Draft talk:Kim Abeles

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Problematic student project

Draft and mainspace articles on American artists including Kim Abeles have been created repeatedly by students since at least 2021. The project goal appears to be to make a few edits to fashion articles, then to write an article about an artist or designer. Creating a draft often seems to be the final thing these students do at Wikipedia, perhaps as the last piece of the assignment, so it's been difficult to ask them why they're doing it, but we've had some feedback about students being asked to pick a name from a list and write an article.

Artists include:

Repeated drafts of the same biographies are not particularly useful to Wikipedia. More seriously, drafts that include copyrighted text are a problem - as are copyrighted images, where students take images from the artists' web pages or social media without permission and upload them to Wikimedia Commons, where they can often remain for years, falsely claiming to be public domain and violating the artist's copyright.

This project work doesn't follow the recommended guidelines at Wikipedia:Student assignments, and with no {{Educational assignment}} templates the students occasionally end up being mistaken for PR companies and blocked. In 2022 multiple accounts were wrongly blocked for suspicious promotional behaviour since they'd been making similar edits from the same geographical location, uploading social media photos of an artist, and the admins had no reason to consider that they might have been students. Many other accounts get a few warnings and a block.

It's not been completely clear if this is a single tutor who needs to update their exercise slightly, or multiple institutions using the same exercise and the same list of suggested artists, perhaps from a textbook or a web page.

There's been some further discussion of this issue at this Education Noticeboard thread. At time of writing students have said they've emailed their tutor and teaching assistants to inform them of the problem, but as of today these articles are still being created, and copyrighted images are still being uploaded to Commons.

If you're a student, please point your tutor at this page. If you're a tutor, please talk to us! You can reach out to contact@wikiedu.org, or visit https://teach.wikiedu.org. --Belbury (talk) 10:19, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For ease of information/transparency, just noting here that I (non-student editor) took my own edits to the student-created Draft: Jemima Wyman: Contemporary Artist and published them as the mainspace article Jemima Wyman. With that, I'm also wondering whether it would be a good idea to make main space articles for some of these artists (presuming they are in fact notable). I'd be willing to try doing that if we think that might help this issue at all. ForsythiaJo (talk) 16:55, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think it would make any difference.

Wikipedia has had a full article about Rafa Esparza since 2015, and students have ignored it in favour of creating additional redundant drafts at Draft:Rafa Esparaza, Draft:Rafa Esparza, Draft:RAFA ESPARZA, Draft:Rafa Esparza - his Impactful Work, Draft:Rafa Esparza (ART-2100) plus many, many userspace sandboxes. The same goes for some of the other artists listed above.

I assume that the class project is explicitly asking students to create drafts. Belbury (talk) 17:13, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]