User:Doc James/Recommendations

Recommendations to the WMF regarding the classes of students editing Wikipedia

These recommendations come out of the experience the Wikipedia community has had with interactions with groups of students and what needs to be done to improve the situation.

1. The profs need to have edited here themselves before bringing their students (preferable having brought an article to WP:Good article status).
2. Classes should begin interacting with the community before they begin editing. This suggestion is based on the fact that many students created pages with titles that were not encyclopedic in nature which was not good for any involved.[1] The class should let their presence be known on the appropriate Wikiproject
3. Students need to respond to talk page feedback.
4. With respect to health care there need to be greater emphasis of WP:MEDRS with respect to using secondary sources (review articles and major textbooks as examples).
5. Students must paraphrase their sources (large quotes or copy pasting is not appropriate).
6. Proper referencing is important and the class needs to have verification that they can do this before being set free on the main space.
7. There needs to be some expectation that profs or their assistants will take an active part in monitoring their students changes (especially with respect to plagiarism / copy pasting).
8. Emphasis needs to be on quality not quantity of content. While we can collect statistics regarding the number of edits made neither the WMF nor the classes should rank people by volume of edits or text. Ranking by quality as done at the Wikipedia:WikiCup may be appropriate.
9. Best practice marking schemes should reflect the advice above. If students are gaining bonus marks from their work here they must also lose marks if they harm the project.
10. Article talk pages should be tagged to indicate they are subject of an "educational project", so as to make interactions with the community easier.

Basis

These recommendations are based on the following analysis/discussion:

• Discussion at WP:MED
• User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psychology,_Part_I
• Discussion at ANI

Users who support these statements

This may be edited further, you will be notified before it is submitted to make sure you still agree

• --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:03, 17 December 2011 (UTC)
• Fences&Windows 20:49, 19 December 2011 (UTC)
• I agree with the above. New editors should be aware of the policies on Wikipedia ( listed here ). In the context of medical articles, people should be aware of the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles (WP:MEDMOS). If it doesn't already exist -- a group editing guide could be written. For the project as a whole, I think the suggested emphasis for groups should be on review of articles/improving the quality of articles. Nephron  T|C 16:26, 27 December 2011 (UTC)