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I think the main problem is people who want to be here vs people who have to be here. Up till now, people who've edited Wikipedia, who have created articles, etc., are here because (for whatever reason) they want to be here. In essence, they're motivated. Now, we're faced with a large influx of people who don't want to be here, who are here only because their class demands that they're here. Furthermore, in every class, some students get A's, some don't -- that's just a fact of life. Thus, we're faced with a large influx of less-than-stellar students (not saying they're all less than stellar, but I think it's safe to say that a majority of students don't make all straight A's in every class) who don't want to be here and are seeking to just do the absolute minimum (their belief of what the minimum is, not our definition). These are students who have, apparently, been successful writing papers to this point because they're plagiarized their way through every major paper. Until that changes, until these students really want to be here, there's not much we can do. I've posted on a few students talk pages -- I've seen several people post on other students talk pages, and I don't think any of the students have really responded -- there hasn't really been any constructive dialog. Perhaps if there was, that would change things, but given people's current motivations (to get the grade then to not return) I think we'd just get lip service if we attempted to force motivation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.23.82.57 ( talk) 22:44, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I'm less convinced about this point. There are plenty of people who want to be editors on Wikipedia who cause trouble and/or can seem to be obstacles. Some of them have to be banned, and even so come back (as sock puppets or whatever). Equally, there can be plenty of students who are asked to be on Wikipedia as part of an assignment who can be useful and productive. Meanwhile, it's certainly true that not every student is stellar: we have good students and bad ones; and yes some plagiarize, others are lazy, etc. etc. But in that, they're fairly representative of the population at large, I think. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 05:30, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
There's an online conference presenting quantitative analysis of the IEP (mostly) occurring at 16:00 UTC, 22 November ( see here for your timezone). More information is available at outreach:Global Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting. The general community is welcome to attend; we need a few people there to ask the hard questions and disrupt the inevitable WMF circlejerk. (I won't be attending myself, time = midnight for me).
I also note with disdain this official WMF blog post, which is extolling the virtues of expanding the EP without regard to community health.
P.S. Why aren't the Foundation staff posting this? (Cross posted to WT:IEP.) MER-C 05:50, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
I'm starting a new section here to tease out a few great ideas I saw above.
What other ideas do you have? How else can we expand Wikipedia's use as a teaching tool (thereby increasing article quality and participation) without sacrificing quality of support? -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:53, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
Re point 1: as well as any more general material, I think it's important that they should read the actual words of the three key content policies, WP:Verifiability, WP:No original research and WP:Neutral point of view, and also the main WP:Notability guideline and (long though it is) WP:What Wikipedia is not. That's a fair amount to read, but so much comes back to those primary documents that anyone trying to understand Wikipedia really cannot skip them.
One aspect of No original research needs emphasis: the essence of a good student paper is often marshalling established facts to draw a new conclusion, but in Wikipedia terms that is "synthesis" and not allowed: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources." JohnCD ( talk) 23:26, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
Have been reading a lot of old talk threads.
I think committed instructors are key. If you look at Jimmy Butler or JbMurray (both efforts pre funding), you see that they still struggled even with committed instructors. But have basically delivered decent content and a few returning editors. And a big part of it getting over the goal line was those special teachers.
I think Wiki is MUCH better off growing slowly and organically and picking the juiciest targets than with a super "mass approach". Wiki is not set up to take on an eductional mission in addition to all the other work it does and the community getting spread thin. We need to clearly be getting either content (good content, relevant content) or hooked good editors...to justify the time spent on these endeavors. (Forget the grant...that is just money...but you only have so many Mike Christie. He is TOP NOTCH. People like that are rare and should be mentoring students or classes that are worthy of it.) I totally disagree with an old comment by the head of the Education department (DEC10) saying that it didn't matter how much content or returning editors we got. NOPE. We are not a service for schools (let wikiversity do that). We need to do this stuff because it ends up driving ongoing valuable participation OR creation of important content (as determined by GA+ and high hit count).
I realize there is a big staffed up group at WMF and so there is a demand to want some big shebang. But I think we see more and more that a few good classes are better than lots of mediocre ones. Especially given the state of development of the en-Wiki. The India case showed it most clearly (you should not be targeting average, early uni Indian editors...it's just not worth it. That was a case of an actual negative impact. But even if the impact is just "neutral", then you've wasted volunteer time. I say find more Jimmy Butlers and more JBMurrays. Try going after the graduate department at Harvard. Aim higher. And be choosey. A starting hurdle is the instructor himself demonstrating editing ON WIKI, the term before.
I loooooved the idea of spending money and going after unis and doing on person visits. (At first.) And there is a role for a group of WMF employees. Sure, definitely. But it needs to be smarter. I worry that you will lose community buyin soon. And that would be a shame as I, you all, and the community all lurve the idea of getting more kids interested in editing.
Sorry if this seems a kick in the teeth. But...needs to be on the table. 71.246.144.154 ( talk) 01:00, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
They should know techniques for searching Wikipedia for existing articles to avoid duplicate or quasi-duplicate articles. They should be made aware of places to find articles that are actively needed or priority stubs to expand. Point them to the key WikiProjects in their subject area(s). They have lots of helpful listings in this respect. Other sources are Wikipedia:Most wanted articles and WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. – Voceditenore ( talk) 14:58, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, all! These are really useful and timely as we are now actively working on developing an online instructor orientation that participating professors would need to go through before joining our program. The key policies and choosing topics are both great ideas -- what else should we include? We're thinking of things like how to use watchlists, how to use talk pages, how to track a user's contributions, etc. What else are we missing? For example, what kinds of community interactions should they be aware of? How much should they know about DYK/GA/FA or other places where peer review of articles happens? We're in the brainstorming phase, so I'd love to get everyone's thoughts on the list. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 17:28, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
Policy vs. mechanics. I asked Sgelbman, the instructor of a course on U.S. politics, a couple of questions related to this discussion. Regarding instructor orientation, she said was that she would prefer policy orientation to help with markup mechanics, though she qualified this by saying that she had some prior Wikipedia edits and was quick with markup languages, so she may be an outlier. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:50, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I'd like instructors to edit on Wikipedia, but I don't see how to give them an incentive to do so, since the reason we want them to learn is so that we can provide them better support. However, if there is a way to provide incentives, then I would love to see them at least take an article to GA. I think they and their students would benefit immensely. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:07, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Just in regard to point 3, I agree that students don't read the materials. Which is why the idea is to require them to read the materials as part of the course requirements, with a formative evaluation to confirm that it has been completed. I've been thinking about this for a while, so I threw together a basic syllabus at Wikiversity - the intent is to write a basic course that could be done in a short time, but summarises for the students core issues that they need to know, and that could be included in the first part of a university course engaging with WP without taking too much time from core course material (each section is meant to be very short, in spite of the number of topics - the main value comes from the introduction and the assessment to push the concept). We did the same with plagiarism where I teach - the students didn't read the materials, so we required them to do so by writing a very short course and providing a short assessment piece, then adding that course to the first part of an existing first-year core topic. Worm is doing something similar when mentoring, so it has been used elsewhere on wiki. - Bilby ( talk) 00:01, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of new editors as OAs; I think a student that needs mentoring needs someone clearly more experienced. The professors who are willing to take the risk of running a class on Wikipedia deserve the best support we can give them. I would address this by throttling back the number of classes to a level we can effectively support. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:07, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Support quality. I asked Sgelbman, the instructor of a course on U.S. politics, a couple of questions related to this discussion. You can see her comments here, but in sum she said the ambassador support was fine but she'd have liked to have had access to support prior to the start of the class. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 02:00, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Do an OA inventory This may seem kind of obvious but how can anything be decided without a truly accurate picture of how many active OAs you actually have? I'd suggest this as a priority. I looked at the list, one has completely retired from Wikipedia; two have explictly marked themselves as "UNAVAILABLE"; at least one other one I know plans not to continue with OA work; and quite a few of the rest have not signed up for any classes this term. There are a lot of courses listed for this current term which appear to have no OAs at all. My impression is that you don't have enough for the current numbers of students, let alone increasing it. I also agree with Mike Christie that the numbers of OAs needed should be based on a ratio of OA to students, not to classes. The latter leads to wide discrepancies in the amount of support given to individual classes. In some cases the ratio to students to OA is so high that an OA simply cannot provide the kind attention that was "advertised" to professors. Voceditenore ( talk) 13:22, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Following on the section above, in fact, Jbmurray may have the records (if not, the memory) to comment on the ratios involved in his students' FAs, at WP:MMM. How many students, how many articles, how many classes, to how many experienced FA Wikipedians collaborating and mentoring those students via WP:FAT? My recollection is that so many of the "regulars" of the FA writing and reviewing community were involved in helping out there, that my problem as FAC delegate was there were few uninvolved reviewers left to give independent review of the FACs, so I had to wait and hope that "uninvolved" knowledgeable reviewers would weigh in. I'd guess the ratio of mentors to students was much greater than one, but perhaps Jbmurray has some data. One disengaged inxperienced Wikipedian professor with more than half a dozen classes of several hundred students working on scores of articles cannot supervise work as occurred with the significant amount of mentorship that WP:FAT provided to WP:MMM-- we had an entire team of experienced Wikipedia FA writers guiding those students. Doesn't scale. Yes, regular editors are doing some professors' work for them, because they overstretched. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 22:27, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, I think it's the opposite: We don't need more articles about obscure and unimportant topics; we need to focus on the quality of the most important topics. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 22:05, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
OA effort put into improving the students' understanding of Wikipedia is not wasted, but it has no long term benefits to USEP, because the student population changes almost completely every semester. That implies that the focus of training should be the instructors. I know that the CAs do a lot to help the instructors, and that's very useful, but the CAs are (usually) not very experienced Wikipedians, so there are limits to what they can convey.
I think that after the semester is over, or perhaps even before that point, we should survey the instructors to find out whether any of them would be interested in improving a Wikipedia article themselves, with appropriate support. If any of them are willing to improve content I think we should ask a couple of experienced Wikipedian content editors to work with them -- they may not think they'll need help, but they will. I think we would find that the professors who do this would have a much better understanding of policies -- copyright, NPOV, V, etc. -- and would be better positioned to run successful classes. Some would need less OA support, and might be able to switch to a mode of only calling on OAs when they need support for specific issues. That in turn would improve our OA bandwidth.
If we actively search out the professors who are willing to spend some time learning exactly what it takes to improve Wikipedia content, we will be finding the professors who will most reward the community for supporting their classes. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:23, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
Further, since you have nominated (yourself) more than one article at FAC, it is incorrect for you to say you have little experience with FA-- particularly in relation to those professors who haven't ever engaged Wikipedia even at the GA level. The differences between Jbmurray and your editing experience-- relative to other instructors who are using this program-- cannot be ignored if this problem is to be solved. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 21:59, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
I would like to add a note of caution to anyone whose experience with the program is limited to less than ten or twenty articles. There have been a lot of classes, a lot of students, and a lot of successes and failures. My own individual experiences with student interactions in the USEP have been quite varied, and I could imagine individual editors forming widely different opinions of the program depending on which classes they have run into. There are a couple of global perspectives available, one of which is this quantitative analysis. I participated in the evaluation team for that analysis, and it was reassuring to me to see that overall the PPI very substantially increased the quality of the articles the students worked on.
I'm not disagreeing with Sandy's complaints, and in fact I think her negative experiences really do represent a problem with the program. But I think it's worth remembering that the students really are helping us build an encyclopedia, and that we have numbers to prove it.
I also wanted to comment on the exchange between Jimmy and Sandy -- when students engage with collaborators (such as Malleus) to get articles to FA, to my mind that's exactly what should be happening. Yes, Sandy, an effort like that will absorb collaboration labour, but so do at least 75% of the FAs that come through FAC. Collaboration is what we're good at; if we complain when the students don't engage on the talk page, and don't collaborate, it seems harsh to me if we also complain when they do collaborate. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 03:02, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
@ Mike, 03:02, 20 November: the students really are helping us build an encyclopedia. Perhaps our different perspective has to do with the content area. I can't think of many ways that faulty or poorly sourced content in 18th century literature for example has the potential to harm our readers the way articles in the neuropsych realm do (akin to BLPs), and in the medical realm, IMO no content is better than faulty content. I don't think we should have undergrad students whose professor has hundreds of students working on legions of articles with no active online mentorship chunking text in to these articles. I'm not aware of other content areas, other than the ongoing copyvio, plagiarism, copyedit issues seen throughout. WRT collaboration, I think we're saying the same thing. It's collaboration that produces most FAs, I know how much collaboration it took for Jbmurray's students to produce FAs, and my challenge to Jimmy Butler is to recognize that level of collaboration doesn't scale, and to identify what things Jbmurray and he did right that might extend to other areas.
@ Jimmy Butler: You have destroyed my dream. That's a most strange comment. " Wikipedia is not Disney Land"; in "my country", realizing a dream takes a lot of hard work, mixed with a serious amount of reality, and the person who delivers the harsh reality is not the one who "destroys your dream". Was your "dream" based in reality? What have you done to document and extend your experiences in ways that might help this program or other professors? How many students and articles do you have in an average term, how many have you had altogether, how many are still on Wikipedia, what have been some of your ratios, and do you see any way that a professor who is not engaged on Wikipedia, with a disengaged Online Ambassador, more than half a dozen classes, more than several hundred students, more than 50 articles, etc can supervise the work of those students adequately? We're not here about dreams-- we're here about how to solve a problem.
As to the specifics of a teacher review before approaching FA or GA, well, that needn't be required for FA because so few of them will ever make it-- it's not an issue. Besides, it should be standard fare for the professors anyway-- why on earth would they even pretend their students articles could reach GA level without review from the professor? They should be doing that anyway. I'd think the bigger problem is probably at the DYK level, since review there has historically been lacking (albeit recently improving). At any rate, the idea of teacher review for GA/FA level misses the point-- the students I have encountered are damaging articles that will never be more than stubs, but nonetheless will affect our readers. If you think you are on the right track, great-- now, if you want this "dream" to be a reality, please invest in the hard work of analyzing what parts of your experience can extend to the broader project, at what scale, and don't let yourself be part of a PR push for something that doesn't scale beyond a small class of 20 or so students supervised by a committed and knowledgeable Wikipedian. That is the beef here-- the WMF, in its search for a remedy for declining editorship-- has brought something on the heads of regular editors that they weren't prepared to supervise. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:58, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
Curious way to deal. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 05:38, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
(Cross-posting to several pages; posted here as IEP has been discussed on this talk page as well, but please focus any further discussion on the talk page linked below) I've just created the page Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis to document our planned analysis of the Pune pilot. We've been collecting ideas in many different places, but we wanted to have one central page where we'll be analyzing the learnings from the Pune pilot over the next few months. We will using the results of this analysis to plan our next pilot in India, which will be kicking off in mid-2012. We will not be running the India Education Program in the first term of 2012. We are committed to using the next few months to get all the learnings we can out of the analysis, so we can launch a new pilot in six months or so that addresses all of the concerns raised from the Pune pilot.
We do have one major outstanding question in terms of how to analyze the pilot, which is how do we measure the impact of the pilot on the community? I really encourage anyone who has good ideas of how to do data collection around this to contribute to the discussion on talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:49, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
Please post any further discussion at Wikipedia_talk:India_Education_Program/Analysis so the discussion all happens on one page. Thanks. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 16:26, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
If you're interested in learning more about the Wikipedia Education Program in action around the globe, join us for the next Metrics and Activities Meeting on Tuesday, December 20 at 16:00 UTC. Please visit outreachwiki:Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting for instructions on joining and time zone conversions. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:27, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
I spy with my little eye something beginning with E... It's a MediaWiki extension for the tracking of students developed under contract for the Foundation. It comes complete with a whole pile of new user groups and special pages. More information is available at mw:File:Engineering support for the Wikipedia Education Program.pdf and mw:Wikipedia Education Program. The extension aims to obsolete some Toolserver hacks and move the management of student tables from public wiki pages to possibly private special pages.
The design specifications in the PDF and MediaWiki pages contradict some of the feedback from the community:
I see this as really bad news. MER-C 04:15, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Blog post from developer and another design document. Sigh. MER-C 01:40, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
Roadmap - deployment = mid/late February. MER-C 08:15, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
Ah, well. I didn't realize that all the .php pages look like this when viewed through the directory tree, so I got a bunch of useless stuff. Looks like I'll have to wait till they fix the bugs ( I tried fixing them myself, but for every bug I fix, a new one crops up; and I have no idea what I'm doing anyways since I'm unfamiliar with the code) ManishEarth Talk • Stalk 07:31, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
Just a note to alert those interested that we've created new Wikipedia Education Program Participation Requirements for all courses in all countries participating in the Wikipedia Education Program this term, based on feedback we've seen from pilot programs in multiple countries. These new requirements take effect immediately, so courses participating in spring 2012 have been crafted around these requirements. More information is available on the Outreach wiki, linked above. Please direct any comments about the requirements to that talk page.
Please note that these are global requirements for participation in the Wikipedia Education Program in spring 2012. Individual country programs such as this one may develop additional requirements as-needed (for example, the Cairo Pilot will have an even lower Ambassador:student ratio).
On behalf of the entire Wikipedia Education Program team, -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 19:28, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
Some of you may have heard about a new Wikipedia Education Program MediaWiki extension that's been in development for a few months. This new tool will completely replace the existing course page and Ambassador listing system beginning in Fall 2012.
Some key features of the new extension:
We'll be talking a lot more about this extension in the coming weeks and months as it's rolled out and we begin using it. Currently, we are ready to have the first beta testers use the tool, and we are looking for 3-5 Ambassadors and professors who are willing to spend a few hours over the next week doing a thorough test of the new extension. We specifically want people who are experienced in creating course pages and adding themselves to the Ambassador lists. We have two goals for this version of the beta test:
In later rounds, we'll be looking at user experience and more bug testing, but this preliminary round is focused exclusively on back-end issues while we still have developer time to fix them.
If you are interested in helping out with beta-testing, we will have a kickoff meeting on Google Hangout on Monday, February 27, with Jeroen De Dauw (the developer) and Frank Schulenburg (who has served as the project manager for this extension) where they'll explain a bit more about the tool and what they need for this round of beta testing. Please sign up on this Doodle if you're interested in helping out, or if you're interested in a larger beta testing later, please indicate that on the Ambassadors talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 20:21, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Please take note of an in-person meeting that, pending approval, will be taking place in the San Francisco WMF office on the weekend of March 22-25, 2012. This event will serve to bring together active community members who taken leadership opportunities in the Education Program with WMF staff to rebuild a volunteer structure that defines roles and delegates responsibilities related to the Education Programs in the US and Canada. The goal of the weekend is to create a community-driven foundation of the US/Canada Education Programs that will address specific concerns, such as expansion techniques, ambassador recruitment, community relationships, etc.
I will select the final list of 10 participants. The group of attendees will be selected based on a number of criteria, including:
If you are interested in contributing to a productive meeting that will greatly impact the US and Canada Education Programs, please fill out
the following form explaining why you think you could help in this endeavor. Please do not fill out the form if you are not available to travel to San Francisco March 22-25 (and potentially traveling a day before or after that). If this event is approved, travel and hotel costs, as well as some meals, will be covered or reimbursed by the Wikimedia Foundation. If you have any pertinent questions unanswered here, please either post below, on
my talk page or email me at jmathewsonwikimedia.org.
In order to make travel arrangements that are cost-effective, please fill out the interest form by 9AM Pacific on Monday, February 27, 2012. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 20:01, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Quick update: the US/Canada Education Programs are planning to partner with a new pilot program from the Wikimedia Foundation this semester. You can read about the Teahouse project's goals and see how they align with those of the Wikipedia Education Program. Perhaps most noticeably, both programs serve to help new editors contribute quality content to Wikipedia while fostering an environment that will encourage them to stick around in the future.
The Education Program will be partnering with their project by using the Teahouse hosts in place of Online Ambassadors for five courses in the US/Canada. As many of you know, the ambassador requirement has increased this semester, and many classes will not meet these requirements to join the program officially. However, we would like to choose five of these courses to receive the support of the Teahouse hosts, which will still give students online support but in a different setting than we have traditionally utilized.
We are partnering with five courses because this will give the Teahouse program a solid support of new editors to work with over the next few months but will not drastically impact the Education Program. We are still working with those professors who do not have the traditional Online Ambassador yet, as we want to make sure these professors are interested in receiving this alternative support for their students.
The Teahouse fellows will be in the San Francisco office next week, so we will select the five courses at that point. We will be focusing on courses that are only lacking a Wikipedian in the pod (aka: they must still have a Campus Ambassador) and will select the five courses based on interest/enthusiasm from the professor. We will also be taking into consideration the number of female students, as one of the Teahouse's main goals is to reach more female editors.
Please comment with any suggestions for selecting the courses (from this list of classes that still need Online Ambassador support) or any feedback about working with the Teahouse in general. I will post the courses as soon as they agree to join the Teahouse pilot. Looking forward to your input. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 23:46, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi all,
Following a village pump proposal discussion I implemented a new tool Followed users which lets you view the most recent edit by a selected list of users that you follow. One important application of this is to allow ambassadors and professors to follow their students and review their work in a timely manner. I'd like to get more people to try it out and let me know at my talk page if you find it useful or have suggestions/problems. Thanks! Dcoetzee 02:58, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm really pleased to announce that Rob Schnautz has joined the Wikipedia Education Program team as an online communications contractor. Rob has been editing Wikipedia as User:Bob the Wikipedian since 2006, and he self-identifies as a WikiDragon, working mostly with the Tree of Life WikiProject. He also helped develop the automatic taxobox system. In 2011, he became the Regional Ambassador for part of the Midwest, and he joins the team now to serve as a liaison between the existing English Wikipedia editing community and the Education Program team.
This means I'll be less active on talk pages and IRC and return to a traditional communications role (writing blog posts, outreach to news media, etc.). Rob will now be the program's primary point of contact on-wiki; if you have questions, feel free to reach out to him either on program talk pages like this one or on his talk page. Welcome, Rob! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:29, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
Please note an important notice about our program here. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 22:48, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
This is an announcement that the WP:United States Education Program/Updates page is now available on the English Wikipedia and will from here out be separate from the WP:Canada Education Program/Updates.
Also, I'd like to present the Education Noticeboard, where current problems in the Wikipedia Education Program should be brought forth. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 16:29, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
Given that ambassadors are meant to be "active Wikipedians", it would be helpful if the default "course participation log" at the top of each course page were set up to include only students - as it is, the OA's edits tend to overshadow everybody else. Nikkimaria ( talk) 16:43, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Project members: I am working on a draft for an "English Wikipedia Board of Education". Your comments would be appreciated. The working draft is at User:Pine/drafts/ENWP Board of Education. Please comment on the talk page. Thank you! Pine (talk) 08:06, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
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) 23:20, 4 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) 18:11, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Are you going to Wikimania? I'd like to arrange an Education Meet-Up while we are all in D.C. this year. Anyone from any country in the world is welcome to join -- Ambassadors, professors, students, program organizers, people interested in starting a program in any country worldwide, etc. We'll even provide T-shirts and some food! Here's where we need some input: when would be a good time for the meet-up, and what kinds of activities would you like to do at the meet-up?
Please fill out this Google Form if you're interested in connecting with other volunteers interested in education around the world at Wikimania! Hope to see you there! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 21:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Yesterday evening the Working Group members and kick-off meeting date were announced. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 18:17, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm new to this, and trying to help a professor set up a Wikipedia project for her online class. At latest count, here are the sites that I've found that have reference material relevant to me:
It is frustrating, because I don't know where to go for the information I need. I think these need to be consolidated, and redirects put in place as appropriate. Are there efforts underway to do this?
In particular, I'm confused about why there is a set of US-Canada program, US program, and Canada program pages, and none of them seem to cross-reference the others. Then, I'd suggest, if the info for a specific region's program doesn't differ from the that of the "master program" (for example, for campus ambassadors), then the info shouldn't be copied in full, but should either be transcluded or cross-referenced. Otherwise, a newcomer has to read all the copies of everything to make sure he is not missing something important.
Note that I don't know if this is the right place to post this topic or not. That's just one example of the problem. Klortho ( talk) 18:39, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Help, I need somebody to help me set up my University course through WP:USEP. I've done this for the past year with no problem but this year the program process has changed and I'm not getting any responses. Crtew ( talk) 19:48, 20 August 2012 (UTC)
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I think the main problem is people who want to be here vs people who have to be here. Up till now, people who've edited Wikipedia, who have created articles, etc., are here because (for whatever reason) they want to be here. In essence, they're motivated. Now, we're faced with a large influx of people who don't want to be here, who are here only because their class demands that they're here. Furthermore, in every class, some students get A's, some don't -- that's just a fact of life. Thus, we're faced with a large influx of less-than-stellar students (not saying they're all less than stellar, but I think it's safe to say that a majority of students don't make all straight A's in every class) who don't want to be here and are seeking to just do the absolute minimum (their belief of what the minimum is, not our definition). These are students who have, apparently, been successful writing papers to this point because they're plagiarized their way through every major paper. Until that changes, until these students really want to be here, there's not much we can do. I've posted on a few students talk pages -- I've seen several people post on other students talk pages, and I don't think any of the students have really responded -- there hasn't really been any constructive dialog. Perhaps if there was, that would change things, but given people's current motivations (to get the grade then to not return) I think we'd just get lip service if we attempted to force motivation. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.23.82.57 ( talk) 22:44, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I'm less convinced about this point. There are plenty of people who want to be editors on Wikipedia who cause trouble and/or can seem to be obstacles. Some of them have to be banned, and even so come back (as sock puppets or whatever). Equally, there can be plenty of students who are asked to be on Wikipedia as part of an assignment who can be useful and productive. Meanwhile, it's certainly true that not every student is stellar: we have good students and bad ones; and yes some plagiarize, others are lazy, etc. etc. But in that, they're fairly representative of the population at large, I think. -- jbmurray ( talk • contribs) 05:30, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
There's an online conference presenting quantitative analysis of the IEP (mostly) occurring at 16:00 UTC, 22 November ( see here for your timezone). More information is available at outreach:Global Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting. The general community is welcome to attend; we need a few people there to ask the hard questions and disrupt the inevitable WMF circlejerk. (I won't be attending myself, time = midnight for me).
I also note with disdain this official WMF blog post, which is extolling the virtues of expanding the EP without regard to community health.
P.S. Why aren't the Foundation staff posting this? (Cross posted to WT:IEP.) MER-C 05:50, 18 November 2011 (UTC)
I'm starting a new section here to tease out a few great ideas I saw above.
What other ideas do you have? How else can we expand Wikipedia's use as a teaching tool (thereby increasing article quality and participation) without sacrificing quality of support? -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:53, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
Re point 1: as well as any more general material, I think it's important that they should read the actual words of the three key content policies, WP:Verifiability, WP:No original research and WP:Neutral point of view, and also the main WP:Notability guideline and (long though it is) WP:What Wikipedia is not. That's a fair amount to read, but so much comes back to those primary documents that anyone trying to understand Wikipedia really cannot skip them.
One aspect of No original research needs emphasis: the essence of a good student paper is often marshalling established facts to draw a new conclusion, but in Wikipedia terms that is "synthesis" and not allowed: "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources." JohnCD ( talk) 23:26, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
Have been reading a lot of old talk threads.
I think committed instructors are key. If you look at Jimmy Butler or JbMurray (both efforts pre funding), you see that they still struggled even with committed instructors. But have basically delivered decent content and a few returning editors. And a big part of it getting over the goal line was those special teachers.
I think Wiki is MUCH better off growing slowly and organically and picking the juiciest targets than with a super "mass approach". Wiki is not set up to take on an eductional mission in addition to all the other work it does and the community getting spread thin. We need to clearly be getting either content (good content, relevant content) or hooked good editors...to justify the time spent on these endeavors. (Forget the grant...that is just money...but you only have so many Mike Christie. He is TOP NOTCH. People like that are rare and should be mentoring students or classes that are worthy of it.) I totally disagree with an old comment by the head of the Education department (DEC10) saying that it didn't matter how much content or returning editors we got. NOPE. We are not a service for schools (let wikiversity do that). We need to do this stuff because it ends up driving ongoing valuable participation OR creation of important content (as determined by GA+ and high hit count).
I realize there is a big staffed up group at WMF and so there is a demand to want some big shebang. But I think we see more and more that a few good classes are better than lots of mediocre ones. Especially given the state of development of the en-Wiki. The India case showed it most clearly (you should not be targeting average, early uni Indian editors...it's just not worth it. That was a case of an actual negative impact. But even if the impact is just "neutral", then you've wasted volunteer time. I say find more Jimmy Butlers and more JBMurrays. Try going after the graduate department at Harvard. Aim higher. And be choosey. A starting hurdle is the instructor himself demonstrating editing ON WIKI, the term before.
I loooooved the idea of spending money and going after unis and doing on person visits. (At first.) And there is a role for a group of WMF employees. Sure, definitely. But it needs to be smarter. I worry that you will lose community buyin soon. And that would be a shame as I, you all, and the community all lurve the idea of getting more kids interested in editing.
Sorry if this seems a kick in the teeth. But...needs to be on the table. 71.246.144.154 ( talk) 01:00, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
They should know techniques for searching Wikipedia for existing articles to avoid duplicate or quasi-duplicate articles. They should be made aware of places to find articles that are actively needed or priority stubs to expand. Point them to the key WikiProjects in their subject area(s). They have lots of helpful listings in this respect. Other sources are Wikipedia:Most wanted articles and WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles. – Voceditenore ( talk) 14:58, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, all! These are really useful and timely as we are now actively working on developing an online instructor orientation that participating professors would need to go through before joining our program. The key policies and choosing topics are both great ideas -- what else should we include? We're thinking of things like how to use watchlists, how to use talk pages, how to track a user's contributions, etc. What else are we missing? For example, what kinds of community interactions should they be aware of? How much should they know about DYK/GA/FA or other places where peer review of articles happens? We're in the brainstorming phase, so I'd love to get everyone's thoughts on the list. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 17:28, 16 November 2011 (UTC)
Policy vs. mechanics. I asked Sgelbman, the instructor of a course on U.S. politics, a couple of questions related to this discussion. Regarding instructor orientation, she said was that she would prefer policy orientation to help with markup mechanics, though she qualified this by saying that she had some prior Wikipedia edits and was quick with markup languages, so she may be an outlier. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:50, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
I'd like instructors to edit on Wikipedia, but I don't see how to give them an incentive to do so, since the reason we want them to learn is so that we can provide them better support. However, if there is a way to provide incentives, then I would love to see them at least take an article to GA. I think they and their students would benefit immensely. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:07, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Just in regard to point 3, I agree that students don't read the materials. Which is why the idea is to require them to read the materials as part of the course requirements, with a formative evaluation to confirm that it has been completed. I've been thinking about this for a while, so I threw together a basic syllabus at Wikiversity - the intent is to write a basic course that could be done in a short time, but summarises for the students core issues that they need to know, and that could be included in the first part of a university course engaging with WP without taking too much time from core course material (each section is meant to be very short, in spite of the number of topics - the main value comes from the introduction and the assessment to push the concept). We did the same with plagiarism where I teach - the students didn't read the materials, so we required them to do so by writing a very short course and providing a short assessment piece, then adding that course to the first part of an existing first-year core topic. Worm is doing something similar when mentoring, so it has been used elsewhere on wiki. - Bilby ( talk) 00:01, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of new editors as OAs; I think a student that needs mentoring needs someone clearly more experienced. The professors who are willing to take the risk of running a class on Wikipedia deserve the best support we can give them. I would address this by throttling back the number of classes to a level we can effectively support. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 01:07, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
Support quality. I asked Sgelbman, the instructor of a course on U.S. politics, a couple of questions related to this discussion. You can see her comments here, but in sum she said the ambassador support was fine but she'd have liked to have had access to support prior to the start of the class. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 02:00, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Do an OA inventory This may seem kind of obvious but how can anything be decided without a truly accurate picture of how many active OAs you actually have? I'd suggest this as a priority. I looked at the list, one has completely retired from Wikipedia; two have explictly marked themselves as "UNAVAILABLE"; at least one other one I know plans not to continue with OA work; and quite a few of the rest have not signed up for any classes this term. There are a lot of courses listed for this current term which appear to have no OAs at all. My impression is that you don't have enough for the current numbers of students, let alone increasing it. I also agree with Mike Christie that the numbers of OAs needed should be based on a ratio of OA to students, not to classes. The latter leads to wide discrepancies in the amount of support given to individual classes. In some cases the ratio to students to OA is so high that an OA simply cannot provide the kind attention that was "advertised" to professors. Voceditenore ( talk) 13:22, 17 November 2011 (UTC)
Following on the section above, in fact, Jbmurray may have the records (if not, the memory) to comment on the ratios involved in his students' FAs, at WP:MMM. How many students, how many articles, how many classes, to how many experienced FA Wikipedians collaborating and mentoring those students via WP:FAT? My recollection is that so many of the "regulars" of the FA writing and reviewing community were involved in helping out there, that my problem as FAC delegate was there were few uninvolved reviewers left to give independent review of the FACs, so I had to wait and hope that "uninvolved" knowledgeable reviewers would weigh in. I'd guess the ratio of mentors to students was much greater than one, but perhaps Jbmurray has some data. One disengaged inxperienced Wikipedian professor with more than half a dozen classes of several hundred students working on scores of articles cannot supervise work as occurred with the significant amount of mentorship that WP:FAT provided to WP:MMM-- we had an entire team of experienced Wikipedia FA writers guiding those students. Doesn't scale. Yes, regular editors are doing some professors' work for them, because they overstretched. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 22:27, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
FWIW, I think it's the opposite: We don't need more articles about obscure and unimportant topics; we need to focus on the quality of the most important topics. -- Ssilvers ( talk) 22:05, 23 November 2011 (UTC)
OA effort put into improving the students' understanding of Wikipedia is not wasted, but it has no long term benefits to USEP, because the student population changes almost completely every semester. That implies that the focus of training should be the instructors. I know that the CAs do a lot to help the instructors, and that's very useful, but the CAs are (usually) not very experienced Wikipedians, so there are limits to what they can convey.
I think that after the semester is over, or perhaps even before that point, we should survey the instructors to find out whether any of them would be interested in improving a Wikipedia article themselves, with appropriate support. If any of them are willing to improve content I think we should ask a couple of experienced Wikipedian content editors to work with them -- they may not think they'll need help, but they will. I think we would find that the professors who do this would have a much better understanding of policies -- copyright, NPOV, V, etc. -- and would be better positioned to run successful classes. Some would need less OA support, and might be able to switch to a mode of only calling on OAs when they need support for specific issues. That in turn would improve our OA bandwidth.
If we actively search out the professors who are willing to spend some time learning exactly what it takes to improve Wikipedia content, we will be finding the professors who will most reward the community for supporting their classes. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 14:23, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
Further, since you have nominated (yourself) more than one article at FAC, it is incorrect for you to say you have little experience with FA-- particularly in relation to those professors who haven't ever engaged Wikipedia even at the GA level. The differences between Jbmurray and your editing experience-- relative to other instructors who are using this program-- cannot be ignored if this problem is to be solved. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 21:59, 19 November 2011 (UTC)
I would like to add a note of caution to anyone whose experience with the program is limited to less than ten or twenty articles. There have been a lot of classes, a lot of students, and a lot of successes and failures. My own individual experiences with student interactions in the USEP have been quite varied, and I could imagine individual editors forming widely different opinions of the program depending on which classes they have run into. There are a couple of global perspectives available, one of which is this quantitative analysis. I participated in the evaluation team for that analysis, and it was reassuring to me to see that overall the PPI very substantially increased the quality of the articles the students worked on.
I'm not disagreeing with Sandy's complaints, and in fact I think her negative experiences really do represent a problem with the program. But I think it's worth remembering that the students really are helping us build an encyclopedia, and that we have numbers to prove it.
I also wanted to comment on the exchange between Jimmy and Sandy -- when students engage with collaborators (such as Malleus) to get articles to FA, to my mind that's exactly what should be happening. Yes, Sandy, an effort like that will absorb collaboration labour, but so do at least 75% of the FAs that come through FAC. Collaboration is what we're good at; if we complain when the students don't engage on the talk page, and don't collaborate, it seems harsh to me if we also complain when they do collaborate. Mike Christie ( talk - contribs - library) 03:02, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
@ Mike, 03:02, 20 November: the students really are helping us build an encyclopedia. Perhaps our different perspective has to do with the content area. I can't think of many ways that faulty or poorly sourced content in 18th century literature for example has the potential to harm our readers the way articles in the neuropsych realm do (akin to BLPs), and in the medical realm, IMO no content is better than faulty content. I don't think we should have undergrad students whose professor has hundreds of students working on legions of articles with no active online mentorship chunking text in to these articles. I'm not aware of other content areas, other than the ongoing copyvio, plagiarism, copyedit issues seen throughout. WRT collaboration, I think we're saying the same thing. It's collaboration that produces most FAs, I know how much collaboration it took for Jbmurray's students to produce FAs, and my challenge to Jimmy Butler is to recognize that level of collaboration doesn't scale, and to identify what things Jbmurray and he did right that might extend to other areas.
@ Jimmy Butler: You have destroyed my dream. That's a most strange comment. " Wikipedia is not Disney Land"; in "my country", realizing a dream takes a lot of hard work, mixed with a serious amount of reality, and the person who delivers the harsh reality is not the one who "destroys your dream". Was your "dream" based in reality? What have you done to document and extend your experiences in ways that might help this program or other professors? How many students and articles do you have in an average term, how many have you had altogether, how many are still on Wikipedia, what have been some of your ratios, and do you see any way that a professor who is not engaged on Wikipedia, with a disengaged Online Ambassador, more than half a dozen classes, more than several hundred students, more than 50 articles, etc can supervise the work of those students adequately? We're not here about dreams-- we're here about how to solve a problem.
As to the specifics of a teacher review before approaching FA or GA, well, that needn't be required for FA because so few of them will ever make it-- it's not an issue. Besides, it should be standard fare for the professors anyway-- why on earth would they even pretend their students articles could reach GA level without review from the professor? They should be doing that anyway. I'd think the bigger problem is probably at the DYK level, since review there has historically been lacking (albeit recently improving). At any rate, the idea of teacher review for GA/FA level misses the point-- the students I have encountered are damaging articles that will never be more than stubs, but nonetheless will affect our readers. If you think you are on the right track, great-- now, if you want this "dream" to be a reality, please invest in the hard work of analyzing what parts of your experience can extend to the broader project, at what scale, and don't let yourself be part of a PR push for something that doesn't scale beyond a small class of 20 or so students supervised by a committed and knowledgeable Wikipedian. That is the beef here-- the WMF, in its search for a remedy for declining editorship-- has brought something on the heads of regular editors that they weren't prepared to supervise. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 17:58, 21 November 2011 (UTC)
Curious way to deal. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 05:38, 24 November 2011 (UTC)
(Cross-posting to several pages; posted here as IEP has been discussed on this talk page as well, but please focus any further discussion on the talk page linked below) I've just created the page Wikipedia:India_Education_Program/Analysis to document our planned analysis of the Pune pilot. We've been collecting ideas in many different places, but we wanted to have one central page where we'll be analyzing the learnings from the Pune pilot over the next few months. We will using the results of this analysis to plan our next pilot in India, which will be kicking off in mid-2012. We will not be running the India Education Program in the first term of 2012. We are committed to using the next few months to get all the learnings we can out of the analysis, so we can launch a new pilot in six months or so that addresses all of the concerns raised from the Pune pilot.
We do have one major outstanding question in terms of how to analyze the pilot, which is how do we measure the impact of the pilot on the community? I really encourage anyone who has good ideas of how to do data collection around this to contribute to the discussion on talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:49, 1 December 2011 (UTC)
Please post any further discussion at Wikipedia_talk:India_Education_Program/Analysis so the discussion all happens on one page. Thanks. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 16:26, 2 December 2011 (UTC)
If you're interested in learning more about the Wikipedia Education Program in action around the globe, join us for the next Metrics and Activities Meeting on Tuesday, December 20 at 16:00 UTC. Please visit outreachwiki:Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting for instructions on joining and time zone conversions. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:27, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
I spy with my little eye something beginning with E... It's a MediaWiki extension for the tracking of students developed under contract for the Foundation. It comes complete with a whole pile of new user groups and special pages. More information is available at mw:File:Engineering support for the Wikipedia Education Program.pdf and mw:Wikipedia Education Program. The extension aims to obsolete some Toolserver hacks and move the management of student tables from public wiki pages to possibly private special pages.
The design specifications in the PDF and MediaWiki pages contradict some of the feedback from the community:
I see this as really bad news. MER-C 04:15, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
Blog post from developer and another design document. Sigh. MER-C 01:40, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
Roadmap - deployment = mid/late February. MER-C 08:15, 24 December 2011 (UTC)
Ah, well. I didn't realize that all the .php pages look like this when viewed through the directory tree, so I got a bunch of useless stuff. Looks like I'll have to wait till they fix the bugs ( I tried fixing them myself, but for every bug I fix, a new one crops up; and I have no idea what I'm doing anyways since I'm unfamiliar with the code) ManishEarth Talk • Stalk 07:31, 27 December 2011 (UTC)
Just a note to alert those interested that we've created new Wikipedia Education Program Participation Requirements for all courses in all countries participating in the Wikipedia Education Program this term, based on feedback we've seen from pilot programs in multiple countries. These new requirements take effect immediately, so courses participating in spring 2012 have been crafted around these requirements. More information is available on the Outreach wiki, linked above. Please direct any comments about the requirements to that talk page.
Please note that these are global requirements for participation in the Wikipedia Education Program in spring 2012. Individual country programs such as this one may develop additional requirements as-needed (for example, the Cairo Pilot will have an even lower Ambassador:student ratio).
On behalf of the entire Wikipedia Education Program team, -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 19:28, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
Some of you may have heard about a new Wikipedia Education Program MediaWiki extension that's been in development for a few months. This new tool will completely replace the existing course page and Ambassador listing system beginning in Fall 2012.
Some key features of the new extension:
We'll be talking a lot more about this extension in the coming weeks and months as it's rolled out and we begin using it. Currently, we are ready to have the first beta testers use the tool, and we are looking for 3-5 Ambassadors and professors who are willing to spend a few hours over the next week doing a thorough test of the new extension. We specifically want people who are experienced in creating course pages and adding themselves to the Ambassador lists. We have two goals for this version of the beta test:
In later rounds, we'll be looking at user experience and more bug testing, but this preliminary round is focused exclusively on back-end issues while we still have developer time to fix them.
If you are interested in helping out with beta-testing, we will have a kickoff meeting on Google Hangout on Monday, February 27, with Jeroen De Dauw (the developer) and Frank Schulenburg (who has served as the project manager for this extension) where they'll explain a bit more about the tool and what they need for this round of beta testing. Please sign up on this Doodle if you're interested in helping out, or if you're interested in a larger beta testing later, please indicate that on the Ambassadors talk page. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 20:21, 23 February 2012 (UTC)
Please take note of an in-person meeting that, pending approval, will be taking place in the San Francisco WMF office on the weekend of March 22-25, 2012. This event will serve to bring together active community members who taken leadership opportunities in the Education Program with WMF staff to rebuild a volunteer structure that defines roles and delegates responsibilities related to the Education Programs in the US and Canada. The goal of the weekend is to create a community-driven foundation of the US/Canada Education Programs that will address specific concerns, such as expansion techniques, ambassador recruitment, community relationships, etc.
I will select the final list of 10 participants. The group of attendees will be selected based on a number of criteria, including:
If you are interested in contributing to a productive meeting that will greatly impact the US and Canada Education Programs, please fill out
the following form explaining why you think you could help in this endeavor. Please do not fill out the form if you are not available to travel to San Francisco March 22-25 (and potentially traveling a day before or after that). If this event is approved, travel and hotel costs, as well as some meals, will be covered or reimbursed by the Wikimedia Foundation. If you have any pertinent questions unanswered here, please either post below, on
my talk page or email me at jmathewsonwikimedia.org.
In order to make travel arrangements that are cost-effective, please fill out the interest form by 9AM Pacific on Monday, February 27, 2012. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 20:01, 22 February 2012 (UTC)
Quick update: the US/Canada Education Programs are planning to partner with a new pilot program from the Wikimedia Foundation this semester. You can read about the Teahouse project's goals and see how they align with those of the Wikipedia Education Program. Perhaps most noticeably, both programs serve to help new editors contribute quality content to Wikipedia while fostering an environment that will encourage them to stick around in the future.
The Education Program will be partnering with their project by using the Teahouse hosts in place of Online Ambassadors for five courses in the US/Canada. As many of you know, the ambassador requirement has increased this semester, and many classes will not meet these requirements to join the program officially. However, we would like to choose five of these courses to receive the support of the Teahouse hosts, which will still give students online support but in a different setting than we have traditionally utilized.
We are partnering with five courses because this will give the Teahouse program a solid support of new editors to work with over the next few months but will not drastically impact the Education Program. We are still working with those professors who do not have the traditional Online Ambassador yet, as we want to make sure these professors are interested in receiving this alternative support for their students.
The Teahouse fellows will be in the San Francisco office next week, so we will select the five courses at that point. We will be focusing on courses that are only lacking a Wikipedian in the pod (aka: they must still have a Campus Ambassador) and will select the five courses based on interest/enthusiasm from the professor. We will also be taking into consideration the number of female students, as one of the Teahouse's main goals is to reach more female editors.
Please comment with any suggestions for selecting the courses (from this list of classes that still need Online Ambassador support) or any feedback about working with the Teahouse in general. I will post the courses as soon as they agree to join the Teahouse pilot. Looking forward to your input. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 23:46, 10 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi all,
Following a village pump proposal discussion I implemented a new tool Followed users which lets you view the most recent edit by a selected list of users that you follow. One important application of this is to allow ambassadors and professors to follow their students and review their work in a timely manner. I'd like to get more people to try it out and let me know at my talk page if you find it useful or have suggestions/problems. Thanks! Dcoetzee 02:58, 27 February 2012 (UTC)
I'm really pleased to announce that Rob Schnautz has joined the Wikipedia Education Program team as an online communications contractor. Rob has been editing Wikipedia as User:Bob the Wikipedian since 2006, and he self-identifies as a WikiDragon, working mostly with the Tree of Life WikiProject. He also helped develop the automatic taxobox system. In 2011, he became the Regional Ambassador for part of the Midwest, and he joins the team now to serve as a liaison between the existing English Wikipedia editing community and the Education Program team.
This means I'll be less active on talk pages and IRC and return to a traditional communications role (writing blog posts, outreach to news media, etc.). Rob will now be the program's primary point of contact on-wiki; if you have questions, feel free to reach out to him either on program talk pages like this one or on his talk page. Welcome, Rob! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 22:29, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
Please note an important notice about our program here. JMathewson (WMF) ( talk) 22:48, 16 April 2012 (UTC)
This is an announcement that the WP:United States Education Program/Updates page is now available on the English Wikipedia and will from here out be separate from the WP:Canada Education Program/Updates.
Also, I'd like to present the Education Noticeboard, where current problems in the Wikipedia Education Program should be brought forth. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 16:29, 26 April 2012 (UTC)
Given that ambassadors are meant to be "active Wikipedians", it would be helpful if the default "course participation log" at the top of each course page were set up to include only students - as it is, the OA's edits tend to overshadow everybody else. Nikkimaria ( talk) 16:43, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Project members: I am working on a draft for an "English Wikipedia Board of Education". Your comments would be appreciated. The working draft is at User:Pine/drafts/ENWP Board of Education. Please comment on the talk page. Thank you! Pine (talk) 08:06, 4 May 2012 (UTC)
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) 23:20, 4 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) 18:11, 9 May 2012 (UTC)
Are you going to Wikimania? I'd like to arrange an Education Meet-Up while we are all in D.C. this year. Anyone from any country in the world is welcome to join -- Ambassadors, professors, students, program organizers, people interested in starting a program in any country worldwide, etc. We'll even provide T-shirts and some food! Here's where we need some input: when would be a good time for the meet-up, and what kinds of activities would you like to do at the meet-up?
Please fill out this Google Form if you're interested in connecting with other volunteers interested in education around the world at Wikimania! Hope to see you there! -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) ( talk) 21:54, 11 May 2012 (UTC)
Yesterday evening the Working Group members and kick-off meeting date were announced. Rob SchnautZ (WMF) ( talk • contribs) 18:17, 15 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm new to this, and trying to help a professor set up a Wikipedia project for her online class. At latest count, here are the sites that I've found that have reference material relevant to me:
It is frustrating, because I don't know where to go for the information I need. I think these need to be consolidated, and redirects put in place as appropriate. Are there efforts underway to do this?
In particular, I'm confused about why there is a set of US-Canada program, US program, and Canada program pages, and none of them seem to cross-reference the others. Then, I'd suggest, if the info for a specific region's program doesn't differ from the that of the "master program" (for example, for campus ambassadors), then the info shouldn't be copied in full, but should either be transcluded or cross-referenced. Otherwise, a newcomer has to read all the copies of everything to make sure he is not missing something important.
Note that I don't know if this is the right place to post this topic or not. That's just one example of the problem. Klortho ( talk) 18:39, 31 July 2012 (UTC)
Help, I need somebody to help me set up my University course through WP:USEP. I've done this for the past year with no problem but this year the program process has changed and I'm not getting any responses. Crtew ( talk) 19:48, 20 August 2012 (UTC)