doing so inadvertently, and might not be in violation of academic practices in their schools. (By contrast, incorporating public domain text without attribution, which is not a copyright violation and seems to be acceptable, if not a good practice, on Wikipedia, would be considered plagiarism.)
There's no excuse for cutting and pasting copyrighted text into Wikipedia, much less edit warring to keep it, and I don't want to stand in the way of that (which seems to be the main subject here). But it would be wise to show a little more restraint in dealing with the other categories. Choess ( talk) 16:33, 22 April 2012 (UTC)
This is symptomatic of the way we see the laypress, PR, and unreviewed primary sources used to promote inaccurate information in Wikipedia articles:
Let's stick to the facts. Article quality improves by 64%, participants add three times as much quality content as regular new users ... Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) ( talk) 14:30, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Frank, I hope you have the analytical background to understand the flaws in this data, and why you shouldn't use them to assert fact. Further, how meaningful is it even if participants were adding quality content, considering the time this project is draining from established and knowledgeable editors, who could be adding even more and better content, if they weren't having to deal with the faulty editing? Once the term ends, and there is a good deal of time between when students are graded and when I summarize the issues I've seen so that students aren't affected by my criticism, I'd be happy to summarize the issues I've seen over the last year, and how much time it has costed me.
I'd much rather be spending my time on important unfinished or poor medical/psych topics that I've tackled of late-- PANDAS, cognitive behavioral therapy, endometriosis-- articles that actually matter to individuals' health-- then dealing with faulty student editing on obscure little viewed unimportant articles like klazomania, echopraxia, and autism spectrum disorders in the media. In the type of faulty data analysis you all are hyping, have you considered lost editor time, and that an article like klazomania only resulted because it's on my watchlist, and when the students mucked it up, I was obliged to fix it, even though no one ever reads or cares about that article? How exactly is the WMF measuring "quality" and "quantity"? Never mind, I've long had a good sense of who and what they value, and medical FAs ain't it. It would be wonderful if, whatever you come up with to deal with the issues that surfaced this term, they will deal with promoting the addition of well sourced valuable content, not articles that push one professor's POV towards the new version of DSM-5.
Here are the page views on the articles I'd like to be working on:
and here are the page views of articles that were on my watchlist before student editing affected them, so that I had to clean up:
It's good that these obscure articles provide a place for students to learn about Wikipedia: I'd be much more interested in seeing how many of these students who are "compulsory editors" actually stick around to add any meaningful content, and how WMF relates this to the time established editors could be spending creating meaningful content. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:51, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
Am I allowed to ask here what is the process for dealing with a student editing project that has not joined the WMF Education Program, or will that add to my disruptive editcountitis because I so often encounter these issues that it is overwhelming staffers? What do I advise this professor, if anything? It's a problematic article, and the prof seems to have no idea what a secondary source is. This is an issue I encounter frequently (articles edited by students without enrolling in the program, or articles whose talk pages are not tagged as part of the US or Canada Education Program). Also, will WMF staff deal with this matter, or will that fall to Nikkimaria, who is already quite overworked? Are unenrolled student editing projects to be dealt with on this board, and if not, where? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 03:05, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Nikkimaria, for the attention to issues and responses above. As term-end approaches in Universities, my work to keep medical articles clean of information that has the potential to harm individuals escalates. What does the WMF prefer regular editors do to consolidate data in one place or bring to whomever's attention those courses, profs, and OAs who have not been responsive, in fact appear to be completely disengaged with Wikipedia? Do you have a centralized place for this kind of reporting, or will this board serve for that? It should not be "my job" to supervise this program, but because there is a huge number of psych courses introducing faulty text into medical articles (that affect real people, akin to WP:BLP), I am constantly faced with this, and would be happy if there were some central place-- such as this board-- for asking the WMF to deal with the situation of missing profs and OAs, so I don't have to struggle to educate all of their students when the prof doesn't respond on talk or the course page. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:08, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I really appreciate everyone participating in discussions here - it seems like the new noticeboard really fills a needed role and will enhance participation and transparency. However, I've noticed that there are two different types of discussion occurring here - general criticism of the education program, with broad, potentially disruptive suggestions for improvement, and reports of specific incidents requiring urgent attention. I originally imagined this board filling the latter role, and I want to figure out going forward whether we believe this board will be most useful serving both roles, or whether it should be divided into two forums for these two distinct categories of discussion (since some people may only be interested in one or the other). Even if it were split, it would still be possible to leave notifications here of relevant discussions occurring elsewhere. If the forum is split, I wonder whether a new forum should be created for general discussion (and if so where), or if an existing forum should be used.
My personal opinion is that (as on WP:ANI) discussion of incidents inevitably leads to discussion of general ideas and that attempts to relocate that type of discussion would be ultimately fruitless as it would creep back in. I also think there aren't enough volunteers with an interest in the education program at the moment that we could sustain two separate forums with a critical mass of participation. So I would elect to maintain this single noticeboard for the purpose. However I am a bit biased as I'm not as turned off by the general discussion and resulting watchlist spam as some others might be. Thoughts? Dcoetzee 22:03, 23 April 2012 (UTC)
I've just found this handout, which is probably one source of many of the problems I'm encountering on medical articles-- it does not explain the difference between primary and secondary sources, and doesn't mention WP:MEDRS at all, which is interesting considering the high number of psych courses or other courses whose topic areas included editing medical articles. I hope the sourcing handout will be updated for the next term. Finding secondary reviews of primary studies for medical articles in PubMed is not that hard, particularly for students who have access to journal databases, but we do need to explain the correct use of primary studies vs. secondary reviews to the professors and students. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-06-30/Dispatches Many of the profs seem to think that because journals are peer-reviewed, that means articles are secondary reviews. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:12, 24 April 2012 (UTC)
After multiple discussions on this page of the issues occuring in medical topics, I located a referencing handout that is linked to now, this term, in several courses that are editing medical articles (incorrectly), and made a concrete suggestion that it could be updated to include better information about how to edit medical topics. Several exchanges later, where it was denied that the lack of such info is part of the problem, it was eventually revealed that this information is, in fact, being updated-- information that might have been stated first, without all the interim denials of the problem. Yes, such communication style is bogging down this page's effectiveness. Yes, the "regular editor" (moi) has no means of knowing the PDFs are being updated since a lot involving the Education Program does not happen on wiki where all can see and follow, this information is coming from two editors whose involvement with the Education Program is unclear (yet they appear to speak with authority), and to date as far as I know, no WMF staff has weighed in on or even acknowledged the discussion or the problem. These kinds of issues have affected the Education Program since its inception. How are regular editors, non-staff or not part of these programs, to make suggestions for improvement? To avoid the denials and indirects that resulted above from a simple request to get better referencing information in to the hands of students and profs, can any WMF staff or person answer the query-- is there a plan or a way to get these handouts updated to include information about editing medical topics, so that the experience can be less frustrating for students, regular editors, and result in better content? Is there a role for an udpated guide specific to medical articles? Is there any reason for me to work on something like that, and with whom would I work and where? I would appreciate if those who don't or can't answer the question cease the indirects, in the hopes that WMF staff will respond. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:08, 25 April 2012 (UTC)
OK, ready to start on this now. My plan is to come up with a sentence or three, that Kevin could bomb as he mentions, and could be raised at that psych initiative, and might be added to the MediaWiki extension. (The psych articles are not the only problem: there are also issues with a Genetics class and multiple other medical classes that I can't identify at the moment-- it's also affecting plain vanilla medical articles.) Should I model the addition needed on what is currently at File:WikipediaReferencing.pdf, or is that not the best starting place? SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:27, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
I think we have three main question 1) what do we expect from students / profs 2) what can we do to help guide students / profs in this direction 3) what actions do we wish to take with those who do not achieve our expectations after a reasonable effort.
This of course will be the most controversial and some may feel we do not need any additional tools to address concerns
Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 13:13, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Unless it's an IEP type situation, I cannot see rolling back an entire classes contributions without individually evaluating them. Likewise I can't see blocking an entire class. I would encourage quickfails at GAN and DYK, and have quickfailed some edu DYK's myself in the past. Stuart: unless all students in a class happened to be editing the same article, referring to them as meatpuppets would be greatly straining the ordinary definition of meatpuppet. In what other situation have we blocked 20+ good faith editors at a time whose editing patterns did not overlap just because they know each other irl and have a poor understanding of policy? Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:32, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I only recently started following this fascinating intersection of worlds—apologies for any redundancy. If it were me developing policy, I'd strongly discourage professors from involving any of Wikipedia's evaluation mechanisms (DYK, GA, C vs B class [lol]). It is enough for newcomers under deadlines to understand Wikipedia and develop articles consistent with WP's purpose. The "lesser" of the evaluation mechanisms I mentioned (and really, DYK isn't one anyway) may be arbitrary, subject to gaming, and aren't that meaningful; they are not in the least a replacement for independent evaluation in a course. The better of the evaluation mechanisms appear as a bridge too far given the very uneven results of these "education programs". Highlighting GAs or FAs as models for article development is one thing, but pushing students towards submitting to these projects may be unfair both to the student and to Wikipedia. A professor might say, "without reference to Wikipedia's methods of article evaluation, how will I know what's been accomplished?" Yet if these courses aren't about Wikipedia editing, then course evaluation must have much more to do with mastery of the subject than of Wikipedia policy, citation templates and wiki-code. Second, this seems really obvious, but it's not apparent from a quick scan of various courses that anyone is vetting them in advance for an answer to a simple question: will you be writing impersonal reports based on existing literature—suitable for an encyclopedia—or developing theses? Such consultation beforehand is the key, no? Riggr Mortis ( talk) 07:29, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&oldid=489488812#Possible_class_project_creating_essay-like_articles SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 16:05, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Here's a big ball of wax for contemplation.
So, OA not fully identified on the course page, passing one of the student's DYKs for that course. This is the kind of manipulation of consensus at review processes that has been discussed elsewhere. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:09, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Gotta go with Sandy here. :( If the Ambassadors do not understand the process, if they are intentionally passing content they should not, if the ambassadors are doing this because students are compelled to edit as grades matter, then there should absolutely be strong ambassador oversight for a classroom with Wikipedia project space. If the ambassador is not doing their job and students are moving content over and nominating content with ambassador approval (though consent or by not paying attention), the ambassador needs to undue it and bear the responsibility. This is NOT the fault of the students. This is the fault of the instructor and the fault of the ambassador. Given the examples we're getting, we should seriously consider blocking instructors and ambassadors who are asleep at the wheel, and give students topic area blocks where they cannot edit inside their assigned coursework area but explain we welcome their contributions elsewhere. -- LauraHale ( talk) 21:49, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Back to this topic, I also disagree with the moves to get students not to submit DYKs. In many cases, without DYK, the wider community would not have become aware of just how bad some of these student articles are. I suggest we should stop shooting ourselves in the foot by encouraging them not to submit: DYK can be a good first place to spot problems, and we should instead ask that DYK solve its long-standing quality control problems, that have been discussed at length for YEARS on talk. As long as DYK has no means of checking what it puts on the mainpage, and relies entirely on Nikkimaria to catch mistakes, we should 1) remind them that this is their problem, too and 2) not discourage students from using DYK, because it's the first stop where we're finding the extent of the problems in many courses. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:55, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
I do think that "students" should be treated just like any other editors. All that course stuff is for the Online Ambassadors, the Professor and others directly concerned with those education programs to take care of. Why are these editors considered a special group? Plenty of new editors edit every day. Why should those in the Education Program treated with kid gloves? Especially since they all ready have Online Ambassadors, Campus Ambassadors etc. to help them? Why? MathewTownsend ( talk) 21:46, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Later today when I'm at my real computer, I'll write up a bit more of what has been expected of the existing roles (CA, OA, etc) in the program as best I can. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 23:14, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
So far, the vast majority of negative stuff that has been brought up that deals with more than a single class or single incident has been related to sourcing standards on medical articles. Obviously, we currently have a hole in the way we present medical sourcing guidelines to classes. To make sure that other valuable feedback is not getting lost in the conversation about medical articles: has anyone else seen any other specific content related areas that we have similar systemic holes in? Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:39, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I had to move two articles (articles Mental health of refugee children and Mental health reform in North Carolina) as their article titles in the past didn't comply with Wikipedia standards. Reason? Overcapitalisation. If those people who lack the time to read Wikipedia's own rules and policies edit like this and cause disputes, this would happen:
• Edit warring and students who become edit warriors
• Move warring
• Conflicts with experienced users who knows more of the policies
• Personal attacks on experienced users and talk page misconduct (i.e. for example, "YOU REVERT MY EDITS? WHAT ARE THE RULES AGAIN, YOU TRASH!")
• Students getting topic-banned, banned and then blocked
• involvement of the MedCom and the ArbCom
• Sock puppetry by banned/blocked students
and all the others.
Wikipedia needs to have users and editors that follows policies. Hill Crest's WikiLaser (Boom). ( talk) 17:17, 28 April 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm way too broad at things. I'm under legal adult age (don't guess it, or I'd get on the IRC and request oversight) And apparently, I'm using the IAR policy. My huge problems which get me embarrassed are biting newcomers and getting screwed up in front of professionals.
Here are the issues I intended to address:
• The article title disputes. I meant that the students learn from mistakes. However, the students almost never respond via their talk pages. Then they never respond... and never. I have no other way to contact any students. Gorman, that's how students learn Wikipedia policy (i.e. learn from mistakes). Since I notice I'm a <redacted personal info>, I get embarrassed if I was unclear. I may seem that I stress the facts. However, if conflicts do occur, a simple edit war doesn't show that productive activity but interruption and distraction from actually contributing to a potentially perfect article.
• Manual of Style. Right now, if conflicts occur, flaming on the MoS could be done by unexperienced users who rely on the academia for Wikipedia editing style.
• <pointless statement>
Even though this may seem unclear, I need some assistance to actually present this info to mean what I intend to say.
My argument in a nutshell: Edit and move warring, plus loss of consensus by any editor for adverse periods for the latter isn't doing anything to improve Wikipedia. It just springs a lot more conflicts into existance. Hill Crest's WikiLaser (Boom). ( talk) 03:18, 29 April 2012 (UTC)
Editors more experienced with the Education Program may want to take a look at this ANI thread; Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboard/Incidents#Uncommunicative school project. There appears to be a class from the University of Portsmouth in the UK working on articles on English villages for an assignment. The students have not been willing so far to let us know which class this is. I know that the UK chapter has been very active in working with academia so perhaps someone from the UK chapter might be able to connect with this class. GabrielF ( talk) 17:43, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
Developing a metric for determining student impact on Wikipedia processes.
1. Identify classes that have been involved on English Wikipedia. Divide them into five groups: A) Classes that participated within the USA/Canada framework who had a campus or online ambassador. B) Classes that participated within the USA/Canada framework who had an instructor who had extensive editing experience on Wikipedia. C) Classes that participated within the USA/Canada framework who had a zero guidance and the who did not use an ambassador. D) Classes that participated independently where their work was clearly structured around an instructor user page or some other instructor created space outside of the programme. E) Classes that neither utilized the programme, nor utilized other space.
These groups will be used for comparisons to measure the relative success of each group.
2. Amongst these five groups, identify if a class was involved in any of the following processes: In The News, Did You Know, Good Article, Featured Article, Featured Picture, Peer Review, in Wikiproject assessment, Articles for Creation and Articles for Deletion. In these categories, do the following:
A) For instructors:
i) Get the instructor's instructional objective and lesson plans specifically as they pertain to this assessment task. This includes criteria used for measuring this objective. Analyze specific instructional objective for how it aligns with the objectives of the assessment process. How well do they align? Compare the differences across all five groups.
ii) Get the instructor's syllabus, the whole course objectives and as possibly the curriculum standards for the course. Analyze the instructor's instructional objectives for the assessment process as it relates to the overall syllabus and curriculum standards. How well do they align? Compare the differences across all five groups.
iii) Find instructor's Wikipedia account. Track the volume of instructor edits during the period when their course was live, after and before overall. Track the number of edits made by instructors in the assessment processes, how many were made to their student related pages and to other pages.
iv) Survey the instructor asking how the they felt English Wikipedia assisted them in meeting core instructional objectives for their course. Also ask about their editing experiences in assessment processes.
v) Chart how instructors were involved with student work that was involved with assessment. How often did the ambassador edit the articles? Did they review a GA/DYK? If yes, what was the pass/fail rate by the assessment type? Was the instructor overturned? (GA pass taken to GAN. DYK ending up rejected. C class taken down to start. Tags removed by an instructor put back.)
vi) Chart how often instructor voted in things related to student work and how often this supported or opposed the final consensus view. (AfD, Merge, etc.)
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
B) For students:
i) Get all the support materials students were given prior to being required to work on an assessment related task from the instructor. Ask students what they were given.
ii) Track student edits before, during and after the course.
iii) How many total edits did a student make to their user page, to article specific talk page, and to article before submitting it for the assessment.
iv) Track the success percentage of students going through an assessment process. (Did their DYK appear on the main page? Did their GA pass?) If failed the assessment process, identify the cause. For example: Asssment process malformed, article had copyvios, article was not long or new enough, article not fully source, article not reliably sourced, article not notable enough.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
C) For ambassadors:
i) Graph their edits to various assessment processes before, during and after the course.
ii) Chart how ambassadors were involved with student work that was involved with assessment. How often did the ambassador edit the articles? How many comments did they make to a student's talk page? How many comments did they make to an article talk page? Did they review a GA/DYK? If yes, what was the pass/fail rate by the assessment type? Was the instructor overturned? (GA pass taken to GAN. DYK ending up rejected. C class taken down to start. Tags removed by an ambassador put back.)
iii) Chart how often ambassadors voted in things related to student work and how often this supported or opposed the final consensus view. (AfD, Merge, etc.)
iv) Survey ambassadors for their views on the various assessment processes, how often they participated prior to the class.
v) Collect all materials the ambassador were given before and during the course by the instructor to help the ambassador support the class.
vi) Ask ambassadors if they believe the student work helped students meet the stated course objectives. Ask ambassadors what percentage of student contributions they feel worked towards Wikipedia's ideals for content improvement.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
D) For people involved with assessment processes:
i) Get a list of people involved in an assessment area at the time a class was active. Find out which percentage of these editors were involved in classroom work. Find out the editing patterns for people involved in an assesment process: Which percentage of their assessment work involved students? What was the percentage before the class was involved? What was the percentage afterwards? What were the edit counts in their main contribution periods before, during and after a class was active? This is trying to determine the impact of student involvement on normal editing processes. (Did they neglect others because of students? Did they contribute less because of student supervision? Did they decrease editing as a result?)
ii) Survey people people involved with assessment and ask their feelings about being involved with coursework. Survey what they feel like it did to their other editing. Ask if about their motives and if it changed because of possibility of a student being given a grade for the assessor's work.
iii) Determine how often the person passed/failed a student's work. Track the reasons why it they did not pass a student's work.
iv) Compare the assessor's student pass/fail rate to the assessor's non-student pass/fail rate. Track the reasons they did not pass a contributor's work.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
E) Other contributors:
i) Identify contributors to articles used in the assessment process by students. Track the edits by those contributors to those articles before, during and after course involvement. Purpose is to determine local article specific editing changes.
ii) Track these contributors overall edit count totals to all articles before, during and after a course for contributors who had edited now student being worked on articles. Purpose is to measure how this impacted on their overall editing.
iii) Survey these contributors to ask how a class working on the article impacted their willingess to edit the article.
iv) Ask contributors where they would find information on student coursework if a contributor had questions about what was happening to an article.
SORT RESPONSES BY FIVE CLASSROOM TYPES.
F) The assessment space:
i) Identify the volume of contributions to an assessment before, during and after an assessment process for totals. What percentage was student work?
ii) Identify lengths of times for assessment for student work and non-student work. How long before a work was assessed and by whom was it assessed? How long did the assessment take from start to finish?
iii) Identify at the overall pass/fail rate for articles before, during and after for student versus non-student work.
3. Analyze the above by comparing the five different groups with in specific assessment types and based on the different groups involved.
This will give an idea on if students are disruptive, how they are potentially disruptive, which groups are the least disruptive, how normal assessment compares to assessment done of student work, and how this impacts other contributor edits.
Is this a lot of work? Yes, but anything less than this really does not address the fundamental problems of how students disrupt community processes while at the same time measuring student success and instructor preparedness. -- LauraHale ( talk) 09:35, 2 May 2012 (UTC)
Over the past several days, I've seen a number of new botany articles appearing from new accounts that appear to be part of a class project. Users in question seem to be:
Most have been working in sandboxes first, and I haven't seen any serious issues, other than some patches of copyvio on one of the articles (which have been fixed). I put one of the nicest articles through DYK. Still, there hasn't been much engagement (although I saw one come back to add a reference when a "citation needed" template was placed), and it would be nice if we had a point of contact to offer support. Choess ( talk) 16:06, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
I just happened to see this on my watchlist, from a course that has given me fits. Wikipedia talk:United States Education Program/Courses/Writing As Communication Spring 2012#Gender representation in video games. I haven't looked any further into this-- just happened to see it because I've posted twice to that talk so it's on my watchlist, so posting it here (because profs don't seem to follow their course pages). I've discussed several of their other problematic articles in sections above, and there seems to be an absence of ambassadorship in that course. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 14:36, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
Anyone interested in the question of what the costs and benefits are of the education program may wish to look at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research and the associated talk page. I've posted an abbreviated version of my comments above at the talk page there. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 12:36, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
A key discussion taking place here is "Are the benefits of the Education Program outweighed by the problems it has caused?" Several editors have pointed out cases where the students have caused additional work for existing experienced editors, taking those editors away from the work they might otherwise have been doing. The Education Program also has its success stories -- articles that have been significantly improved by student contributions. We need to be able to measure both the quality of the students' work, and the burden they place on the community, if we want to understand whether the Education Program is a net benefit to Wikipedia. In addition, if it is a benefit to the encyclopedia, we'd like to understand what classes work well, and why, so that we can work to increase the quality of student work from each class, and decrease the burden placed on existing editors.
LiAnna Davis of the WMF asked Doc James and I to meet with her to come up with ideas about how to improve the metrics for the Education Program. Here are some suggestions as a result of that meeting. We'd like to get feedback: are these the right things to measure? And will this approach give us useful numbers?
First, article quality. Did a student's edits improve article quality or not? We suggest re-using the metric from the Public Policy Initiative. Two or three articles will be selected at random from each class in the EP, and an assessment page created. Volunteer editors will measure the article quality before and after. Doc and I have both volunteered to do this, but others would be welcome to help; it's not as timeconsuming as you would expect. The rubric for scoring is here, and an example assessment page is here.
The articles would be assessed at two different points: first, the "Pre" state, just prior to the student's first edit; second, the "Post" state, as it was after the student's last edit. This will give an initial estimate of how much value was added by the student.
The second metric is community burden. We propose to post a note on the article talk page, at the end of the semester, saying: "This article was edited by students as part of the Education Program. If you were involved in editing the article during the time the students were working on the article, we would like your evaluation of the students' involvement with the article." There would be a link to an assessment page where editors could record their opinion of the burden placed on them by the students' work on this article. We're thinking of a scale something like this (and the wording is very much a draft):
We could also post an invitation to this assessment on the talk pages of any editors who edited the article or article talk page after the student began editing. Note that the quality metric and burden metric would both be assessed on the same articles: that is, if an article is randomly selected to have a quality assessment it would also get a burden assessment.
We also discussed the relationship between a professor's understanding of Wikipedia and the likelihood that their class would be successful. We felt that it was likely that professors who are good content editors would be well positioned to design successful classes, but if we want to proselytize this point of view we need to gather data to prove that it's the case. The simplest relevant metric seems to be the article space edit count for the professor. We propose to track this number as well, and look for a correlation between this and student success.
Overall, a student's involvement with the Education Program would be regarded as a success if it gains significantly on the quality metric and does not bring with it a measurable burden on the community.
We'd like to get feedback on this approach. Should we go ahead and assemble draft assessment pages? Are there better ways to measure what needs to be measured? Are we measuring the right things? Please comment. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 15:57, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm going to write a combined response to the above, to save time and wordage. Laura, I have no credentials in education -- perhaps I should have made that clear to start with. I can tell you what my background is if you like, but rather than rely on credentials I'd prefer to argue, as you are doing, on the basis of the pros and cons of the suggested approaches. I agree with many of your points but my feeling is that, as with so much else on Wikipedia, we have to tailor the specifications to the labour force available, and although I think the metric program that you outline further down this page would provide very useful data I don't think it's feasible. The question is whether there is any overlap between what is feasible and what is worth doing. You seem to be saying that there is no overlap; I disagree -- I think it's possible to define a simpler set of data that is collectible and useful.
I should also have mentioned in my post that the WMF is plannning to gather some of the data you mention regarding the classes -- I would call this data about the inputs to the program: class sizes, class year, prior experience of professor, support available from OAs and CAs, and so on. If we can find a way to usefully measure the impact, or output, then there may be some interesting correlations there. LiAnna might be able to add some detail; I don't know any more about it than this but I was glad to hear that this data is being gathered.
To respond to some specific points:
To summarize: James, LiAnna and I met to talk about metrics because we wanted to quantify the complaints we are seeing on this board. Nobody wants the education program to continue if it's harmful to Wikipedia, but we need to have some kind of metric. Laura's proposal is, I think, far more work than the community can undertake. If the proposal I outlined above is not possible, can someone suggest a better approach that doesn't require drastically more labour? Or is it simply useless to try to support the arguments made on this page (on either side of the case) with data? Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 02:17, 3 May 2012 (UTC)
Emphasis on by the student, mine, that is wrong. Sample. Article is on my watchlist, students edit it and add faulty text, it takes me ten edits plus a lot of research to clean up, lather rinse and repeat ten times over the term, by the time the course ends, they've added faulty text a dozen times, I've got hundreds of edits into cleanup (because I edit in small pieces, hoping they are following and reading each edit and learning, but they aren't)-- the article is decent because I spent boatloads of time cleaning up an article that no one cared was a stub because no one read it anyway (per page views). You cannot say that article was improved by students by looking at their first and last edits-- I did because I had to repair their damage. Example, of which I've got dozens-- klazomania. Who the heck cares about klazomania? Negligible page views, obscure topic about which nothing is written. At a time I coulda been writing real articles, I had to clean that up. If you're going to evaluate the first and last student edit as if they added value-- they didn't. What they added was work for me to an article of zero consequence. Similar across every student-edited article I've encountered-- the article improvement between first and last student edit is because I had to invest time to keep the articles clean, which would be fine if they were typically articles worthy of the time invested in them (in terms of importance and page views)-- instead, they are obscure topics like klazomania, which sound sexy and fun (oh, compulsive shouting, cool, let's edit that!) Klazomania was last term-- same thing this term with echopraxia where the students are just determined to write about schizophrenia in the echopraxia article, Autism spectrum disorders in the media (which was unnecessarily spun off from another article and has taken tons of edits to keep clean and has added nothing new of substance, in fact, has copied text from other articles), Bipolar disorder not otherwise specified (would my time not be better spent cleaning up bipolar rather than one obscure offshoot that no one reads?), separation anxiety disorder, and then the infamous Internet relationship where the student repeatedly plagiarized but the professor couldn't be bothered to follow student contribs where the copyvio removed is clear in edit summaries (is it my job to do the prof's grading???)-- when these articles are evaluated as some sort of improvement between first and last student edit, how are all of my interim edits to clean up and remove copyvio accounted for? That rubric doesn't work-- unless I was supposed to let medical articles languish until the term ends and do cleanup then-- in between the first and last student edit are experienced editors being burdened to clean up, and we would have been better with a stub in most of these cases, leaving experienced editors to work on articles of substance rather than being drug into obscure topics ... sorry if others have already pointed this out, I'm just home and didn't have time to read the whole thing. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 02:45, 3 May 2012 (UTC)The articles would be assessed at two different points: first, the "Pre" state, just prior to the student's first edit; second, the "Post" state, as it was after the student's last edit. This will give an initial estimate of how much value was added by the student.
Hi all, thanks for these comments. I completely agree with much of the sentiment above, that establishing a baseline for how much new editors in general impact experienced editors is important for comparing to student editors. I'm open to any ideas of how to measure how much our students are impacting resources more than any other new editors.
With respect to the quality stats Mike Christie mentioned above, we want to establish a general quality impact for each class so we can figure out what patterns emerge from those classes we see as successful (again, our primary definition of success is improving the quality of Wikipedia articles, not adding new editors). We're kicking off a research project to collect data we think may or may not have some impact on what makes classes successful. We have a list of questions available at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research, and I encourage anyone interested in research to take a look at the questions. We're trying to identify common markers across successful courses, so that we can be more selective about which courses to work with in the future, targeting courses that have markers that we have seen have led to success in the past. Please take a look at the questions and add anything you think we've missed that might contribute to the success or failure of a class. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 23:14, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
We have a class of masters students adding content pertaining to physiotherapy. There additions are however supported by primary research and are often of to great of depth for a general overview article. Articles they have been working on include stroke and Parkinson disease. I do not know who the prof in question is. I have created them a subpage here so that they can than write in greater detail Rehabilitation in Parkinson's disease. Assistance would be appreciated.-- Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 00:23, 6 May 2012 (UTC)
Earlier in this noticeboard ( #New_botany_class.3F) User:Choess noted that he had identified a large number of students contributing as part of an unaffiliated course, and had created an ad hoc course page at User:Choess/BIO341 to help track them. I took the liberty of adding notices to student user pages to indicate that they were contributing as part of this class. However, I've received e-mail from the instructor indicating "[s]ome asked me not to identify them in this public context as a Stony Brook student". My response was essentially that this information is not personally identifying and is relevant to their contributions and our interactions with them, and that students who used their real name as a username could request a rename, but because this is a serious concern I want to establish that there is consensus around this. Although the amount of information supplied could potentially be reduced, I can't really imagine a way of providing contact information for the instructor that does not expose the identity of the class indirectly (because the instructor does not yet have an account). Thoughts? Dcoetzee 21:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
Maintaining a list such as User:Choess/BIO341 seems appropriate to me. So does reaching out to the group and identifying a point of contact who will be responsive to wiki talk page comments (or emails). – SJ + 07:33, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
I agree strongly with maintaining a list such as User:Choess/BIO341. Without knowing that some cactus articles were being created by students for an assignment, I would have reverted wholesale and then asked for a block if the editor(s) persisted, since they were creating articles without understanding synonyms (at least one still contains information based on two different species). We need to know that a class is editing, and what user names they are editing under so that we can avoid being too heavy handed. We don't want to put them off continuing to work on Wikipedia. Ideally we need to know when the assignment finishes, so we can then go back and fix things up. If we don't have such lists, then students' work will suffer constant interference. Peter coxhead ( talk) 08:41, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
Discuss here. Pine (talk) 07:09, 8 May 2012 (UTC)
We're replacing the course page system currently in use for the U.S. and Canada Education programs. Please see WT:Ambassadors#Replacing the course pages and place followup comments there. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 18:10, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
As a response to some of the discussions here (and elsewhere) about quality metrics for the work done by the students in the Education Program, the WMF has created a set of assessments to evaluate the impact of the courses on the articles they have modified. Here is an example of a completed assessment page from a year ago. If you would like to contribute assessments, please take a look at Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Article quality and do as many assessments as you have time for. Please also let anyone else know who you think might be interested in assessing articles.
These assessments are an important part of the program. Regardless of whether you think the education program is having a good or bad effect on the encyclopedia, measuring the impact of the students' work on Wikipedia articles is the best way to determine the value of the program. There are too many courses and too many students for the community to be able to rely on examples to decide the future of the program. We need data to make decisions, and these assessments are part of the process of gathering that data. Please consider helping by assessing a few articles. If you have any questions, please post them here. Thanks -- Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 10:38, 13 May 2012 (UTC)
There appears to be a class assignment that requires peer reviews [28] but it appears that comments are going ignored. [29] The two links go to related articles, I think they are from the same class. Does anyone have details to see if there is a class that is requiring peer reviews and what class/professor/ambassador is providing instruction/requirements? If requiring peer reviews without requiring editors address them is occurring, I think it should stop. Biosthmors ( talk) 02:08, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
Please accept this page of the school — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chitra sivakumar ( talk • contribs)
A professor who is not involved with the Education Program just emailed the gender gap listserv to request help for her students who will be posting articles this week. I'm copying her message here:
If anybody is interested in helping these students, please keep an eye out for those new articles/updated articles. Sorry I don't have usernames! Thanks for any help you can give, and I'll also direct them to Teahouse for technical questions. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 17:05, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
(repost) Sorry I couldn't post on a more specific talk page, only the talk-page banner for the article in question, text annotation ( review), didn't give any details. Anyway, there were some fairly big concerns with the article (but nothing particularly unusual). The nominator hasn't yet replied or edited and I wondered whether anyone in the Education project had any ideas or wanted to do anything about that. I've placed the article formally on hold today. Grandiose ( me, talk, contribs) 17:52, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
Just linking to the topic from here since this is a fairly central place: WT:Ambassadors#Farewell! Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 02:52, 1 August 2012 (UTC)
I've just opened up a request for comment on whether to enable the Education Program extension for managing and monitoring courses, both within the Wikipedia Education Program, and potentially for other classes working independently as well. If it does get enabled, there are related technical (user rights) and policy (who should be able to use it, and how will user rights be assigned?) issues that will need to be sorted out. It looks like this wasn't ready soon enough to use this coming term for most classes, but if the community wants the extension, it should be ready to go for the next term.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 13:39, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
The RfC has closed, and based on the result, we should be turning on the Education Program extension soon (with user rights to be controlled by admins, and the extension available for use by classes in the US and Canada Education Programs as well as other classes working independently).-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 14:56, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
User:NerdyNole has introduced some copyright violations such as [30] from [31]. How can we let the instructor know this happened? Marcus Qwertyus ( talk) 02:47, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
I've come across an IP user purposely adding incorrect information to Wikipedia, who claimed that it was for a class project [32]. Regardless of the truth of the IPs statements, am I safe in assuming that isn't permitted and they should inform their teacher (if he/she exists)? Also, apologies if this isn't the right board to broach such topics. It was the one that seemed the most correct to me. RA0808 talk contribs 16:16, 27 September 2012 (UTC)
An RfC has been initiated Wikipedia:Education_Working_Group/RfC by the Education Working group on the future of the US Canada Education program. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 13:26, 1 October 2012 (UTC)
I've been recommended to post about this here, so just have a look at this ANI thread to see what I'm referring to. The editors here will have a better handling of the situation and what to do in this case than I. -- Jethro B 05:54, 5 October 2012 (UTC)
The Education Program extension for structured course pages for classes is now live. (It's actually been deployed for a few weeks, but unrelated platform updates introduced a critical bug that it took us a little while to fix.) Per the RfC on using the extension, it's now available for use by US and Canada Education Program, as well as whatever other courses the community chooses to use it for. See Special:SpecialPages#Education for the various features and lists of courses.
Admins now have the ability to create (and delete) institutions and courses, and to assign the user rights for "course coordinators" (non-admins who will be able to create and remove courses, mark people as instructors or volunteers, and use the rest of the extension features), "online volunteers" or "campus volunteers" (people helping out with courses, such as Online and Campus Ambassadors), and "course instructors".
I'll be beta testing it with one of the current classes, Education Program:University of Guelph-Humber/Currents in Twentieth Century World History (2012 Q4), as well as building up the documentation for course pages. Now's also the time to figure out how we want to use this for independent classes; it should make it easier to keep tabs on classes and catch problems early, so trying it out by offering it to a few classes that we discover editing on their own might be a good first step.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 17:52, 16 November 2012 (UTC)
It appears that when I found Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, a topic on my course page ( User:Biosthmors/Intro Neuro), I seem to notice a funny pattern. Biosthmors ( talk) 21:10, 20 November 2012 (UTC)
I'm under the impression that telling students to generate an outline before editing a Wikipedia article might be a bad thing (if it is used as the basis to create sections and subsections). I think it serves as an incentive to create articles with excessive amounts of subsections that create a troubling experience for readers. See here for example. Biosthmors ( talk) 16:44, 23 November 2012 (UTC)
See Talk:Gathering hypothesis and the article, and the article Hunting hypothesis. American Psychological Association Wikipedia initiative. Thanks. Dougweller ( talk) 20:18, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
It looks like a whole bunch of articles from the Behavioral Ecology class were just nominated for GA (see all the recent nominations in Biology and medicine). From what I've seen, the articles from this class are quite strong and the students are very active, so it'd be worthwhile to give them timely reviews. Anyone up for reviewing a few biology articles?-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 03:00, 28 November 2012 (UTC)
I saw there was an RfC. Where is the program headed? I don't need many details, I'd just like to get a main idea. It appears the WMF wants to limit future involvement, though I'm not sure to what extent. Thanks. Biosthmors ( talk) 20:36, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
Essays are great places to collect/develop wisdom. Maybe we can develop guidance essays on topics such as WP:Student assignments, or WP:Supporting a Professor during an assignment, or WP:How to support a classroom assignment. Maybe we can start with one central page then split as necessary. Any preferences on titles/a title? Or do essays already exist? Biosthmors ( talk) 21:01, 2 December 2012 (UTC)
How would y'all feel about the idea of education program specific admins? There is no technical mechanism to do this, so what I mean by it is pretty much someone going through RfA making a pledge to only use the toolset in situations specific to educational assignments - e.g., revdeling student copyright violations, histmerging moves mucked up by students, and issuing preventative blocks against education program editors, enforceable via revocation of the bit if significantly broken.
The reason this idea occurred to me is because I have encountered a number of situations related to the education program where being able to use an admin toolset would've been useful (and due to some on the ground stuff I'm in the process of setting up, I expect I will encounter many more in the future,) but don't think that I would currently pass an RfA as a standard candidate, and I also don't desire to use the admin toolset broadly anyway. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of education program who is in a similar situation.
I know there would be a risk of someone who made such a pledge going berserk, misusing their tools, and, say, banning a bunch of random people, but I think the standard for "we trust you not to go berserk, and trust you to clean up education program stuff" isn't as high a standard as "we trust you to appropriately use administrative tools in every area of Wikipedia." (This is a very tentative idea; I've not decided whether I like the idea myself or not yet, but wanted to see what other people thought. I'm not intending to do this myself for the foreseeable future, so this isn't intended as some sort of weird pre-RFA canvassing.) Kevin Gorman ( talk) 04:23, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
That all said, I do like the idea of dedicated EP "cleanup" personnel. It would take a lot of the burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' learning curves, if you had people waiting in the wings to mop up spots where the learning went wrong. I don't think this calls for specially-appointed admins, though, so much as 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), or perhaps non-ambassadors who volunteer to go through EP work in hazmat suits so the rest of the community doesn't have to. If someone does the rest of the work, it's not too hard to find an admin to actually mash buttons for something like a histmerge. It's the finding the pages involved, figuring out what goes where, figuring out how it was messed up, etc that takes the real time. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 15:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
It would take a lot of the burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' learning curves,...Don't you think a more accurate statement would be
... burden off the community, which strains under the weight of. Problematic student classes indeed concentrate things in a way that makes them more visible, but collectively I suspect there's just as much burden on the entire community associated with the learning curves of all new editors, its just not as visible or concentrated in one spot. Point being, I don't think there's any more or less burden associated with education related editors. New editors place a burden on the community, why because the community has norms that requires it to welcome new contributors and deal with them in positive and constructive ways. And we all know the learning curve can be high--we all experienced it in some way. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 16:26, 7 December 2012 (UTC)EP classes'all new editors' learning curves,...
Thanks for the answers, y'all. I don't follow RfA closely enough to have been aware that such things had previously been suggested and rejected. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 16:45, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
There were a bunch of articles (or sections added to articles) started for one psych class in Spring 2012, all on the Big Five:
Many of these (and others) were nominated for DYK at the same time. I think there was agreement then that professors should not require students nominate articles for DYK or GA. (I don't have the diffs as Educational Program discussions aren't collected in one area.)
Here is a sample Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dimensional approach to personality disorders which demonstrates how exhausting the process was. As you can see, the article was kept but continues in a disreputable state (as do all the other articles mentioned above). No one has cleaned them up. I've stayed away from the EP courses since so I'm not familiar with the current situation.
Hopefully this kind of thing no longer happens. Best, MathewTownsend ( talk) 19:50, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
FYI: there is a discussion about new articles created as part of a classroom project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There are a number of recent pages about participants in the Federal Writers' Project which appear to be outside the scope of WP. I've offered to contact the instructor and if needed transwiki import the pages to Wikiversity. It may also be desirable to contact the instructor about any potential future projects to insure that new content is within our guidelines and to offer assistance. -- mikeu talk 20:37, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Sorry the following text is so long. The two formal student analyses are given so much weight by the Education Program that I think it is worth investigating them seriously. I hope you can bear with me.
I've been investigating the impressive soundbite: "Our data shows that students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent." which is listed at the Common misconceptions about the Wikipedia Education Program as a fact rather than a misconception. But it is the latter. The figure comes from the Public Policy Initiative assessment. Their results are shown here: Student Contributions to Wikipedia. They summarise this as
The exercise was repeated for Spring 2012 United States and Canada students( results here) with a different set of student work. They summarise this as
The articles were assessed on a point scale here that looked at Comprehensiveness (1-10), Sourcing (0-6), Neutrality (0-3), Readability (0-3), Formatting (0-2) and Illustrations (0-2). The total score can range from 1-26.
These scores are essentially subjective though there is guidance on what sort of score would be expected for each metric category. However, there is a tendency to bump up the score for any perceived shift in an area. Adding a point for Comprehensiveness when actually the increase in topic covering was negligible or even unchanged (just more noise). The score for Sourcing might improve because the added text was sourced but overall the article was still in a poor shape and its sourcing score should have remained. Adding one image to an unillustrated article could shift the score from 0 to 1 when in fact it should still have scored 0 on the scale. This natural bias to want to indicate the change on a crude scale can only be avoided by having the pre and post articles reviewed by different people. And since there is a big variation in scores by the reviewers, one would need a very large number of reviewers to average the results.
The articles are reviewed by non-subject experts. It is very difficult for a non-expert to judge the comprehensiveness, sourcing and neutrality of a topic. This is highlighted by some of the scoring for medical articles.
Since the scores are looking at different aspects of an article, adding them all together produces quite an arbitrary quality score. A different score could arise by a different weighting of the various scores or by including other metrics. For example, neutrality is a score point but not generally an issue with many of these articles. Far more likely an issue is WP:WEIGHT (which is part of NPOV) which concerns the balance of the article wrt topic issues. Are we writing too much about one aspect and not enough about others? The assessment didn't look at plagiarism which is a huge problem and very hard to analyse with out good access to the sources and a lot of time. The assessment didn't look at Wikipedia's comprehensiveness on the topic outside of the one article.
Looking at the raw data for Spring 2012 United States and Canada students one can see a large variation student improvement scores depending on what they start with. It is very easy to score a high delta when working on a stub or start class article but much harder for C or B class articles. None of the students worked on GA, A or FA class articles. The average point improvement ranged from 4 down to 0.5 depending on what class you begin with.
For existing articles, the PPI assessment found a 4.8 point improvement and US&Canada found a 2.94 point improvement. However, all I think one can honestly retrieve from this is that both are above 0. If many students had picked C or B class articles to begin with, then the improvement would probably be less than 1 point on average. If they had all expanded stubs and starts, the improvement might be 50% higher. If the scoring system had been stricter or differently weighted or included other factors, the numbers would shift again.
For new articles, it makes absolutely no sense to compare total scores. Of the 26 points, half (sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting) make no sense for a non-existent article. The other points (comprehensiveness, illustrations) could be rated at 0 for non-existent articles though this rather assumes the information wasn't on Wikipedia anywhere before the article was created. Which in fact is a big problem for new student articles and article expansion, and something the assessment didn't look at. Therefore the statements that there was a 5.8 point and 6.5 point improvement in all articles seen by these two assessments is nonsense. The former figure is behind the "students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent" which is a mathematically naive calculation totally at the mercy of the mix of new and existing articles in the dataset: the percentage improvement tends towards infinity as you remove existing articles from the dataset.
These analyses have essentially concluded that students wrote stuff about a topic. When expanding missing or short articles, they could write unreadable, inaccurate, unsourced text and still improve their score. When expanding long articles, they could have written "Jason is gay" and not changed the score. Their text could be completely plagiarised and still improve the score. Their "new material" could already be present on Wikipedia and still improve the score.
I think the Education Program should be asked to remove their "improved 64 percent" statement as mathematical nonsense, and the other numbers should be treated with scepticism. Further analysis of the student edits is required:
I am concerned that the student work appears most effective when the create new articles or expand stubs. Sooner or later, the psych undergrads are going on run out of ways of entitling their essay on the Big 5 or colour perception as a "new article". The effect is a fragmentation and duplication of information on Wikipedia. The emphasis on a self-contained piece of writing goes against the hyperlinked collective work that makes Wikipedia strong. That the students also fail to interact with other editors or join projects exacerbates the silo effect. Add to this the problems MathewTownsend notes above when trying to AfD these unneeded duplicate articles. For an example of these issues see Talk:Myoclonic epilepsy#Big problems with this article where student edits would have been scored very highly on the above assessments but in fact had extensive copyvios, duplicated existing better material or were completely off-topic. Colin° Talk 13:48, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
Hi all, I'm one of the coordinators of the Canadian Education Program. Some of my colleagues and I are currently reviewing recent discussion on this board. While I appreciate the engagement, and the clear desire to improve the Education Program, there are concerns about the way some editors have gone about presenting their criticism. In particular (and this is not intended to be threatening) there are concerns that parts of this discussion have violated WP:CIVIL, WP:GOODFAITH, WP:BITE and perhaps (most concerning) WP:PERSONAL and WP:HARASS. I would appreciate if those involved could post links to the primary concerns, in particular:
I recognize that this is a discussion board, and that opportunity should be allowed for extensive comment; however, for this thread, if you wouldn't mind, please keep answers as brief as possible. Please refer to as many concrete examples as possible. Please also refrain from adding additional anecdotal criticism.
Thank you for your help with this.
Sincerely, Jaobar ( talk) 16:30, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Jaobar: I suspect that part of the reason you posted is related an email I sent to a colleague of yours a couple days ago. I've reviewed the email I sent, and although the tone of it was probably grumpier than was necessary (and it probably wasn't a good idea for me to write a grumpy email while on a lot of cough syrup/while with pneumonia, though that certainly doesn't excuse a grumpier than necessary tone) I don't think that it violates any of the policies you linked - and I stand by its contents. I'll be in private contact with you in the immediate future to explain further the particular situations that led me to send it. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:20, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
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Greetings. As of this evening, I see little evidence to justify the previous discussion. Hopefully this will change by tomorrow.
For example, User:slimVirgin stated "I alerted the teacher, and he said that checking for plagiarism was not something he did. He suggested I handle it myself, and said he would give students who had posted copyvios an F." So far I see no evidence of this. Please point me to this conversation.
User:MelanieN, as far as I know, all individuals with profiles are considered editors, not just Wikipedians. Please point me to examples of students (editors) requesting that course material remain unaltered during the semester.
As far as copyright violations, I see one thread where concerns were raised, to which the professor responded. I also see claims of 4 alleged copyright violations. I am hoping that this potentially damaging set of discussion posts (damaging to the Education Program) has not been the result of an over-reaction. Please provide evidence. Jaobar ( talk) 04:49, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
I provided you with conclusive evidence of a student repeatedly infringing copyright via email earlier today, before your most recent post. As I said in my email, I'll be getting some other diffs to you that show such problems in the relatively near future. All of the other diffs that you have requested are already present on this page as far as I can tell. (Although I would certainly invite other people to provide additional evidence of student copyright infringement here, as requested.) Kevin Gorman ( talk) 07:22, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
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Jaobar, I am happy to encounter an education program professor who has actually edited articles; having engaged Wikipedia, I'm sure you realize your demanding tone isn't helpful here-- a board where we are seeking solutions to a a problem that is deep and wide.
I have said it before, here and elsewhere, but I'll repeat this for your benefit. It is not my job to be an unpaid TA for a professor who has never edited any article, doesn't check or know how to check edit history, doesn't look at article talk, and wants me to blow the whistle on a student, causing the student to get an F for plagiarizing. Those professors-- who haven't given adequate instruction to their students and are using established Wikipedians as unpaid TAs-- shouldn't be unleashing their students' work on Wikipedia. If they are too lazy or unknowledgeable about how to check an article history to find my very clearly marked edit summaries indicating removing plagiarism, see talk or to follow the link to talk, it's not my job to notify them or to be fingerpointing at any specific examples here. If we were dealing with editors who would be sticking around, I would be dealing with the plagiarism as I would any other editor; since these students leave as soon as their course is done meaning there is no educational benefit in helping the student learn how to be a real Wikipedian, I have no reason to pursue the copyvio matters, other than removing the plagiarism as soon as I find it. I do not intend to be pointing out where I've found plagiarism; it is the professor's job when grading to look at edit history, where they can find clearly marked edit summaries. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 13:34, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
Jonathan, the gist of the discussion is that plagiarism (copy-paste editing from sources cited in footnotes) was found in several articles being edited as part of a Canadian course, and the teacher has left it to Wikipedians to deal with it. [42] My view is that teachers should check for plagiarism themselves, for a number of reasons, including (a) it's part of the job, (b) unpaid volunteers shouldn't be burdened with the extra work, (c) where the sources are books, they're probably in the university library, whereas we might have to rely on inter-library loans (which apart from the hassle factor could take weeks to arrive), and (d) volunteers shouldn't be responsible for deciding, in effect, which students get an F. As one of the program coordinators, what's your view on this? SlimVirgin (talk) 02:08, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
I don't want to put words in your mouth, Jaobar, so please correct where I'm misreading you (because I assume I am), but to me right now it looks sort of like you're hoping to keep EP-related Wikipedia stuff a sort of "not the real world" sandbox where students/professors not adhering to the rules doesn't count. What some of the people here are trying to communicate is that to them - to many of us - it does count, and that while seeing someone appear out of the blue and dump a copyvio in an article is bad, it is in some ways worse to see someone appear because they were sent here and go on to dump a copyvio in an article. So to you it seems unnecessarily aggressive for people to go to students and professors and ask them to fix their mistakes and not commit more of them, because why are we persecuting these people who are donating their time and efforts to Wikipedia? To others, it seems like asking non-student editors to clean up and maintain students' work is an unnecessary drain on everyone else who's donating their time and efforts to Wikipedia.
There's probably a point to be made here about how to engage with students and professors in a non-offputting manner, but that point is weakened when the reason the offputting manner is being deployed is because the more understated manner doesn't seem to have worked. Wikipedia does have a reputation for being prickly to newcomers, and it's something we can stand to work on, but the people who feel pricked need to meet us halfway as far as at least attempting to fit in. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 18:14, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
What I realized after talking it over with Sage, however, is that there's another level that can be read in Kevin's comment, basically saying, "I not only intend to report plagiarism from students on Wikipedia, but I intend to pursue the matter until I can be sure they are punished, no matter how high I have to go to accomplish that." I don't think that's an appropriate stance to take - the responsibility of someone who encounters student plagiarism is to report it to the professor, not to be Dirty Harry about making sure the student "pays" for it. If reporting the matter to a professor doesn't get the problem dealt with, in my opinion the problem has ceased to be with a student, and begun to be with the professor, because it is the responsibility of a professor who assigns extracurricular work (in the sense of "sending students to work on something that's a separate, non-school entity") to make sure that work is done in a manner that isn't damaging to the entity they're sending students to work on. If, for example, a veterinary professor was assigning students to volunteer at an animal shelter, it would fall to the professor to make sure that the students he sent weren't causing problems there. It's the student's responsibility if one of them decides go all PETA and release the dogs, but once the professor knows about that behavior, he would be responsible for making it clear to his class that that wasn't ok, and if he refuses to do that, the shelter would be correct to hold the professor, not just the students, responsible for future jailbreaks.
The other issue here is the idea of off-wiki consequences. Wikipedia usually frowns on "reporting" editors to real-world supervisors, teachers, etc. It can have an incredibly chilling effect to basically threaten someone's livelihood/future for something they did on a website. However, in the case of EP classes, I think it is reasonable in some cases to pursue off-wiki consequences for student misconduct. There need to be limits - certainly no calling up anyone's mom or internship or something - but if a student is editing on behalf of Class Y at University X, they are accountable to that class, and possibly to that university. If you're doing an assignment for Class Y here, and you perpetrate some serious academic dishonestly, like plagiarism, it is appropriate (in my mind) for your professor to be informed. It is not appropriate for a Wikipedian to try to take on the role of the professor and actually deal with the dishonesty by disciplinary means of some kind, like contacting a dean. But again, it's not appropriate for an editor to do this because it's the professor's job, not because students somehow shouldn't be held accountable for misconduct. We really, really need professors to be working with us on this. We, the community, can't end the EP, or fire a professor from the program, or even fire a student who doesn't get it. That means that when we report problems to the EP, or to a professor, we need them to be willing and able to address the issues, because they're the ones who can handle it. We can't; we can only clean up the messes that are left behind. In the future, in cases where a professor isn't taking responsibility for his students' conduct on Wikipedia, there needs to be a way to deal with that, because otherwise you end up with desperate Wikipedians trying any and all measures, some wise and some overkill, to do the professors' jobs and make the pain stop. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! ( talk) 20:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
To clarify, my comment was made before I was aware of any particular class with problems. It was not intended as a threat directed towards anyone in particular, and isn't (or at least the escalation bit) something that I ever anticipate having to pursue. I have in the past and will in the future report students' plagiarism to their professors. Every professor who I have approached has understood the issue, and has addressed the issues appropriately. I understand that some people have concerns about any sort of off-wiki consequences for on-wiki actions, but when Wikipedia is edited in the context of an academic assignment plagiarism should absolutely be taken every bit as seriously as it is for a 'real-world' academic assignment. If professors choose to fail, honor code, or otherwise punish students who have blatantly plagiarized, then I have no problem with it - students understand plagiarism, and if they choose to commit blatant plagiarism anyway, they deserve whatever punishment they get. If they choose not to do so, then as long as the professors take action to ensure that the plagiarism doesn't recur on Wikipedia, I have no problem with that either. (And I understand that due to the privacy policies at most schools, I'll never be made aware of whether or not a student is punished. I'm completely fine with that, and would be dismayed if I was made aware.)
When I suggested that I would have no problem escalating beyond the level of an individual professor, I did not anticipate ever having to do so. I still don't anticipate ever having to do so. I literally cannot imagine approaching a professor with conclusive evidence that one of their students has plagiarized work and not having them take some sort of action. However, if there is ever an education program class that has a massive issue with plagiarism and an unresponsive professor, then I will absolutely consider contacting other people at the participant university, including the professor's departmenthead, if (and only if) it appears that that is the best way to mitigate damage to Wikipedia and to the education program. I do not anticipate ever having to do this. If a situation arose where I did do this, I would bring the issue here for discussion first. I view this situation - which I never anticipate happening - as analogous to contacting the abuse department at an ISP or the network administrator at an K-12 school with evidence of abuse of their network (both of which are things that I have seen done on Wikipedia with regularity,) or analogous to publicly calling out paid editing shills (which is also something that happens regularly, and not infrequently results in negative international news coverage directed towards the shills.) And to reiterate: I cannot imagine this situation ever actually occurring.
The damage that will occur to the education program if the perception of Wikipedia's broader community continues to be that education program participants are unresponsive to the concerns of the broader community will be incalculable. I think the education program has the potential to be massively beneficial both for academia and for Wikipedia, and if its potential is limited because Wikipedia's broader community views it as a liability and places severe restrictions on it (such as sandbox-only editing, which has recently been suggested on this page,) I'll view it as a tragedy. One way to mitigate this perception is for education program participants to make clear that issues like blatant plagiarism are not acceptable, and will be dealt with strongly. If my words or this particular situation drive away one or more professors from the education program, that's unfortunate, and I would regret it. But professor recruitment is not an issue with the education program at present - any professor who drops out of the program can be replaced with two more next semester. At this stage in the program, it's infinitely more important that the education program is run as a tight - and well accepted - ship, then as a gigantic ship. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 21:15, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
There seems to be a lot of agreement above that students should use sandboxes. One of the brochures for the program ( here) suggests that students move their work out of the sandbox as soon as possible, shortly after they start writing it. I'd like to propose that this advice be changed.
Even experienced Wikipedians often work in sandboxes, and if it's a contentious article we might ask for consensus before moving it in place. It would be a good idea to regard all student essays as contentious in the same way, and to ask that they wait for a Wikipedian to move it into the encyclopaedia. As well as protecting Wikipedia, this would have the added benefit of not requiring them to release their work, which is something we should definitely not be forcing on them. Wikipedia functions on the basis that we're all here as free actors, and that if we choose to edit, we know our work is being released. But the students are not free actors, and are not choosing this for themselves, so editing direct to mainspace is neither in their interests nor in Wikipedia's. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:24, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
Specifically, the proposal is that students editing as part of the education program be asked to write their material in sandboxes. If they're editing part of an existing article, they can copy and paste that article into the sandbox and work on it there. Teachers are asked to provide a grade based on the student's changes to the sandbox version. This would mean that plagiarism and poor quality work would be entirely for the teacher to deal with.
Once the course is over (or once the material has been graded), if the students want to, they can ask that their work be moved into mainspace by a Wikipedian – who would say no if any plagiarism or poor use of sources is found, without having to search to find it all – and at that point if the students want to pursue DYK, GA or FA, that would be fine. With the course over and the article in mainspace, they'd be working on it as regular Wikipedians. The process would provide a good transition for them, from students forced to be here, to Wikipedians choosing to stay.
If it's an existing article, they could ask on the article's talk page whether there are objections to moving in the new version and wait for someone there to do it. Or the education program could set up a board similar to the one we use for paid advocates, where students ask that their work be moved over. This would mean the students would not be forced to release their work, and could request its deletion from their userspace when the course ends. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:50, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
I recently stumbled across the idea behind this project - professors assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. I came across it when one of the resulting articles was nominated for deletion. I have a real problem with the whole concept. I raised my concerns here Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine#Brain-disabling psychiatric medical treatment, and several people have responded, including one who pointed me to this page. It seems to me that posting student term papers into Wikipedia mainspace violates several Wikipedia principles, including WP:ESSAY, WP:SYNTHESIS, and WP:OWN. (What happens to a student's work - and their grade - if someone comes along and does a major edit or rewrite, which is perfectly possible in mainspace?) A very good suggestion was made at that discussion, namely, that students should post their articles to WP:Articles for Creation instead of directly to mainspace. They would have much better control of their material there - they could "own" it - and only the articles which were really encyclopedic and about notable subjects would get promoted to mainspace. What do you all think of the AFC idea? -- MelanieN ( talk) 21:03, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
There's a major difference between professors assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their course work and professors having students posting term papers in mainspace. Most classes participating in the education program or otherwise using Wikipedia-based assignments recognize the difference between a Wikipedia article and a term paper and instruct their students accordingly. (I'd like to say all classes do, but in an open ecosystem that ideal will never be reached.) Many professors that I have worked with in the program have not only recognized the difference between an encyclopedic article and a research paper, but have been excited about having their students participate on Wikipedia specifically because of that difference. One class I worked with last semester dedicated around five hours of in-class time specifically to how to write in an encyclopedic style and to covering Wikipedia's important cultural norms and policies. That's way more training of that nature than any normal new non-student editor would receive.
In much the same way that not all new non-student editors are able to successfully create high (or even acceptable) quality content, not all student assignments are successful. Sometimes individual students' articles are bad. Sometimes this is because individual students have failed to pay attention to the instruction they have received, and sometimes this is because the quality of their instruction was poor (or, in some circumstances, both.) If a student posts an article that violates our normal content policies in a major way, then it should be handled in pretty much the same way as if a non-student posted an article that violated our normal content policies. If the problems are fixable via normal editing processes, then they should be fixed via normal editing processes in the same fashion a problematic non-student contribution would be fixed. If the problems aren't fixable via normal editing processes (for instance, if the topic is non-notable or is an unsalvageable violation of WP:ESSAY) then the articles can go through our ordinary deletion processes, including WP:AFD, WP:SD, etc. If the same student has recurring competence issues, then they can be blocked or banned in the same way as any other editor. I would suggest approaching someone's ambassador before going through most of these steps, in the same way that I would suggest approaching the mentor of an editor who had one before going through most of these steps. In the linked thread, you ask how someone can be aware that they're dealing with a student and thus that they shouldn't 'bite or be uncivil' to them if their articles are simply posted in mainspace. Biting and civility are not student specific issues. You don't have to know that you're dealing with a student in order to be civil to them or to avoid biting them, that's just what you should do with everyone by default.
Most instructors are perfectly aware that the content their students submit to Wikipedia can be edited by people other than their students. (Again, I'd like to say all, but in an open ecosystem some will always slip through the cracks.) Generally, professors keep this in mind when coming up with their grading metrics. For a decent number of professors, interaction with the community is an actual *desired* result. Since it's pretty easy to track (either via direct diffs or via one of the tools designed to do so) the exact contributions any particular student has made, subsequent editing by other users does not represent a substantial obstacle to grading individual students. Even if a student's article goes to AfD it can very easily be userfied by any administrator, which would allow for the instructor to still see what exactly each of their students did.
I generally agree with The Interior that it is a best practice for undergraduate students with no prior Wikipedia experience creating a new article to do so in a sandbox, and to run the article by their ambassador before moving it live. There are some professors who have had significant success without the use of sandboxes (like Brian Carver,) but mostly when dealing with graduate students. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 06:17, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
When 30 students are told to edit articles (not invited to volunteer), the teacher is essentially the editor of all 30 articles and ought to make sure that Wikipedia isn't harmed. Volunteers not connected to the university shouldn't have to sort out the problems. SlimVirgin (talk) 17:59, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
Melanie: I don't actually see any place where this professor has complained about their students work being edited. Could you post a diff to where they said something like this? (I actually see them thanking someone on their talk page for reverting a copyright violation.) Obviously if this is what their expectation was, their expectation was wrong. Any professor who expects their students' work to go unedited has not listened to what anyone involved in the education program has told them. Professors who have this expectation should have this expectation corrected. No one should feel under any obligation to listen to a professor who wants to WP:OWN their students' articles any more than they would feel about any other editor who has WP:OWN problems.
Wikipedia has tons of problematic editors. Most of them are non-students, but some of them are bound to be students. Problematic editors in the education program can be dealt with just like problematic editors outside of the education program. Protocol for dealing with copyright violations should be the same, student or non-student. If you're uncomfortable dealing with problematic students, post here when you find 'em, and let one of us deal with it. I have absolutely no problem being responsible for a student receiving a failing grade if they have plagiarized - I've done so before, in non-Wikipedia contexts. All of these students know why they shouldn't plagiarize, and know what to expect if they get caught doing so. (I'll be looking over the students from the linked class myself as I have time, though unfortunately as I have pneumonia and am in finals, that'll be limited this week. Normally, I'd have a lot more time available to do so.)
Remember that these students are new editors, and the content they produce should be compared more closely with the content that is produced by new editors not in the education program than with experienced editors. Mistakes are inevitable, but I think the overall quality of content of new student editors is higher than the overall quality of content of new non-student editors, and I don't think that new student editors are problem editors at a higher rate than new editors are in general.
For those of you wondering why I think assignments like this are not only appropriate, but actively worth advocating, take a look at the list of articles on Brian Carver's user page to see one reason. All of those articles have been improved by students from one professor's classes - and they're all encyclopedic, and many are of high quality. Kevin Gorman ( talk) 00:39, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
I’ve followed this discussion with interest because I wanted to learn more about how the problems came about. I think there are two concerns here that the new Education Program needs to work on. First, the editing behavior of the students wasn’t up to WP standards, but not unexpected of new editors. Two, the sub-standard behavior was associated (adversely) with the WP Education Program, because there was a Professor and 41 students involved. However, when one examines the history, two things become evident. One, the Professor, although a Wikipedian for about a year had really only made edits to the Canada Education Program courses page and his user page. Although the professor knows how to edit WP technically, there’s little evidence that the Professor understands article editing norms. Also, there is little evidence, if any that the Professor was formally recruited by the WMF into the Education Program, but rather self-enrolled by merely adding his course to the course page. It would be interesting to learn how the Professor became associated with the Education Program. Second, although there are Online Ambassadors identified, there is little evidence that there was any serious mentoring of the Professor by the ambassadors. Since there was no identified Campus Ambassador, one must assume the Professor got zero face-to-face mentoring by an experienced Wikipedian. It can be difficult for even experienced Wikipedians to mentor even one new editor successfully, let alone having an inexperienced editor (the professor) responsible for managing the edits of 41 other new, inexperience editors in the context of highly constrained classroom time.
I agree completely with those above who say students are editors and every Wikipedian was a new editor at one time. I think it is also important to understand that the Education Programs are Outreach programs designed to improve content in WP because of the enormous untapped academic and scholarly resources within the higher education community. Many believe, as I do, that this type of outreach is essential for the future growth of WP. As this case shows, I think we all should take care not to indict the Education Program for problems like this, when there is little evidence that the Education Program had anything to do with causing the problems. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 02:58, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
I find it troubling that SlimVirgin and MelanieN are raising the same issues that many medical editors have been raising here and everywhere for several years, and getting the same pat answers and faulty data analysis in response. (See Colin's data analysis, which differs from the WMF data analysis-- I have been told that WMF's analyses fail to look for or account for plagiarism at all.) Plagiarism and copyvio by students are still rampant, we have many instructors who have never edited Wikipedia and can't explain Wikipedia policies to their students anyway, we have classes editing articles without tagging article talk which would help us know which professor to contact, we have term-end crunch revert wars, we have established editors having to clean up multiple essays at the end of every term, we are not gaining new editors via outreach because the students are only here for a grade and rarely continue editing after the class ends, the students don't know correct sourcing or indeed most Wikipedia policies ... in other words, all still the same, and yet Slim and Melanie are getting the same pat answers we medical editors have been given for several years now. Student editing under profs who have no knowledge of Wikipedia forcing students to edit a project that they have no long-term commitment to is a problem and it's getting worse, not better. Why is the approach/response here unchanged and why is the problem downplayed in light of Slim's and Melanie's concerns? I was previously given to believe it's a big problem in the psych realm but there were less problems in other content areas: from the examples here, that doesn't seem to be the case. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:18, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
Note that while these aren't geared toward exactly the purpose you had in mind, we have these: {{ welcome teacher}} and {{ welcome student}}. Maybe the best approach would be to edit those make them useful for situations where you're trying to figure out what the student or professor is up to. I'm not sure how widely they are used, but I know at least that User:Pharaoh of the Wizards uses them pretty regularly.-- Sage Ross (WMF) ( talk) 16:13, 10 December 2012 (UTC)
First, as the point of the program seems to have been to find new editors, can someone say how many students have stayed on to become regular Wikipedians?
Also, I'm confused about the status of the program. It seems to have official status. An enormous amount of money has been spent on it, I believe it has its own namespace, its own templates, and Foundation employees dedicated to overseeing it, and it extends a protective mantle over its participants (which is one of the reasons the students can't be compared to regular new editors). Yet when I asked above whether poorly administered courses could be excluded in future, Kevin said no, anyone can set up a course and there is no way to stop them from registering as part of the program. So the question is: given that this program has some form of official recognition, why are the people overseeing not able to deny registration to institutions that perform under par? SlimVirgin (talk) 03:25, 8 December 2012 (UTC)
Instead of having all these thoughts shared and then lost to an archive, please share them at WP:Assignments for student editors ( WP:AFSE or WP:A4SE). Best. Biosthmors ( talk) 16:42, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Also
Wikipedia:Recruiting those in academia (
WP:RECRUIT or
WP:RECRUITING).
Biosthmors (
talk) 19:22, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Moved to
Wikipedia:Recruiting subject-matter experts.
Biosthmors (
talk)
23:04, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Some of the instructions professors give seem like they are contrary to wikipedia practices.
For example, for Wikipedia:USEP/Courses/Cognition and the Arts (Greta Munger) Assignment one:
Isn't there a danger such instructions will send a flock of new students to that article who will introduce material that won't follow WP:MEDRS? e.g. recent primary research? MathewTownsend ( talk) 18:46, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
There are a number of ethical issues involved here, and I wonder whether the ethics committees of the universities have been consulted. Some of my concerns are:
To what extent, if any, were the ethical issues discussed with outside bodies when the program was set up? If those discussions didn't take place, does that need to be rectified by (for example, and this is just a suggestion) inviting comment from the universities? SlimVirgin (talk) 04:58, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
It's difficult to see how students are taught those skills by being told they can choose their own topic (vaguely within field X) and their own sources, which are often websites, then adding a few paragraphs to articles that already exist. SlimVirgin (talk) 16:24, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
Regarding your second point (and to some extent your first), I got the ethical willies when I discovered that students in at least one class are REQUIRED to edit under their real names. See User talk:Biosthmors/Intro Neuro#AFC or not?. [49] Is that appropriate? [50] -- MelanieN ( talk) 17:08, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
( edit conflict)@Slimvirgin - First I would challenge your characterization that this is a list of ethical issues, but rather is a list of pedagogical issues that every instructor must deal with. These discussions are difficult in a way because the WMF is indeed transferring management of the US/CAN EP to an independent entity. The planning for that entity is still on-going, but it involves a diverse group of seasoned Wikipedians and academics. But out of that planning has come the realization that the use of WP in the classroom as a teaching tool is here to stay for one reason: the movement within academia for Information Fluency is strong and WP is a tool perfectly suited to advance it. The new EP recognizes that and captures that in this statement within its strategy: Enterprise Purpose. I personally believe the early years of the EP haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to using WP as a tool in the classroom. As we move forward with the new EP, we have to find and employ the most effective pedagogy using WP to help professors, librarians and other academics achieve their learning objectives without overburdening WP itself. -- Mike Cline ( talk) 17:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
I despair when I read glowing language like this discussing the program goals, so out of touch with what so many established editors are experiencing, particularly when these kinds of posts end with one minor recognition of the serious "overburdening" of established Wikipedian editors.. So I would ask, on a personal level: What specifically would ease your despair, ease your frustration? Over the next few months, my fellow MSU Campus Ambassadors and I will be working with two MSU professors to plan the use of WP in their courses for the Spring term. What should I be doing with these professors that I haven’t already done in previous terms to ease your despair since I am so out of touch with the issues facing the EP? As for glowing language and program goals, I am all about solutions. Recognizing problems is the easy part, it is the solutioning that is challenging. So help me support next terms MSU Wikipedia related classes without overburdening the Wikipedia community by telling me how to ease your despair.-- Mike Cline ( talk) 18:25, 11 December 2012 (UTC)
(comment from above) "In fact this was the core reasoning behind a suggestion I've heard from a couple of academics that on-campus knowledge about editing Wikipedia should reside in writing centres, which I gather exist at a lot of US universities, rather than within specific academic disciplines." I've never heard of "writing centres" at US univeristies. Is this true? And is this where editing wikipedia is taking place? MathewTownsend ( talk) 22:28, 12 December 2012 (UTC)
We are planning on launching an elective at UCSF where 3/4th year medical students will be editing Wikipedia as per here Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/UCSF. I will be heading down their to give a week of lectures / editing sessions to students and staff on how we work and will be involved in supervising the students. We will see if this works with a small number of students and than see if it is scalable. The hope is that students who get involved in the first year will provide supervision is subsequent years and that is the only way this can really grow. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 17:51, 13 December 2012 (UTC)