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Large genetics class off the rails

This class: Genetics 3250 has 68 students listed.

here are the articles they are working on so far:


Students are adding unsourced content, content about biomedical information sourced to primary sources (some of them predatory), and essay-like content, added to articles without any mind for the rest of the page. They are edit warring to keep it at the pages I have checked Actinin alpha 3 and Fibroblast growth factor receptor 3. I spot checked other pages and they appear to be editing this way across many pages.

They don't seem to have done the training.

Pinging User:Ian (Wiki Ed) and the instructor User: MSalem-MTSU.

I've also left a note at WT:MED and WT:MCB linking here. Jytdog (talk) 20:09, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi @Ian (Wiki Ed):, there is also some blanking of sections with no explanation (for example in the Microbial genetics article. The citations need to be added properly as well, not in a list in the beginning of the article. In this example, should we reverse these edits for now and move to the talk page? Thanks. JenOttawa (talk) 17:15, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
JenOttawa Thanks very much for bringing this to our attention. I've reached out to the instructor and asked that his students cease editing. We're in the process of going through their contributions and will update here when we hear back from the instructor.Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:35, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! Jytdog (talk) 21:30, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

And this one has 48 students listed and is also struggling.[1] Same instructor. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:28, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, yes, we're treating as the same class. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:41, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
The instructor just got back to me and is asking his students to cease editing.Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:54, 19 November 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. They just need more instruction on the types of sourcing they should be using and how to format. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:06, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
User:Doc James that isn't all. The content they are adding is self-contained and repeats things said elsewhere on the pages (eg. in describing genetic disorders they repeat information about where the gene is) and goes into excessive detail about disease. The writing is often too informal. And the edit warring. They are altogether aiming for wrong thing - "here is my self-contained essay for grading" not "here is a useful subsection in the whole article". But yes better sourcing and citation-formatting would make their content easier to edit down. Jytdog (talk) 18:15, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Yah when the students do not take the time to read the article first... Gah... Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:40, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
As Jytdog said in the initial post - this class went off the rails, badly. Part of the problem was that it wasn't identified as editing medical content - we don't accept classes this large who want to edit biomedical content. We've relied on the instructor making the determination, but in light of this, I've started a conversation about modifying our procedures when it comes to large classes in some area of biology.
That said, I'm baffled by what happened. These kinds of problems used to be more common in the past, but we built our resources to try to address that. I'm hoping this was a one-off problem, a perfect storm, but I'm certainly going to dig into our trainings and resources once the term is done and things slow down. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:43, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Way too much work required cleaning up afterwards. This is burning me out. In addition to the sourcing and essay-like problems mentioned above, the students apparently do not understand the basics of how Wikipedia articles are structured (they start with leads, not introductions). Boghog (talk) 20:39, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

You're right. It isn't ok to expect you to clean up after a class like this. That's why we asked them to stop. I personally feel awful about the demand this class in particular has put on you and Jytdog. I apologise, and speaking personally, I will do what I can to minimise the odds of this happening again. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:10, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
Thanks @Ian (Wiki Ed): for being so responsive here. This student needs some assistance. I feel horrible reverting the work, but I cannot keep up in any other way. These are good faith edits and the students are working hard. We expect them to make some errors as they learn (we all did/do), but it seems that they do have much support learning the guidelines. This user is a student editor in University_of_Cincinnati/Environmental_Public_Health_(Fall). Ian, I see here you are also doing your best to keep up with this student and have been helpful! JenOttawa (talk) 17:06, 21 November 2018 (UTC)

@Ian (Wiki Ed): Thanks for your responsiveness above. Unfortunately students from the same instructor have started editing again (see for example Dermatopontin) with the same type of deficiencies (inserting redundant essay-like sections that are not supported by secondary sources). I would appreciate if would contact the instructor again. Thanks. Boghog (talk) 06:12, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. This isn't good at all. I have asked Helaine to get in touch with him again. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:02, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

Long Term Metrics

Do we have any metrics on how much added by coursework is well sourced and actually remains in the wiki? I would be interested to see detailed reports on the efficacy of the program. I see the blog post points out some nice articles that were created from "thin air", which is good- but I've also seen that forcing students to edit the wiki results in a lot of essays(WP:NOTESSAY) and WP:SYNTH being introduced. The promotional material such as report has a few issues.

  • 67% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules but doesn't this means that 1/3 of all students are editing without keeping up with the courseware.
  • Students edited 1,130 articles, created 20 new entries, and added more than 160K words. Ok but were those words any good e.g. Link Between Enlightenment and Imperialism is a whole bunch of words about what wikipedia is WP:NOT.

Are there systems in place to monitor the goodness of edits? At the end of a course is there a post-mortem procedure to go through and check edits? Do we have any metrics other than words added, such as words added which remain after 6 months (we'd need a bot for this). It seems some courses involve a lot of peer review, but somehow essays pop up like Link Between Enlightenment and Imperialism, which continues to exist, despite the fact that the course will end on December 7th 2018, effectively rendering all this work void. Editors are getting around to deleting it, but it makes me question the oversight of the program, that it has somehow managed to exist in mainspace at all.

It might be that on the whole having students edit the wiki is better than the edits of the general public on the whole. I just wonder if we have the statistics on the matter. It would also be nice to know that there are systems in place for putting students into tiers, for example the oversight needed in descending order would go post-docs, graduate students, 4th year undergrads - 1st year undergrads. Probably 4th year undergrads need very little oversight, but a great many students wash out of 2nd year (otherwise known as gatekeeper courses).Ethanpet113 (talk) 04:56, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

Those are good questions, and I'm interested too. What makes student editing somewhat unique, relative to editing in general, is that very large numbers of edits show up all at once, and that it is sometimes awkward to deal with edits by persons who are being graded for their editing and who are editing as a requirement instead of as a purely volunteer activity. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:44, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
Hi, Ethanpet113 and Tryptofish. Sorry for the tangent and let me know if I should move this to its own heading.
I would like to see an essay written, or Wiki Ed material written, for student editors that takes them back to the basics of composition terminology so that they can do some conceptual reframing of the difference between 1) the type of writing done on Wikipedia vs. 2) the typical type of writing that they are trained to do in higher education (essays). It could even list other commonly assigned types of writing in higher ed to compare and contrast from to help make this conceptual distinction even clearer: lab reports, annotated bibliographies, book reviews, etc. As a new editor, I had to struggle for a bit the first few weeks to really keep that difference in the type of writing at the forefront of my mind and whenever I give feedback to student editors I try to emphasize the difference in these types of writing to them to encourage them to try to make this conceptual difference.
Perhaps there is a Wiki Ed staff member who has a degree in English or some related sub field who has the expertise to effectively write this kind of training material? Or perhaps there is a professor (or group of professors) that we could reach out to to help us effectively create this training material? It would improve the project a lot I think, because it would also help us to better communicate with non-student new editors too! Sincerely, Shashi Sushila Murray, (message me) 21:19, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
Hi Ethanpet113, thank you for your questions.
About training completion percentage: A certain percentage of students will fall behind in the term; that's normal student behavior. Many of these students who are behind on the training modules are also behind on actually doing their Wikipedia assignments too, or they end up not actually doing the assignment, etc. So while it does mean 1/3rd of students aren't up to date, it also doesn't mean that those 1/3rd are actually going to edit. We don't have good data to answer this question.
About quality of edits: We've run several studies around quality of student work. In 2010–11, the pilot year of our program, we conducted an extensive research study. We brought in subject matter experts and Wikipedians, and asked them to assess student articles on a 26-point scale, based on the English Wikipedia's 1.0 Assessment scale. The results showed that students make substantive improvements to articles through their work. We repeated this study again in spring 2012; again, the results showed significant quality improvement. But both of these studies took an immense amount of volunteer time to assess articles. It was not scalable to keep asking Wikipedians to assess before and after articles each term. In 2016, we attempted to automate the process; see this Meta page for results. That research found that students are effective in bringing low quality articles up to higher quality and that they accounted for 2% of the low-to-high quality leaps observed within the given period. A year ago, we also looked at student edits from the spring 2017 term (so around six months out from when they were done editing), and we found that only 2.6% of our students' mainspace edits were reverted and only 1.9% were deleted. Does that mean every edit is good? Obviously not, but we feel like our program is making an overwhelmingly positive difference to the quality of Wikipedia content.
And yes, we do provide oversight, although this current month – November 15 to December 15 – is literally the busiest time in the year for us, as students at both quarter system and semester system schools are all editing at the exact same time (the spring term's difference in calendars between the two systems spreads the busiest part of the term out between March and June). So we definitely aren't catching everything right now, but here's what we do: (1) We have honed our requirements for support over the years to ensure the right type of courses (e.g., not large 100-level classes) attempt Wikipedia assignments. This heads off a lot of the potential problems. (2) We have a system of automated alerts that monitor student work through our Dashboard software. The Dashboard alerts our staff (and the relevant instructor) if students add copyright-violating or plagiarized content and we work together with the course to remove and resolve the issue. There are also alerts in place if articles are nominated for deletion, or if students begin editing articles with discretionary sanctions. This push notification to our Wikipedia Experts on staff enables us to handle the most egregious problems proactively. (3) As they can, our Wikipedia Experts (Ian (Wiki Ed), Shalor (Wiki Ed), and Elysia (Wiki Ed)) monitor course edits. They are able to monitor nearly all edits at the beginning of the term when there are few edits, but as I mentioned, now is our busiest time so they aren't reading all edits as they're made in real time. (4) At the end of each term, our Wikipedia Experts review student work, checking to see if contributions are of high quality, are coherently organized, are integrated into the existing text, and are supported by reliable sourcing. This close-out process happens for about a month to two months after the end of the term. That means things like plagiarism we handle immediately vs tone issues we'll handle in the next month or two.
To respond to your point, too, Shashi Sushila Murray, our training materials attempt to prepare students to avoid original research and write in an appropriate tone. While there are some students who simply will not follow training guidelines, we have found that for the many thousands who we support each year, many find the preparation adequate. If not, our Wikipedia Experts are available to answer an individual’s questions. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:59, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Cassidy, thank you very much for the thoughtful and detailed answer. And I want to acknowledge that the Wiki Experts do indeed work very, very hard on this important work. Shashi Sushila Murray, it might be worth considering whether there are things that should either be added to WP:ASSIGN or to the Wiki Ed materials. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:20, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Thank you @Cassidy (Wiki Ed):, that was very informative. I'm happy to know that the program is effective, and not just advocacy for advocacy's sake- or at worst actually detrimental. If I may make a suggestion, then I would say in future monthly reports to prevent this question from needing to be answered again, a section or note on "adjusted edit value" should be included. The "this much text added" approach of current promotional material just makes me naturally uneasy because it seems like one of those marketing statements, that isn't telling the whole story. I understand the process isn't scalable, so just a note extrapolating from the 2011 and 2012 studies would be good. For example

140k new words were added^[note 1] . Note 1: 133k words after adjusting for an approximate success rate of 95% as found by studies performed in 2011 and again in spring 2012

I would also advise that as the 10 year aniversary of the origional study is upcoming, it might be time to repeat it to detect if the program has improved or diminished in value, because there's enough of a reproducibility crisis in academia, we don't need to add to it.

Ethanpet113 (talk) 19:19, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Political Philosophy of the Enlightenment

I've come across Link Between Enlightenment and Imperialism as a new article. It's clearly an essay that is not suitable for an article at this time. It's part of the class Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/College of the Holy Cross/Political Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Fall 2018). Some of the other changes by this class ([2]) may need attention as well. power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:12, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for bringing this to our attention. We're looking into it now and will report back. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:46, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Just wanted to let you know that I reached out to the instructor, and he will be addressing these issues with his students. Thanks. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:08, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Poor use of named refs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T169841
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T52568

Students are by and large doing a good job writing citations when they write them, including the use of templates like {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}} which keeps them standardized, and helps them avoid errors of omission. So kudos for that. One problem I see that keeps cropping up, however, is the poor choice of names in named refs. Names should be something like "Bernstein-1974", i.e., author's last name and year, or some other mnemonic that makes sense in the context of the given citation. Reference names like <ref name=":4"> are very editor-unfriendly, when trying to change the wikicode. Ref names like that used to be used in the early days, but are really discouraged now. WP:NAMEDREF says, Names must not be purely numeric; they should have semantic value so that they can be more easily distinguished from each other by human editors. I don't think they meant that by adding a colon, it's no longer purely numeric. In any case, it's highly un-menomnic.

I have a feeling there must be some rogue training module out there that is teaching them to use colon + digit for ref names, because it keeps cropping up over and over, and I don't know where else they would be getting it from. Can someone try and figure it out, or at least, point them to Help:Footnotes for when they want to create a named reference? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 11:27, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

That's the way visual editor is designed, and last I asked, it wasn't a priority for them to change. Or even provide an easy way to edit refnames. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 11:58, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Yup, that's not really the student's fault - it's the default naming done by the Visual Editor. Naturally students tend to be quite happy with letting the software handle that part (I doubt many waste any consideration on future-proofing the code...) Pain in the derriere, and I vaguely recall some discussions about how to make this less of one, but they have not so far lead anywhere productive. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 12:15, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
@StarryGrandma and Xaosflux: Thanks. Aha, so as someone who never uses VE, I was unaware of that issue; students and training modules absolved. That's a shame. One thing though: even if VE doesn't even give them an easy way to edit Refnames, does it allow linkage to pre-existing refs with mnemonic names that don't look like the colon+digits pattern? Meanwhile, glad it made the top 10 list. Mathglot (talk) 22:05, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
@Mathglot: Yes, thankfully. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:12, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
FWIW, I've definitely seen it from non-student editors. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:23, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

Assignment template wasn't added to article's talk page

Hello, just a regular editor here and not a student. For some reason, the {{Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment}} template was never added to Talk:Bakemono no e for this course. Opencooper (talk) 21:15, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

@Opencooper: Maybe they're only just getting started updating the talk pages, as many of the other articles listed for that course also don't have anything on the talk page yet. The one I found that did (Talk:Nurarihyon) was just edited yesterday to add the template, and the assigned editor's first article edit was also yesterday. This is week 14, and according to their schedule, they're only just entering the live-edit phase of the course now; I expect the assignment templates will be added this week as student start their live editing. Mathglot (talk) 22:28, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
The assignment templates are based on which articles the class lists as their assigned topics (and are added as soon as the articles are assigned); for that class, it looks like they didn't actually assign any articles.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:49, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Hi, WikiEdu agreed to allow this course based on my promises to oversee it. There may be some irregularities. Does that template go on all pages that students are assigned to edit? I'm happy to add it. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 19:23, 13 December 2018 (UTC)
I added all the individual assignments (some students don't have an assigned page if "their" yokai doesn't have a page). Since all of the students are adding to the Bakemono no e page, I didn't assign it to an individual student, but added the template to the talk page. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 19:51, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Thank you everyone for all that you do.

I wanted to recognize Wiki Ed, students, and teachers for all of the hard work that you do in improving Wikipedia.

Without students and teachers many notable, yet niche, topics would be hopelessly neglected. You are helping to improve the quality coverage of Wikipedia against the inevitable systemic bias that results from the demographics of Wikipedia and Wikipedia's nature as a volunteer project.

Furthermore, the Wiki Ed organization is doing such important work. Your training materials are, in my opinion as a new editor myself, of higher quality through user friendliness, friendliness in tone of writing, and clarity of explanation, than the standard training material and documentation for new editors (I recommend them when I dip into the Teahouse so that other new editors can learn how to edit faster). Additionally, the feedback and training that you give to students while working on their assignments is of higher quality than what I typically see among volunteer editors (so far) who seem to not understand how to write to communicate with clarity and respect.

Thank you, Wiki Ed, students, and teachers, for all of your hard work in improving Wikipedia and (this specifically to Wiki Ed) in making Wikipedia accessible to editors who have some of the greatest potential improvements! Sincerely, Shashi Sushila Murray, (message me) 21:08, 4 December 2018 (UTC)

You should probably be instead thanking all the people that cleanup after the WikiEd students come through. Natureium (talk) 18:21, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Just spitballing here, but that is something that might also be worth quantifying. Perhaps WikiEd could examine how many student edits get reverted or taken to deletion discussions such as WP:AfD. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:25, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Or how many create articles that resemble essays (lots), how many have to be greatly cleaned up (lots), how many make edits that don't comply with MEDRS even though that should have been stressed to them (lots), how many students complain that they are going to fail because their article doesn't meet the requisite standard to not be deleted (lots), how much time people spend moving their articles to draft (lots), how many create articles that are copyvios (lots)... Natureium (talk) 18:31, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
I've certainly had my share of those kinds of aggravations, but I'm also trying to walk a line here, between pointing out some very real problems, and not totally dumping on the Wiki Ed people who really do work very hard with very limited resources. I do think it could be worthwhile to compile some statistics on:
  1. Student edits that get reverted.
  2. Student pages that get WP:PRODed or taken to WP:AfD.
  3. Student pages that get moved back into draft space.
There can be a pitfall in collecting data, such as having experts examine content added, that are sort of predisposed to demonstrating the value of the program, a sort of confirmation bias. It would be useful to quantify what are, in effect, the worst-case scenarios, in part because such data can be useful in identifying areas and methods of improvement. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:44, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
I am going to suggest (perhaps engaging in my own confirmation bias) that the data one section up supports my general idea that WikiEd is most successful when improving existing articles rather than writing new articles. This is for any number of reasons, including existing articles perhaps having eyes on them to help course correct. Writing a new article is beyond a beginner's skill, it's why we don't give out autopatrol to everyone and make true beginners go through AfC, but also something beginner's frequently want to try. Editors who try creating an article right away end up stuck, fairly or not, at AfC because they don't know that after they become confirmed they could create in mainspace. WikiEd students and teachers do know better so their new articles appear in mainspace which presents its own challenges. I think WikiED students are on the whole more clueful than the average new editor (see the fact that they source) but don't on the whole generate higher quality new articles - frequently they just generate articles which are longer.
I think WikiED students are, on the whole, improving the encyclopedia. On the whole they're choosing topics more likely to be notable than the average AfC submission, on the whole they're less likely to COPYVIO, on the whole they're more likely to source (though I do not know they take advantage of the superior access to sourcing they have over the average new editor). They are less likely (perhaps even MUCH less likely) to write using an encyclopedic tone and more likely to create longer articles where a gap in Wiki knowledge can be compounded many times. This trend towards longer articles with numerous issues makes it hard and time consuming for a different editor to fix it. It's this intensity and depth of problem that causes, I think, some of the concerns here while the benefits I've enumerated are less strongly felt and more widely dispersed. So I too will thank WikiED for all that they do - I think their efforts ensure that teachers who would be using Wikipedia anyway have support and through their promotional work of recruiting professors helps get some amount of content that wouldn't otherwise exist to be written. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 20:07, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
FWIW, Tryptofish I think WikiEd has value, I think it's just poorly executed on Wiki-ed's end. We shouldn't have creative writing classes putting their "creative" writing on Wikipeida and that should be be "How To" 101 instructions given by the Wiki-ed staff member that is liaising with the class. Also my creative writing example is just one of many, this is a much broader but common issue with these classes where they (WikiEd) are taking on classes that just aren't appropriate or wildly misinformed. Praxidicae (talk) 19:01, 5 December 2018 (UTC)
Thank you for your specific suggestions and comments Tryptofish and Natureium. Questions of what content sticks and what gets removed are ones we’d like to address in the future with more research. As I mentioned above, a year ago we ran Spring 2017 contributions about six months after the end of the term and found only 2.6% of our students’ mainspace edits were reverted and 1.9% were deleted. I know we are supporting large numbers of students, so even 2.6% of them can seem overwhelming to an individual volunteer, but please always feel free to reach out to one of our Wikipedia Experts (Ian (Wiki Ed), Shalor (Wiki Ed), or Elysia (Wiki Ed)) and they can address any issues rather than relying on volunteers like you. Continuing to understand how our student editors impact Wikipedia is a priority for our organization and we will keep you updated as we seek the best ways to measure that further.
To speak to your points, Barkeep49, the majority of our students work on existing articles rather than creating new ones. For example, in the current Fall 2018 term, our students have edited about 5,800 articles, and created only 517 new articles, meaning new articles account for about 9% of student articles. This ratio has been relatively consistent across terms.
We do have an extensive onboarding system to ensure all our faculty are teaching appropriate courses for Wikipedia articles (not creative writing courses, certainly!) and that students are being assigned to write neutral, fact-based encyclopedia articles, not essays. Do some students ignore their instructors' instructions and create essays anyway? Yes. But again, if you see work from students in our program that needs cleaning up, you are always welcome to ping the Wikipedia Expert assigned to the class. We don’t expect that volunteers clean up that work, but if you do see it before our staff does, a quick ping is immensely helpful. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:10, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Those findings of 2.6% and 1.9% surprise me, even allowing for the fact that these are percentages of large numbers. I'm pretty sure that I, by myself, revert more than that from among just those edits that cross my watchlist. Maybe my experience is atypical (possible), or I'm more prone to revert than are other editors (unlikely). I get the feeling that there's something here that doesn't add up. Perhaps there are a lot of edits that get largely reverted but with a little bit kept and revised (I know I do that frequently), and those don't get counted. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:30, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Also, I'm sure there are pages that get PRODed but contested, or taken to AfD and moved out of mainspace, or blanked and redirected, instead of being deleted, and those probably were not counted as "deleted". --Tryptofish (talk) 22:34, 7 December 2018 (UTC)
Tryptofish, You bring up some good points. You're correct that the 'reverted' percent only counts 'true' reverts. We acknowledge that there are limitations with these specific numbers, i.e. there can be a lot of variability between terms and the standard tools for calculating such things don't account for the complexity of real wiki work. Figuring out a way to account for these limitations in such reports is something we hope to be able to do in the future. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:36, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
So I was a little surprised by the numbers Cassidy (Wiki Ed) presented partially because of the reasons Tryptofish stated in terms of lasting edit quality and partially because 9% of student articles being new felt low. So I did a spot check and the spot check gave me every assurance that 9% is correct. However, it feels like that 9% accounts for a disproportionate amount of the problems. Do teachers and instructors receive additional training/support if they identify new article creation as a goal? If they don't, could they? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:02, 12 December 2018 (UTC)
Hi Barkeep49, supporting that 9% of student editors who create articles is definitely a priority as we build out our support technology. The problems students run into here are varied - both across disciplines and article types. Some of these problems can be chalked up to a student disregarding the notability guidelines that they should have learned about in our existing trainings. Other problems are ones that we hope our trainings and support in the future can address for all new editors. So to answer your question, yes and no. Our trainings provide some additional guidance for new article creation and we hope to expand that in terms of how our Dashboard tracks and engages with their work in the future. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:55, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Something just came across my watchlist that I thought would be useful to link to here: Talk:Cichlid#Proposed merge with Cichlid aggressive behavior. It's an example of a page created by a student in a class assignment that is, for all practical purposes, a WP:Content fork that most editors would have advised the student to treat differently. However, it would not be counted as a delete (I assume), because it will end up as a redirect to another page as the result of a merge discussion. It's not a total loss, because there actually is some merge-worthy sourced material (and that's a lot better than the standalone essays that we see), but it's the kind of thing that, had it occurred on a couple dozen pages instead of just one, would have been a waste of editor time. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:10, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for October 2018 now available

Wiki Education's Monthly Report of organizational activities in October 2018 is now available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (Cassidy) 17:39, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

@Cassidy (Wiki Ed): I’d like to subscribe to this message. Can you set up a signup list page, maybe like Legobot uses, and then run off that to place a brief message monthly on my Talk page? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:49, 14 December 2018 (UTC)
Hi Mathglot, We post our monthly report to Commons, our page on Meta, the reports page on Meta, our blog, and the Education Noticeboard. You’re welcome to subscribe on one of those pages. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

PSY 490 - Forensics Drug Use (Fall 2018)

The class at Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Western Illinois University/PSY 490 - Forensics Drug Use (Fall 2018) already has one article at AfD (Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Pros and cons to the legalization of marijuana), and a second (Marijuana is a compulsive drug) with a PROD tag. Another article (Draft:Common practices in pain management) has been moved to draft. Someone may need to reach out to the instructor. @Ian (Wiki Ed): power~enwiki (π, ν) 03:47, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

These look like last-minute deadline submissions. OhanaUnitedTalk page 05:06, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
I am having the same problem with Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/California State University Long Beach/International Studies 319 TuesThurs (Fall 2018).....adding huge sections two-country articles overwhelming them. How do we get in touch with the instructor?--Moxy (talk) 05:17, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
@Moxy: Shalor has asked Helaine to get in touch with the instructor for that class, and @Power~enwiki: I will do the same with the psychology class. In that case, the class is over, but it will be helpful for them to get a better sense of what a Wikipedia article is if they do this in the future.
Moxy, it's usually easiest to ping one of use if you want to get in touch with an instructor. Student should have a link to their course page on the Wiki Education Dashboard which will have their email the Wikipedia expert assigned to their class, which will either be me, Shalor, Elysia or, in a few cases, Sage. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:05, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
I have just been moving the additions to their own articles..... and Advising the students where it is....like Food security in Chad.--Moxy (talk) 16:52, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
@Moxy: That might be okay in principle, but your message to the student user was a bit telegraphic and left no clue as to why the content was moved. This is rather bitey for a new user, and might've gotten pushback from an experienced user. They should at least get an explanation. At 10kb and ten references, I think the new article is very unlikely to be deleted, which raises the question why it was moved. The content represented only 10% of the Chad article, which is within size split range, but I wonder if it would have just been better left as is; WP:PROSPLIT may apply. However even if this were considered a non-controversial split, point #6 still applies: Create a good summary of the subtopic at the parent article, and this was not done. It also leaves the new article as an orphan. Please see Summary style for more on this.
Any such move of work from one article to another must be accompanied by attribution. This is part of Wikipedia's licensing requirements as described at Wikipedia:Copyrights and explained at the editing guideline WP:CWW and at WP:SPLIT. Any future edits of this nature must be fully attributed. (Past edits involving unattributed moves must also be attributed; this may be achieved as described here.) I've gone ahead and added retroactive attribution to the article history. In addition, it's recommended that the {{Copied}} template be used on both Talk pages; these have been provided by Natureium and myself. Have you done this with other articles besides Food security in Chad? Cordially, Mathglot (talk) 00:03, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
All wonderful suggestions.... please help with the remaining 20 articles.--Moxy (talk) 02:04, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
@Moxy: I will be happy to help with the remaining 20 articles, if they need to be split per consensus of discussion. Can you temporarily suspend splitting any further articles, and append a list of, or link to the 27 articles below? These need to have discussions raised on their Talk pages, unless they are completely uncontroversial splits. The split at Chad, for example, is not uncontroversial. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 08:16, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
Note: I've reversed the split at Mauritania. See here for details. Mathglot (talk) 09:25, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
No need for consensus to move new additions that are undue and essay like. In fact consensus should be made for the huge additions and they should follow BRD not the other way around. Best leave the decision to thoses that work on the articles.--Moxy (talk) 12:40, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

User:Julien.leuthold

Just thought you guys might want to know that this user seems to be using wikipedia in their courses. Look at my conversation with them for more information. [Username Needed] 10:07, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Looks like it's a class in Switzerland; @Ilario: is WM-CH in contact with them? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:57, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Copy-paste merging versus history-merging

Followup to the already archived Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Archive 16#Proposal for update in the student instructions for moving drafts into mainspace. See Wikipedia talk:Merging#When to request a histmerge. You might consider making the archiving of this page a little less aggressive, so I'm not forced to create a fork of a discussion that's less than a month old. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:59, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: 7 days is rather aggressive, isn't it. I think that's a hold-over from when course announcements were all posted here rather than a subpage, making the page fairly unwieldy when not archived frequently. I've changed it to 30 days -- we'll see how that works. And thanks for the link. I'll take a look at this on Monday, but wanted to comment that this is definitely something we want to spend time on this summer, revising training materials prior to the fall 2017 courses starting. I've added DNAU to this thread to ensure it's here at that time. Also want to ping Shalor (Wiki Ed), the content expert working with that class in particular. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:29, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/688809 Memory/Archive. We need adequate notice of student editing, and course instructors shouldn't be assigning the task of writing multiple content forks of the same topic, leaving it for overworked volunteers to clean up. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:22, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

I apologise for dropping the ball on that one, I started preparing the page about the course but didn't share it on the announcement noticeboard. Advance notice of editing would certainly have helped, but the students' accounts remain blocked. Please could the blocks be lifted? Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 12:29, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
I don't think just an announcement on a noticeboard is sufficient. Most editors are not monitoring these noticeboards. There should be some indication on the editor's user or user talk page, such as Template:Student editor (e.g., like this). It should link to their assignment, so we can see what their objective is. wbm1058 (talk) 12:48, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Note how Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Rutgers University/Languages in Peril Section II (Spring 2017) lists each student in the class, along with the titles of the Wikipedia articles that they are working on.
Wikipedia:Outreach Dashboard/Swansea University/LAA319 - Competition Law doesn't have a similar list of students and articles. – wbm1058 (talk) 12:53, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
OK, I see that course runs until 28 June 2017. Can these closely related articles either be merged, or clearly differentiated using WP:summary style so that it's clear they are not forks covering the same topic? wbm1058 (talk) 13:18, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Just to comment on noticeboard announcements, though wbm1058 has since clarified that's not necessarily the question here, I don't think there's a formal process for announcing Education Program classes in general. Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Wiki Ed course submissions is a page of notices automatically (or semi-automatically) generated by the Wiki Ed Dashboard), but I don't think WMF has incorporated an equivalent into the Programs and Events Dashboard (classes outside the US/CA), so the best way to stay up on that would probably be to keep tabs on the Dashboard itself. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 12:51, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Btw, Wbm1058, I don't know if you saw this, but from the page you linked you can click the "Dashboard" link at the top and then go to the "students" tab to see the list of students and assigned articles (though it looks like most have not added an article yet -- perhaps that's what you mean). --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:32, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, no I didn't find that until you pointed it out. But there I see "Assignment End: 2017-05-10", so it's not clear to me whether the course is still active, and whether the students will return to editing if their accounts are unlocked. Sockpuppet investigations isn't an area I'm active in administratively, so I'm unclear on proper procedures for reopening an investigation and unblocking editors... if we can wait on User:Bbb23 to do it then I'm sure it will be done the right way. – wbm1058 (talk) 13:43, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • I'll keep an eye on students doing this. This summer we're going to be working on refining some of our handouts and instructions, so this will definitely be something we look at. :) Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 12:55, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • Frankly, folks, Wiki Ed drives me crazy. You have no idea how many cases are brought to WP:SPI from which, understandably, blocks ensue and then along comes someone to say, oh, these are students. How are we supposed to know that? There should be a clear notice on their userpage as to who they are and a link to the program. It would be better for you, the students, and the various unsuspecting editors at Wikipedia who become involved. I'm not going to spontaneously look at a Wiki Ed venue every time I evaluate a case. Unless you start cleaning up your procedures, this won't be the last time this happens. I will unblock the four accounts and remove the sock tags from their userpages (no need to reopen the case). Someone else can deal with the undeleting of any pages that were deleted. BTW, Richard, you should not have edited the SPI archive. Instead, you should have gone to Wbm1058, to me, or to an SPI clerk to make your request. I'm sure Wiki Ed is a lot of work and you, of course, provide a valuable service to Wikipedia and to the outside community, so I apologize for being, uh, brusque.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:22, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • @Bbb23: Every class working with Wiki Ed (the Wiki Education Foundation) should have a list of students on the course page, a tag on every student's user page, and a tag on the articles they work on (there are some exceptions to the latter based on the way sandboxes are handled). I think that you're probably talking about the parts of the Education Program that aren't Wiki Ed? That seems like it could be addressed by incorporating the templating procedures into the P&E Dashboard. @Sage (Wiki Ed): who is the best person to ask about that at WMF (or otherwise)? --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:41, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
  • If the P&E Dashboard was set up to automatically create a page on-wiki listing editors involved that would be very helpful. Currently it has to be manually set up which relies on my (very much fallible) memory. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:41, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Bbb23: WikiEd haven't done anything wrong here (and do an excellent job) this course is under my auspices rather than theirs. I agree that student accounts should include a note on their user page that they are taking part in an educational course and I will make sure that happens. Thank you for taking the time to unblock the accounts. I apologise for the extra work this has created and appreciate that it is taking up your volunteer time. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:39, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Richard Nevell (WMUK): Not to worry, many of my comments are tongue-in-cheek, although I have had some negative experiences in the past. This is the first time I've learned something useful, i.e., the division of responsibility. Happy teaching.--Bbb23 (talk) 15:44, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
@Bbb23: Yes, there are different hubs of activity. For future courses (not just this one but others I'm involved) I'll be making sure students have a notice on their user page and on talk pages as Ryan said is compulsory for WikiEd courses. Currently I recommend it for courses WMUK assists, but it should be a requirement rather than a recommendation. Please could 826540MAH (talk · contribs) 838181CDC (talk · contribs) 838463swanseauni (talk · contribs) Elinahh (talk · contribs) Nfyfe826276 (talk · contribs) also be unblocked? Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 16:00, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 Done.--Bbb23 (talk) 16:37, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
An important responsibility for any class assignment, no matter which program advises it, is to put Template:Educational assignment on the talk page of every article being worked on. That's the first and foremost way to let other editors know that these are student editors, and not something else. Then, as also mentioned above, students should put Template:Student editor on their own userpages – and of course there should be a course page that clearly identifies the instructor. These steps can go a long way towards preventing such problems as mistaking student edits for socking, and also help a lot with keeping communication open with other editors. I think that all programs that work with student assignments should try to make these things clear to all classes they work with. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:27, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Automatic edits from Programs & Events Dashboard

@Richard Nevell (WMUK), Wbm1058, Bbb23, and Ryan (Wiki Ed): I'm currently mentoring User:Medhabansal for an internship project to enable edits from Programs & Events Dashboard, which would let us enable some of the edits that the Wiki Ed Dashboard makes on a wiki-by-wiki basis. The project just started, but hopefully within the next few months we can have the automatically-updated course pages and the userpage templates like for Wiki Ed courses. --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:58, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

That's a very encouraging development. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 15:14, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for November 2018 now available

For those interested in reading about Wiki Education's programmatic activities for the month of November 2018, you can find our report on Commons, on-wiki, or on our blog. Please let me know if you have questions. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:43, 30 January 2019 (UTC)

UCLA course assigning new articles

This course at UCLA for Jan-Mar 2019 on "Radical Women in Latin American Art" claims 45 students and has two dozen red links in the "Assigned course" column. It's hard enough for intermediate editors to create a brand new article, let alone student editors. Does Wiki Ed admin have an opinion on professors encouraging their students to tackle new articles? Do the teachers, and the students, have sufficent information in their training modules to take on the responsibility? Are they allocated confirmed status manually so that it's even possible? Is this putting a burden on Content experts that they have the bandwith to handle? @Sage (Wiki Ed) and Shalor (Wiki Ed): Mathglot (talk) 07:00, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

It's unsurprising that a course creating biographies of women in Latin American art has a lot of red links; indeed, courses like this are how we think our organization is ideally positioned to help meet our movement strategy of knowledge equity. And while I normally would agree with you that creating new articles is a daunting task for a newbie, one thing our program has found is that biographies, because they're so prescriptively structured, are some of the easiest articles for new editors to create. Obviously notability becomes a huge concern there, but we spend a fair amount of time addressing it with our biographies handout and training materials that students are assigned.
The confirmed bit is actually rather sneaky: If students complete all the exercises assigned in our training modules, then they will make enough minor edits over enough time to have autoconfirmed status and thus are able to move it on their own. If they don't complete the trainings, they won't, and they'll have to ask me or another Wikipedia Expert to move it for them, giving us a chance to assess notability before we move it. I appreciate your concern about our bandwidth, and we calculate that out each term to ensure we're not taking on more courses and more students than we can support. If it helps, only about 10% of the articles our students edit are brand new, so the bulk of our program's work happens to existing articles.
I will definitely keep an eye on this class to make sure that they follow the guidelines for editing, sourcing, and notability. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:35, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Huge problem we have had as of late is the advice at Wikipedia:Student assignments#Overview not being followed leading to mass disruption and deletion of many new article. Student assignment should be evaluated before publication. To quote "Student assignments should always be carried out using a course page set up by the instructor. It is usually best to develop articles on the students' user pages, or as drafts. After evaluation, the articles may go on to become Wikipedia articles. --Moxy (talk) 20:54, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

We seem to have a class from the London School of Economics editing Human nature

Note: A discussion similar to this one is going on at Talk:Sex differences in psychology#LSE project.

See the revision history.[3] I'd say it's being run by User:J.birch2. Cumulatively the edits have made quite a change to the article. User:Andrew Lancaster brought this to my attention. Can anyone please do whatever is normally done with new projects where there's been no obvious contact? Thanks. Doug Weller talk 10:55, 22 January 2019 (UTC)

That's correct. We are in the process of building a section on "Contemporary Philosophy". J.birch2 (talk) 11:08, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
Hi J.birch2, are you in touch with Daria Cybulska (WMUK) or anyone else from Wikimedia UK? See their website for more information on their support available to you. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:43, 22 January 2019 (UTC)
I just took a quick look again. It appears that there is quite a bit of original research and some use of sources which may not be the best - I'm not clear why there is such emphasis on certain authors. Not that it was that great an article before. Some other things such as lack of page numbers makes it almost impossible to check the sources. Doug Weller talk 19:49, 23 January 2019 (UTC)
Everyone, including J.birch2, please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/M.realini1.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:00, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
I have responded to the "sockpuppet" accusation. Thanks for alerting me. As for the quality of the project so far -- all the editors are beginners and they're learning. We'll improve the sources, page numbers, etc. It's a work in progress. I thank LiAnna (Wiki Ed) for noting WMUK. I have been in touch with them and they helped me set up a dashboard for the project here.J.birch2 (talk) 18:14, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed), Daria Cybulska (WMUK), Doug Weller and others in this thread: do you have any advice on how my students can avoid having their changes reverted while they are in the middle of working on a page? We've been unable to work on Sex differences in psychology due to quick reverts of all changes. In the short term, I'm redirecting them to a sandbox page in my own userspace. Is this the only way? We're deliberately working on low quality pages in need of improvement, not protected pages or high quality pages.J.birch2 (talk) 13:32, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
My take on the question of reverting is that student editors should be treated the same way as any other editors would be treated. Edit Wikipedia mainspace and you may well be reverted, and the next step should be discussion on the talk page. Therefore, I would strongly oppose any measures that would restrict in any way the ability of editors to revert student edits, partly per WP:OWN. If an instructor chooses to have students edit in mainspace, then dealing with the consequences comes along with the educational experience. Of course, editing in userspace avoids the problem. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:27, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
@J.birch2: Yes, I had some advice on how your students can avoid having their changes reverted while they are in the middle of working on the page. The three approaches are detailed here. I also agree with Tryptofish's comment wholeheartedly, including the last sentence, which matches one of the approaches I recommended at that link.
Being forthcoming and helpful to new editors is a goal here, so any reverts to student edits should be done in a constructive and respectful manner, but as long as the revert is in line with Wikipedia policy and guidelines, then editors should not hesitate to revert an edit by a student that would have been reverted had the editor not been a student. The only difference I would make in so doing, would be to use greater detail than I normally would in the edit summary, adding some relevant policy links to aid in the explanation of the revert, and I might also in some cases add a note on their Talk page as well, if that seemed appropriate. Mathglot (talk) 03:46, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
J.birch2, Jumping in as a previous onlooker. What are your educational goals here? The concept of starting with low quality pages is a good one. However, even if an article is low quality if it is highly watched new edits might scrutinized in a way that existing content is not. Just saying that Human Nature and its 285 watchers will probably attract more scrutiny, and thus require more attention, than say Bioconservatism. This scrutiny, of course, can be good if framed correctly as it's one of the virtues of editing Wikipedia, but also an instructional concept to be ready to instruct around because you cannot control the reaction of other editors. Best wishes, Barkeep49 (talk) 04:40, 5 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks Barkeep49, Mathglot. J.birch2 (talk) 07:18, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Courses under Education program ns

@xaosflux, Can you tell me what happened to courses listed under the old Education_program namespace? See for example, Education Program:University of Canterbury/International Human Rights Law (Semester Two 2017) (now red) which you linked previously at ENB/Archive 16. Was this a temp namespace that is now somewhere else such as under Wikipedia namespace? I see courses older than that one that still have valid pages under the Wikipedia namespace, for example, this one; so what was that other ns about, and where are those pages now? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:28, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mathglot: see phab:T125618 and its subtasks. In short right now you can download a database dump of them, but they are no longer online. They may or may not be coming back within the project namespace see phab:T188407. — xaosflux Talk 01:35, 4 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, I subscribed to phab:T188407, the documentation subtask. Mathglot (talk) 01:58, 4 February 2019 (UTC)

Wow, I didn't know this was happening but it is really annoying that seemingly I lost access to data on my past projects, I had list of students, their articles, grading guidelines and other stuff there. I hope this will be restored, if in read-only mode. This is particularly troublesome for less active members. I can imagine some instructors coming back after few years, seeing all of their old work deleted, and deciding figuring out what happened not worth the trouble. PS. If you want to see examples of damage this deletion wrought, see User:Piotrus/Educational_project_results: good thing I saved information about articles my students did... everything else is gone. Also see for example Talk:Rigveda Wiki: "This article is/was the subject of an educational assignment in 2014 Q1. Further details were available on the "Education Program:Hanyang University/Collective Intelligence in Practice (2014)" page, which is now unavailable on the wiki." Nice advertisement - contribute to Wikipedia, your educational project may be obsoleted and deleted. Thank you for helping out. Sigh. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 16:34, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for December 2018 now available

Wiki Education's Monthly Report of programmatic and administrative activities during December 2018 is now available on Commons, on-wiki, and on our blog. Please let me know if you have questions. Cassidy (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:06, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

Online Ambassador application: Abdulrehimras

This extension was removed, nothing to do here. — xaosflux Talk 16:36, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Abdulrehimras

{{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}}

Abdulrehimras (talk · contribs)

  1. Why do you want to be a Wikipedia Ambassador?
    To have a wider platform and larger knowledge pool to impart academia
  2. In three sentences or less, summarize your involvement with Wikimedia projects.
    YOUR ANSWER (OPTIONAL)
  3. Please indicate a few articles to which you have made significant content contributions. (e.g. DYK, GA, FA, major revisions/expansions/copyedits).
    Revisions
  4. How have you been involved with welcoming and helping new users on Wikipedia?
    Yes
  5. What do you see as the most important ways we could welcome newcomers or help new users become active contributors?
    Guide them through
  6. Have you had major conflicts with other editors? Blocks or bans? Involvement in arbitration? Feel free to offer context, if necessary.
    No
  7. How often do you edit Wikipedia and check in on ongoing discussions? Will you be available regularly for at least two hours per week, in your role as a mentor?
    Yes Am regularly available online
  8. How would you make sure your students were not violating copyright laws?
    Teach them right
  9. If one of your students had an issue with copyright violation how would you resolve it?
    As a legal expert I have many avenues to resolve this
  10. In your _own_ words describe what copyright violation is.
    It is the use of another's creation without permission
  11. What else should we know about you that is relevant to being a Wikipedia Ambassador?
    Am learned, vastly knowledged and intelligent...

Abdulrehimras (talk) 19:15, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

Endorsements

(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)

 Not done Thank you for your interest, however we are currently phasing out the MediaWiki extension which uses the Online Ambassador user right - TNT 💖 19:16, 18 July 2018 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Outside USA/Canada

Is it possible for courses outside the USA and Canada to use the education resources yet? I asked a couple of years ago and it wasn't. I'm about to start teaching the same course again, and wondered if anything had changed. --MHAN2016 (talk) 16:07, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation's resources are only available for higher education faculty in the U.S. and Canada, but there are a suite of other tools and resources available for anyone to use at outreachwiki:Education. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Acteur

Gianfranco Salemi Comédien Italie France — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gianfranco Salemi (talk • contribs) 08:54, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for January 2019

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for January 2019 is now available. Find the report as a PDF, on-wiki, or on our blog. Ozgegun (talk) 23:08, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Speedy Deletions of Outreach Dashboard pages

A flurry of WP:CSD G8 deletions today have removed a number of education course dashboard pages (see below). Unfortunately, they were all created in the wrong place, so someone decided to template them all for speedy removal as not belonging to a parent page. Luckily, one active project has been retained, originally at Wikipedia:Outreach Dashboard/University of Derby/5PU506 Content Development (January 2019), but now moved to be a sub-page of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed.

Obviously, this wasn't created at https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/, so any attempt to edit it on Wikipedia reveals the default 'DO NOT EDIT THIS PAGE!' notice. Please could I ask if a more experienced editor could advise its creator (Cbderbylib) what, if anything, she now needs to do to get it properly registered on the dashboard.

For anyone wanting to restore the deleted pages at WP:REFUND, these are:

Many thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 00:02, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

 Comment: @DeltaQuad:, hi, I came across this page and thought you could have a look and advise how to ask for undo deletion and move those pages in the dagger list above? They are said to belong to wiki Education.
Also, how about moving another one from Wikipedia:Wiki Ed to under wiki Education?:
Seems to me, they, 7+1 in total, are course offerings. Sorry I am new to moving pages, and felt you could take care of it. Cheers, --Omotecho (talk) 01:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
@Omotecho: I'm happy to do whatever, I'm just unclear about where you want them moved to? (Please ping on reply) -- Amanda (aka DQ) 02:19, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
I've restored the pages so they can be dealt with, either get what is needed from them, or move them somewhere appropriate - then we can delete whatever may be left over. — xaosflux Talk 02:20, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
@DeltaQuad:, wow you are super fast! Thank you for crisp reply, and maybe @Nick Moyes: would confirm if those 7+1 pages to be moved under wiki Education dashboard. Thank you guys so much for offering help. =) --Omotecho (talk) 03:08, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
@Omotecho: there isn't a process for "us" (the English Wikipedia admins/editors) to "move" things to dashboard.wikiedu.org - perhaps drop an email note to contact@wikiedu.org and refer them to this link? — xaosflux Talk 03:18, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
@Nick Moyes, Omotecho, DeltaQuad, and Xaosflux: I'd want to defer to Sage (Wiki Ed) to say for sure, but I wanted to quickly reply to this before anyone started spending time getting into mass moves/deletions. There are two Dashboards. Wiki Education developed the one that is at dashboard.wikiedu.org. A fork of that is hosted at outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org. The wikiedu.org Dashboard is used only by Wiki Education program participants, which are only going to be at institutions in the United States and Canada. The Outreach Dashboard (Programs and Events Dashboard) can be used by anyone. Course/event pages are primarily hosted in the Dashboard software itself, not on-wiki. For transparency reasons, the Dashboard can create mirrors of the course pages on wiki. These course pages are updated only through interaction with the course page on the Dashboard and should not be edited on wiki. They're just for documentation of what's going on on the Dashboard. If you were to edit it, the next time someone changes something on that Dashboard page, your edit would be removed automatically. These are the subpages of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/. I do not believe the P&E Dashboard has this page mirroring active, and thus I'm not sure what documentation would've led multiple people to create such pages (I don't see the Dashboard edit tag in the histories, which leads me to believe they were created manually, not by the Dashboard). --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
I can't offer an opinion on whether the seven retrieved pages need to go anywhere or are now irrelevant. Not being an involved editor, they do look pretty old and finished with to me. However, Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Derby/5PU506 Content Development (January 2019) is definitely very active and must be allowed to function. The education team are best placed to know how. I suspect Cbderbylib did create it manually, so I hope she will comment on her needs. Thanks to everyone for their swift response to my request for assistance here. Nick Moyes (talk) 08:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
Hi, all - yes, the page was created manually - mainly because I saw other similar ones and couldn't figure out how it had been created via outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org (and clearly it can't be, which answers that question!) so I created it manually based on other existing pages I'd been pointed towards via the Wikimedia UK Universities page. I knew the main Wiki Education was only for US and Canada, sadly. I've found it useful for students to be able to point to a course page with more detail than the outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org page, when interacting with other editors, and also when using the educational assignment templates on articles they're editing. But happy to be guided towards a more appropriate location for it, if one exists! Cbderbylib (talk) 08:38, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Maybe it's time to enable edits from outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org?

Per the above discussion, it looks like these were all created manually. I suspect the early ones were created because at one point, Programs & Events Dashboard had links to the non-existent Wikipedia pages that would have been created automatically if edits were enabled, and the later ones were created to try to manually replicate an on-wiki course page intentionally since they were using Programs & Events Dashboard instead of Wiki Education Dashboard.

Enabling edits on en.wiki proposed a while ago, but the proposal was archived without enough input to be a clear consensus. It's enabled and being actively used for education programs on two other language Wikipedias now (pt.wiki and cs.wiki). I suggest that we enable it here, which head of future confusion about why the on-wiki edits don't happen for courses on Programs & Events Dashboard.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:56, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

  • Support. I think this is not particularly controversial and had no explicit opposition the first time it was proposed.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:56, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Support It would be very useful for this to be enabled. Having a course page automatically generated on wiki helps for coordination of the students and to help the community understand that a course is taking place. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 14:01, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Support As a translator working on Wikipedia:Wikipedia Library projects, or another WMF’s channel useful for someone offering academic course and involve editing WP. Off topic but could be a great channel to support increasing peer-reviewed medical articles on WP which is kinda slow to evolve, but surely connected to WMF’s challenge to support Medical/healthcare personnel needing WP as backup on field. --Omotecho (talk) 16:14, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

A program of creating biography of Taiwanese writers on ENWP

Hi all. I'm a staff of Wikimedia Taiwan(WMTW). WMTW will have a program which works with the course "Chinese Literature" of Department of Chinese as a Second Language of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). In the program, students will need to edit or create articles about some Taiwanese writers in Mandarin language and their works on EN-WP.

According to WMTW's programs before, I'll ask the students of this course to prepare their drafts on Google Drive, and move to the article pages on Wikipedia after the teacher and some Wikipedian reviewing them. The moving may happen on 17th June.

I need someone help because I don't familiar with the policies, the habits or maybe some unspoken rules here. I'm worried that some articles reviewed by WMTW staffs or volunteers of ZH-WP will still been deleted under the policies of EN-WP. It will be perfect if some volunteers of EN-WP can help us to reviewing the drafts of the students and to give them some suggesting by leaving comments.

If you're interested in helping, please reply this message or mail to me via the system. Thank you so much.--Reke (talk) 12:34, 8 April 2019 (UTC)

Hi Reke. One thing that jumps out at me is the use of Google Docs. I always recommend that student editors compose their work directly in their sandboxes. They can't link in Google Docs, they can't add inline references, and their section headers may not be formatted properly. When they move work to Wikipedia, there's a good chance of them introducing formatting errors. I also get the sense, working with student editors, that the ones who write in Google Docs have less of a sense that they're writing Wikipedia articles.
There are exceptions, of course, and people can produce good work off-wiki, but my experience is that the average person produces better work if they draft their contributions on-wiki. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 12:57, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Reke I am happy to help review and give suggestions. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:22, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Ian (Wiki Ed) Well, most students in Taiwan use to copy some paragraphs of references into their draft then rewrite it, if they do the same thing on the draft page or sandbox of Wikipedia, that will violate our copyrights policy and make their drafts to be deleted. That's the main reason why we usually ask them to work on some place which is not always public, Google Drive is one convenient choice, while sometimes we even use Microsoft Office or LiberOffice.org.
Asking them don't copy/paste in the beginning is useless. Most students felt that is too difficult to just write in their own words after reading. Maybe that shows the education of writing is fault in Taiwan. However, I can just design a simple way to help students not to offense the rules so easily.
Another reason that why we ask students to edit on an off-wiki platform is that they can't edit one page at the same time by visual editor. If the work is for a group, the only way is using some other online editing platform, then move to Wikipedia one by one at the last class.
Barkeep49 Thank you so much, and I'll tell you (and others who wants help too) how to do this next week.--Reke (talk) 15:41, 8 April 2019 (UTC)
Reke if they copy source material into their draft and reword it, it becomes very difficult to avoid close paraphrasing - that's not a reflection on them, it's just a reality of writing. That can be very hard to detect with translations, but it's still a copyright infringement. And that's a problem for Wikipedia and for all re-users - I've seen 10 years of article history deleted because there were copyright infringements in the first version. Please, please don't allow them to do this.
While edit conflicts can be a problem with group work, we warn them about it up front and it seems to work. I get one or two complaints about this a term, out of the thousands of students we support. Most aren't doing group work, but quite a few are. One way around this is to have them draft their sections in their own sandboxes and then use a single sandbox to collate everyone's work. It's much less work to head these problems off up-front. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:43, 9 April 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for your suggestions. I've tried to tell students don't make their statements by rewording, but just like I said before, useless. Over 60% of their sandbox pages still would be deleted by copyright problems, then I'll get many help messages from students and arguments from administrator. Using an off-wiki platform maybe is not the best way but it's one way that works in my experience. Teacher and I can stop those close paraphrasing works to be published at least.
The other way is writing a model article by myself and highlight the key words or sentences they need to replace. This way will be used if all target articles in the course have similar structure.
There are different learning process between different countries and that may cause different abilities of students. I totally agree your points but I have to consider the reality in Taiwan.--Reke (talk) 05:13, 11 April 2019 (UTC)

Difficulty with Wikipedia member

Just wondering what can be done if there is a Wikipedia member who has been constantly deleting my group's work on an article for our school project. The member hasn't been offering much constructive feedback, even though we've reached out to try to communicate and negotiate with them. Instead, most of the content that we're adding to the article is getting entirely deleted, often for seemingly small reasons, such as data being in quotation marks, rather than italics.

We've received very little help from our professor and TA, so it would be great to get some advice with this.

Thanks, Linguistics300 (talk) 05:22, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Comment: While I agree that communicating principally in edit summaries is not ideal, Tjo3ya has been quite specific in their summaries [4]. Some discussion also appears to have been happening at Talk:Coordination_(linguistics), which is the preferred venue because comments there will come to the notice of everyone interested in that page - so it would probably be most productive if you sought a resolution there. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 13:08, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

Unlogged class assignment?

Could somebody have a look at Chinese Learning as Substance, Western Learning for Application and a userpage suggesting this was a class assignment? I will remove it from the COIN noticeboard as having been mistaken for undeclared paid editing. ☆ Bri (talk) 01:45, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I may have figured out who the instructor is; we'll reach out to confirm and try to bring them into the fold. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:21, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Reports for February and March 2019 now available

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for February 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. The report for March 2019 can also be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 23:38, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Articles used exclusively by students

Hi all. I was going through the copy edit tag and came across some articles that seem to have been created by students and then subsequently maintained almost exclusively by students (it's not 100%, but the edits I found that were made by non-student editors seemed to be fairly minor or technical). Three that I looked at are Sexuality in music videos, Misogyny in rap music, and Hip-hop feminism. They're not bad articles, but they do seem like they could be candidates for a merger of some kind, or at least a tone and style overhaul. But I'm new enough that I'm not totally comfortable proposing any kind of merger, especially so if these are articles that seem particularly popular for college courses. Nothing on the various WikiEd pages I checked indicated that there were specific articles that the courses you guys work with go to on a regular basis, and I know that student editors aren't supposed to get any special type of consideration for preserving their edits, but I'm a little confused about how to approach these articles knowing that they're tinkered with sporadically and might get re-created regardless. Zojomars (talk) 16:04, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

I think you should feel free to propose any kind of merge or other action that you would like. I can point you to WP:NOTTA, which basically says that you need not treat student editors any differently than other editors. If you want to suggest a merge while not being unilaterally responsible for it, the best way to do it is spelled out at WP:MERGEINIT, which explains how to propose it on the article talk page and then see what the consensus of other editors is. Very often, student editors disappear after the end of the semester, and they won't even respond to what you say, so it will just be you and other (non-student) editors. And alternatively, you are absolutely free to WP:BEBOLD and revise the pages for tone etc. But please don't feel like you are obligated to extend any special consideration to class projects. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:25, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

OLES2129 Question

It appears that OLES2129 is a course in On-Line Editing at the University of Sydney. Is there a course page? Who is the instructor? I am asking because one of the students is editing disruptively. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:23, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Looks like it's this one. Pinging Fransplace. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:39, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: it may also help if you can identify the editor(s) and article(s) with issues. — xaosflux Talk 16:59, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
It is Yche3321 and their sockpuppet Yche33211 and the following: Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Draft:Use of wormwood recreations. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:23, 28 May 2019 (UTC)
Just an FYI: "OLE" stands for "Open Learning Environment" [5] at the University of Sydney. And "Open" means less FLOSS, and more "The course is open for students to try it without committing to enroll for credit" Though the course which is editing Wikipedia requires enrollment. Bob Cummings (talk) 17:29, 8 June 2019 (UTC)

The Monthly Report for April is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog.

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for April 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 22:23, 31 May 2019 (UTC)

Restoring old records of education programs

@Xaosflux:

In March 2018 the process for formal deprecation of the Wikipedia:Education Program extension began.

We both talked about this at that time.

That extension published many records of class participation on English Wikipedia. I had the idea that the extension would be turned off, but I did not realize that the published records would be deleted. I am writing to ask if and how I could request undeletion of these records.

These records contained lists of students who participated in the education program and the articles they edited. Project reports like this contain meta:Learning and Evaluation/Global metrics which the Wikimedia Foundation, universities, and other organizations use to demonstrate program efficacy.

Icahn School of Medicine has some people who are evaluating the history of interest in their Wikipedia program and drafting a narrative of their engagement. If I were to make a request for restoring the text from the education extension, then where should I direct that? Again - I do not want the functionality of the tool, but the text on the page did report wiki account names of participants, when they edited, and what they edited.

Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:34, 7 June 2019 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: as far as I know, all of that was added to archives (phab:T174802) that you could access, there is also a long outstanding request (phab:T188407) TO "Document clear method for users to access historical data from the education extension". There is no on-wiki "restore" page option for pages in the special education program namespaces. For pages in existing namespaces (e.g. Wikipedia:) onwiki undeletes can be requested at WP:REFUND. Most of the dumps should be publicly accessible here so I suggest you look there first. — xaosflux Talk 18:42, 7 June 2019 (UTC)
Thanks. It seems the information is archived there. I communicated this at Wikipedia_talk:Icahn_School_of_Medicine_at_Mount_Sinai. Blue Rasberry (talk) 18:48, 7 June 2019 (UTC)
@Bluerasberry: We migrated some of them to our Dashboard too, so you can see pages here and here. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:51, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
@Salubrious Toxin: Check it out! LiAnna found them! Thanks LiAnna. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:13, 8 June 2019 (UTC)
@Bluerasberry: @LiAnna (Wiki Ed): Wow thank you both!! Salubrious Toxin (talk) 14:44, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
Thanks should go to Sage (Wiki Ed), who did the work. :) --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:21, 9 June 2019 (UTC)
This was brought up on phabricator a few months ago. * Pppery * it has begun... 17:51, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for May is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for May 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. Ozgegun (talk) 21:04, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for June 2019 is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for June 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 23:33, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

Unregistered University of Missouri class assignment

Ryan (Wiki Ed), LiAnna (Wiki Ed): Could you please reach out to new editor FJ329, who has been editing as part of a University of Missouri class assignment? This one appears to be unregistered, and I think the course instructor should be coordinating with you. Thanks. --Neutralitytalk 22:04, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping! I left a note on FJ329's talk page, asking them to connect their instructor with us. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:20, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Student journals

Moved from User talk:Shalor (Wiki Ed) § "Student journals"

Bringing RHaworth's comment at Shalor's page here here for wider notice, and comment. (Good catch, RHaworth!). Though most of these "journals" are stubs so far, so we can't be sure how they will use them, nevertheless this webpage does give some indication of what is expected, for those journals in the sci-fi section, at least. To me, this contravenes WP:NOTWEBHOST and is not appropriate for storage on Wikimedia servers; the university should use its own servers for these pages. This should be escalated at Wiki Ed, and passed on to WMF for comment, if necessary. Mathglot (talk) 09:18, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

@Mathglot and RHaworth: Sorry for causing trouble. I understand that these journals stretch (if not break) what's allowed on Wikipedia, but here's my thinking:
  1. They allow students to get comfortable with working on Wikipedia (learning to edit, reference, etc.) in a relatively safe space;
  2. They will lead directly to students editing Wikipedia articles with what they research and discuss;
  3. They teach students correct ways to interact on Wikipedia;
  4. They are for educational uses of Wikipedia that will help build a community of editors.

That said, yes, I will definitely use my own server in the future. It's just being able to link directly to Wikipedia articles, etc., is easiest done directly on Wikipedia. But, I understand that these subpages are problematic. I will make other arrangements and get more creative on assignments. Thanks. —Grlucas (talk) 15:11, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Grlucas thanks for being so receptive on the student journal part. I took a look at a bunch of the work your students produced this summer and found the work to generally be high quality additions. The one issue I saw was a well written article on a non-notable topic. So thanks for creating at least one class (and presumably more given the list of classes you've taught) which is improving Wikipedia and doing so without too much strain on volunteer editors. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 15:36, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
  • I hope we will accept Grlucas’ offer to use his own server in future. Gerald, you argument about wikilinks is weak in two respects: very few of the student essays contain wikilinks and, more importantly, when you set up a new installation of the MediaWiki software there are no doubt a bewildering number of options. Among these you will be able to specify that a link coded as [[:en:user:Grlucas|Gerald Lucas]] will come out looking like this: Gerald Lucas on your server just as it does here. — RHaworth (talk · contribs) 10:44, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Online Ambassador application: ShaktiPD

The "online ambassador" program on the English Wikipedia was retired. — xaosflux Talk 01:20, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

ShaktiPD

ShaktiPD (talk · contribs)

  1. Why do you want to be a Wikipedia Ambassador?
    YOUR ANSWER
  2. In three sentences or less, summarize your involvement with Wikimedia projects.
    YOUR ANSWER (OPTIONAL)
  3. Please indicate a few articles to which you have made significant content contributions. (e.g. DYK, GA, FA, major revisions/expansions/copyedits).
    YOUR ANSWER
  4. How have you been involved with welcoming and helping new users on Wikipedia?
    YOUR ANSWER (OPTIONAL)
  5. What do you see as the most important ways we could welcome newcomers or help new users become active contributors?
    YOUR ANSWER (OPTIONAL)
  6. Have you had major conflicts with other editors? Blocks or bans? Involvement in arbitration? Feel free to offer context, if necessary.
    YOUR ANSWER
  7. How often do you edit Wikipedia and check in on ongoing discussions? Will you be available regularly for at least two hours per week, in your role as a mentor?
    YOUR ANSWER
  8. How would you make sure your students were not violating copyright laws?
    YOUR ANSWER
  9. If one of your students had an issue with copyright violation how would you resolve it?
    YOUR ANSWER
  10. In your _own_ words describe what copyright violation is.
    YOUR ANSWER
  11. What else should we know about you that is relevant to being a Wikipedia Ambassador?
    YOUR ANSWER (OPTIONAL)

ShaktiPD (talk) 15:10, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Endorsements

(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for July 2019 is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for July 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 21:27, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for August 2019 is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for August 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. 2603:3024:1D00:A900:3C8E:4819:8104:B38F (talk) 22:22, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

I requested a page move for an article used in a student assignment

I only just realized this, and I thought I should post here about it in case I'm suppossed to do something differently. The article in question is Cognitive advantages of multilingualism, which is assigned to KelilahRachel. Clovermoss (talk) 22:52, 1 October 2019 (UTC)

@Clovermoss: Thanks for the heads-up. You should treat student editors the same as you'd treat any other editor. The page move shouldn't have an impact on them or on our ability to track their contributions. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:10, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
Clovermoss, is there a reason you felt this needed a formal discussion as opposed to just doing it? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:12, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
Barkeep49 I already did do it, I was posting here because I wasn't sure if I was suppossed to do anything different because the article was a student assignment. Since I don't have to do anything differently, and I know that now, I'll just keep editing like I was before. Clovermoss (talk) 19:46, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
@Clovermoss: I think what Barkeep49 means is that you can just move the page, you don't need to add the move discussion template. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:07, 2 October 2019 (UTC)

Discussion at WP:THQ#Co-authoring a new article

 You are invited to join the discussion at WP:THQ#Co-authoring a new article. -- Marchjuly (talk) 14:51, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Was hoping to find a WikiED advisor who can try and help this editor out. They seem to be a student, but I’m not sure if they’re working on their own or as part of a class project. -- Marchjuly (talk) 14:55, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, Marchjuly! Responded there. We always appreciate a note here directing us to on-wiki discussions of class assignments like this that we may not be aware of. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:11, 10 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks LiAnna (Wiki Ed) and also thanks Helaine (Wiki Ed) for trying to help sort this out. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:21, 10 October 2019 (UTC)

Differing dashboard views: viewing "My Articles" for a given user

Is there cobbled-together url or other simple procedure that will allow us to view the "My Articles" link on the dashboard, for any given Wiki Ed enrolled student who has some assigned articles?

I wouldn't think this is private info, as one could traverse in a few clicks to the course page for a user, and then look up the assignments that way. The need for this arose in the following circumstance: Wiki Ed student Sgilbreath (talk · contribs)noping asked for help on Shalor's talk page in this discussion, with Shalor's response here, at the user's TP. The user complained about something squirrely in the links in their "My Articles" list. An obstacle blocking the attempt to resolve the user's question, was the fact that Shalor has a different dashboard view than the user does, and she was not able to see the "My Articles" list that the student saw (presumably because they have different logins, and therefore their list of enrolled courses and assigned material will be different). A workaround involving emailed screenshots has been suggested, but that's cumbersome.

It seems to me that there ought to be an easier and more efficient way to see what a user sees on their dashboard. Is there some url we can cobble together, stuffing the username into the right slot perhaps, which would then produce a page either giving the identical view that the user sees on the dashboard when they log in and go to "My Articles", or if not identical, at least a page that reproduces the article list faithfully, even if in a different format? If so, could you please describe how to build such an url?

As a follow-up question: does Wiki Ed maintain some test Wiki Ed users, instructors and courses that we can play with (enroll in a course, assign an article) to test things out? Alternatively, do you have a dummy course which I can enroll in myself, so I can see what my dashboard looks like, and what my "My Articles" view is?

I just want to be clear what I'm looking for in this discussion, namely: a general solution (like an url with a userid substitution token, or a procedure) for viewing what any given student sees at "My Articles". This discussion is not about finding a solution to Sgilbreath's problem; if you have some insight into that and can help them with their specific problem, by all means do so by commenting at User talk:Sgilbreath#Peer review. Adding Sage (Wiki Ed). Thanks! Mathglot (talk) 08:33, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Mathglot: this particular case was a bug, which we deployed a fix for yesterday. We've been looking at possible ways of implementing some sort of 'view as a different user' feature, but there aren't any quick and easy ways to do it. However, for the assigned articles and the links to where each student should be doing their drafting, peer review, etc., those things are likely to become more easily accessible during our upcoming project to improve the evaluation and grading experience for instructors. We've been working on changes to the My Articles section recently, and the plan is that the more structured links for specific stages of each assignment will also be the basis for making it easy for an instructor to view the edits for the specific stages.
We have a staging server that can be used for testing and exploring the interface; you can enroll in this example course to test out the upcoming version of the My Articles interface, although the 'progress tracker' feature you'll find there is not yet enabled for real courses; we'll be enabling that between terms in mid-December.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:37, 8 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, Sage; I've enrolled, and run through some of the training. I've run into a few minor glitches which I ascribe to the fact that it's a test server and some beta issues as you mentioned. If you are looking for feedback in particular areas which you expect to be working per spec on the test server, let me know which they are, and I'll keep my eyes open. Btw: I did use the feedback feature at the end of a training sequence to send you some comments, I hope those got through, because I'm not sure I saved a copy. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:21, 12 October 2019 (UTC)
Mathglot: It looks like just one feedback from you came through, but it doesn't have any comments beyond "This is Mathglot running through the Student training module on the dashboard-testing server and using the Training module feedback page."--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:30, 14 October 2019 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed):, No, it was much longer than that, but I think I may still have a cached copy. Shall I email it to you directly through the site, or how would you like me to get it to you? Mathglot (talk) 04:52, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
@Mathglot: Email is good. Thanks! --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:02, 15 October 2019 (UTC)
 Done Mathglot (talk) 09:36, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

stealth class?

This editor says they're editing for an online class. (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) Chris Troutman (talk) 19:19, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Chris troutman! I left a note on the student's talk page asking them to reach out to us. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:21, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

BQUB19

There appears to be a group of students trying to create articles as part of some class called "BQUB19" (see WT:U#Usernames with “BQUB19” prefix for some of them). They appear to have been assigned to create articles by their teacher which are going to be graded (see User talk:Edgar181#Dppc, User talk:Edgar181#DPPC pt. 2, User talk:JJMC89#Suspiciously similar user names and User talk:Diannaa#Draft:Metal transporter CNNM3), but as expected are starting to run into difficulties. Could a WikiED adviser take a look at this and see what's what? It looks from the list of usernames that the same thing has been happening since 2013; so, maybe it would be better for WikiEd to get in touch with the school or instructor and see if things can be arranged so that the students can receive more support from WikiED to help them avoid the problems they seem to be having. It might be a good idea to find out how familiar the teacher is with Wikipedia because it seems like they are asking their student's to do things (e.g. submitting Wikipedia work for a grade) that might not play out as intended. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:11, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Marchjuly! Looks like these students are from Barcelona; Wiki Education supports courses only in the U.S. and Canada. I'll ping the Wikimedia Foundation's education team lead, Nichole Saad, here (@NSaad (WMF):); hopefully she can connect them to support resources from Amical Wikimedia. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:04, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks LiAnna (Wiki Ed). Perhaps the teacher and students are not aware that different language Wikipedias can sometimes have quite different policies and guidelines in some areas even though most others can be relatively similar. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:25, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping, LiAnna (Wiki Ed), we'll look into it.NSaad (WMF) (talk) 13:26, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for September 2019  is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for September 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 23:33, 1 November 2019 (UTC)

Existing sandboxes shown as unavailable/non-existant

On this course page, there are three students whose username shows up in red, indicating that their sandbox doesn't exist. However, when navigating from here, clicking on the sandbox link below these students' names takes me to a list of their existing sandboxes, including their primary user sandbox. Why is this discrepancy present, and how can I fix it on the first page to reflect that the students do have their sandboxes set up? bellamelodia (talk) 02:09, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

@Bellamelodia: the redlinks don't mean what you think they do. On the first page, those red links indicate that those editors do not have a primary userpage created, for example: User:JoyEdem. JoyEdem does have sandbox pages created, for example: User:JoyEdem/sandbox. — xaosflux Talk 04:15, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Ok, thank you! bellamelodia (talk) 21:45, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

How can I invite students to contribute to a Wikipedia page?

Hi! Can I invite students to edit and contribute to a Wikipedia page that has a poor quality score and requires more information? If yes, what is the correct process to follow? --KatherineBusby2019 (talk) 15:55, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

@KatherineBusby2019: If you're a university instructor in the United States or Canada, visit teach.wikiedu.org to get started. If you're outside that region, visit education.wikimedia.org to get connected to the global program. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:10, 11 November 2019 (UTC)
@LiAnna: Thanks a lot for the guidance. KatherineBusby2019 (talk) 13:38, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Legit class or WP:NOTWEBHOST?

I can't tell if this user's sandbox is being used for a legitimate educational purpose, or if it's someone just using Wikipedia as a free web host to post their class notes. Is there anyone here who might be able to make that call? Link is User:Agnese marino basc/sandbox. --Drm310 🍁 (talk) 21:37, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

In my opinion, it's legitimate. It seems to be a draft-like preparation for something educational, and it is very recently-created. Had it been something abandoned from long ago, that might be different. The only issue I see (and I haven't looked into it) is whether it is for a class that is part of the educational program here. If not, someone from WikiEd should reach out to the user. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:33, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
I'm not as convinced. Clicking through the links, the intent seems to be a space to collect notes with no intent to refactor them into article updates. The user has made no edits outside the sandbox either. With my AGF hat on, I do think the goal is to help the encyclopedia, but I think someone, ideally from WikiEd, should reach out as soon as possible. We don't want to bit the whole course, but we need to make sure that there are plans to incorporate these changes into mainspace rather than simply sit in the user sandbox. Wug·a·po·des​ 22:44, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
You may be right. In any case, we clearly agree that someone from WikiEd should reach out. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:00, 12 November 2019 (UTC)
From the two IP addresses here it looks like they're in the UK, and possibly "basc" refers to this program at UCL? So I'm pinging @Daria Cybulska (WMUK): to investigate further! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:21, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Students editing well-developed articles

My understanding from years ago is that students were advised not to choose FAs and other well-developed articles for their assignments. The advice for students now is: "Finding an article to work on isn't just about picking a topic. It's about picking a topic that needs improvement. ... working on a Good or Featured article will present you with many more hurdles than working on a less detailed article. If you're new to editing Wikipedia, these hurdles can be especially frustrating."

Can this advice be strengthened, so that students are asked not to choose FAs, GA, and sensitive topics? Recently the Holocaust and Female genital mutilation were chosen; FGM (an FA) has been chosen several times. Not sure who to ask about this, so pinging LiAnna and Helaine. Related discussion here with Shalor early this month about the Holocaust. SarahSV (talk) 22:01, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

I would strongly support strengthening this guidance. Obviously no one owns an article, but some of us do act as shepherds. Some GAs/FAs could use some attention. But the odds of success for a WikiEd student are so much lower on those and the chance of a frustrating experience for both regular Wiki editors and the student are so much higher. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 22:05, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
@SlimVirgin: Thanks for bringing this to our attention. WE're updating that text to more explicitly tell students to not work on Featured or Good articles. That's been our default policy, and we reach out to instructors as soon as we learn that any of our students are working on such articles, but I think it was a good idea to strengthen the language. It will go live shortly. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:23, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Helaine, thank you, that will help a lot. Would you consider adding something about avoiding other well-developed articles on sensitive topics? The Holocaust is neither a GA nor FA, but student editing there would not be wise because it's so carefully sourced and in places very carefully worded. That's true of a lot of developed articles on sensitive issues, even if it isn't immediately apparent. SarahSV (talk) 23:34, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
SlimVirgin We already cover this in our training modules, but I'll be sure to review them to see if there are other areas where we can make this more explicit. Unfortunately, students will try and tackle these types of articles despite being discouraged from doing so. Thanks. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:43, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
Helaine, thank you. Anything you can do to emphasize the advice would be appreciated. SarahSV (talk) 23:53, 20 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Hi! I just wanted to second what Helaine has stated - we definitely recommend that students not edit articles that are of GA or FA status - or ones that are controversial or held under sanctions. We do try to catch them as much as possible, definitely. 16:53, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

University of Oklahoma

Can someone from WikiEdu check whether the current University of Oklahoma class Science and Civilization in Islam (Fall 2019) class is incentivizing having content stay in live articles? User: Pgibs2220 recently restored questionable material to Science and technology in the Ottoman Empire without discussing on talk; their edit note included 'Please do not take down. I need this to be kept up for my class.'Dialectric (talk) 18:37, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

I strongly suspect it's just a misunderstanding on the student's part. The instructor has been doing this for a long time. I'll drop him a note and ask him to speak to the student. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:45, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Ian (Wiki Ed) Same problem with this class. In particular this student came to the help chat and explained virtually the same thing Dialectric said above.Praxidicae (talk) 16:30, 26 November 2019 (UTC)
@Praxidicae: - for whatever reason, despite our trainings, they ended up with a lot of misconceptions about what the assignment is about. I've given them some feedback that I hope will set them on the right path. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:04, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Heat Engine Drafts at AFC

At Articles for Creation, I have encountered two drafts in the past 24 hours that look like class projects about heat engines, in sandboxes, tagged for review. The first has been renamed to Draft:Reheat cycle. The second has been renamed to Draft:Turbines & its Performance Characteristics. They don't look like properly developed draft articles, but they do look like class work that may either be due to students misunderstanding instructor instructions, or due to an instructor misunderstanding how to use Wikipedia. Has anyone else seen any other similar papers, or does anyone know who is the instructor? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:08, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

As far as we can tell, this isn't a Wiki Education-supported course. If you do find out what school they're at, we're happy to try to help if it's a US or Canadian university. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:41, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Promotional/copyright violating BLPs

Today I came across this article which I was initially going to tag for g11/g12 before I realized it was a student's work. I basically trimmed down all the quotes, which were in excess and tried to remove the promo but this appears to be a problem with many of the articles in this class. Can someone please help them with understanding WP:NPOV and independent sourcing? These largely appear to me to be resumes of the subjects as well. Praxidicae (talk) 15:45, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

25 edits

I've seen a few things posted on Shalor (Wiki Ed)'s user talk by a student saying he/she needs to make 25 edits (User talk:Shalor (Wiki Ed)#Look at my sandbox and User talk:Shalor (Wiki Ed)#Thanks for the feed bacK). Perhaps this is one of the requirements of this particular class? If it is, then I don't think it's a very good idea because it seems to be causing a case of WP:HIGHSCORE. I can understand setting a threshold number of edits might be a way to encourage ("force") students to do their work in sort of the same way teachers give out homework assignments or hold tests; however, I don't think that's really a good approach to try and apply to Wikipedia, particularly in the mainspace. For sure, WP:IMPERFECT tells us that mistakes are OK and WP:BITE tells us to try and be understanding when they happen, but other editors are going lose patient quickly if they feel there are students simply making edits to meet their required quota, without any regard for the quality of their edits. Perhaps the instructors of these courses should be advised as to how this approach might cause some unanticipated problems with other editors. I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus here or cast any blame; it just seems to be, in my opinion, a bit of a bad approach. I guess in some way, you could say the same about the Wikipedia:Adventure, but that does seem to at least provide a little more guidance and structure to help newbies. Maybe having students take ADVENTURE would be a way to help them meet their quota of edits instead of just having them dive head first into the mainspace. I think ADVENTURE also has things about how talk pages work, e.g. signing posts, indentation, that will help the students better interact with others. -- Marchjuly (talk) 23:42, 27 November 2019 (UTC)

Copies of Existing Articles on Plants

Two editors have submitted drafts from their sandboxes to Articles for Creation for review that appear to be copies of existing articles on plant species. In each case my first thought on seeing them was to accept them, because species of plants and animals are notable, but we already have articles, and the drafts appear to be copies of the articles. This seems likely to be some sort of class project where either the instructor gave instructions that were mistaken, or two students misunderstood the instructor. (Neither is likely, but the first is less unlikely, and the probability that one or the other is the correct explanation has to be close to 1.) Does anyone know what has happened?

One was Draft:Silphium perfoliatum. The other was Draft:Ipomoea aquatica. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:39, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

This is another case where I have encountered almost the same behavior with two drafts in 24 hours (in this case, in 2 hours). Anything can happen once, but if the same thing happens twice, there is usually a reason. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:42, 2 December 2019 (UTC)
Thank you, User:Shalor (Wiki Ed). Unless you can see something that I can't, all of the IP edits were made to one draft and not the other. The most likely implication is that the registered user who submitted that draft may also be in Zurich. We don't know anything about the other user, but we can guess that they are also in Zurich if this is a class project. Of course, we aren't sure about that. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:29, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
@Jeeb1207: is this part of Wikimedia CH's education work? Maybe someone from WM-CH can jump in here to help them, as it looks like they're in Zurich! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

University of Philippines Open University

Hi, wondering if there's anyone who can reach out to people at the University of Philippines Open University as it appears they may be running courses with Wikipedia editing as a component. I was hoping something more would happen after the articles were sent to AFD and semiprotected, but so far nothing much other than [6] which seems to confirm a class project. Some of the articles which seem to be affected are Information and communication technologies for development and Development communication policy science and Development Communication and Policy Sciences. I don't think these are the same class.

The first one could be this ICT4D course [7]. Some of the earlier editors did call themselves UPOU [8] or UP [9]. I also saw at least one Filipino IP editing logged out (the person later took ownership) but some other IPs which may or may not be part of the class project which were in other places. And checkuser also reported IPs were all the place, also supporting an online course. I never did figure out what ITMr4thQuarter referred to.

The second 2, well one of the editors of the second called themselves DCOMM330 [10] and another 330 [11] which may refer to this [12] "COMM 330 (Communication Policy and Planning)". There is also [13] supporting a Filipino link. I was original wondering if MHbR2019 was a course but actually I realise it could easily be a name.

See also Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive1024#Information and communication technologies for development- Extremely large (100+) amount of spas.

Nil Einne (talk) 17:22, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

@Filipinayzd: is this something you can help with? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:37, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

Problematic probable school project ".adt"

A few dozen editors with usernames ending with ".adt" have been editing since August, primarily on a variety of STEM topics. The edits have been repeatedly and often undone by many other editors on various editorial and copyvio grounds. Based on a few of the references and some edits, it seems to be based in India or thereabouts. Does anyone recognize this situation? Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Marather.adt is the user collection. DMacks (talk) 04:34, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

From poking around, I'm guessing the ".adt" is Agricultural Development Trust in India, and it's part of this project: m:Grants:Project/Rapid/WIKIPEDIA Awareness campaign for college students. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:00, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Stealth class

Regarding the Stephanie Sarley article, these editors claim to be students. (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) Chris Troutman (talk) 21:44, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks! I left a note on the responsive student's talk page directing them to our resources. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:35, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Samuel Johnson, Ann Radcliffe

At Samuel Johnson and Ann Radcliffe, editors @Madelynesaulnier17, AmandaWilson2019, Janevitz, Takada753, Jwone, Bloggerwriting, Molly.Meadows1, and LindseyAmber98: may be editing as part of an unregistered course. They need to be approached about WP:ENGVAR, WP:OVERLINK, WP:MEDRS, and WP:OWN#Featured articles (Samuel Johnson is a Featured article), as well as not to insert text in a way that disassociates previous text from its citation. I have not looked at the quality of edits at Ann Radcliffe, as it is C-class, but they should be reminded of the requirements for editing Featured articles like Samuel Johnson. I was editing from an iPad, am momentarily on a real computer, and have not welcomed or templated any of these editors; I am not sure what templates are currently being used to address potential student editing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:57, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks SandyGeorgia, I left notes for all the users you linked above on their talk pages. I don't know if there's a specific template, but definitely encourage any students without user pages you come across to have their instructors work with Wiki Education. Students working with us all should have user boxes on their user pages linking to their course pages with clear indications we're supporting them. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:56, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
We have Template:Welcome student (also Template:Welcome medical student). By the way, if there is anything that needs to be updated on them, please let me know. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:01, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
Thank you LiAnna (Wiki Ed) for completing the work I left undone; I was editing from a phone hotspot fueling my iPad while on a road trip to a funeral, couldn't put all those pieces together easily, and appreciate that you did it. Thank you for that reminder, Tryptofish, but I was also uncertain what template to use when we have strong evidence they may be student editors, but no single edit indicating such-- I'm not sure either of those templates fit this case, and maybe someone will generate one. Thanks both, unwatching here now, so please ping me if further info is needed. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:52, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
And now I see Diannaa just revdel'd and deleted a bunch of copyvio at Ann Radcliffe. [14] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:36, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

This is getting stranger and stranger: could more eyes please look at this? I cannot find that in the source, and the Tory issue is covered elsewhere. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:47, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

LiAnna (Wiki Ed) have any of these editors responded? This is looking more like a coordinated experiment or something other than typical student editing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:49, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
No, none of them ever did. But one challenge is when student editing happens outside our program, very few instructors know enough about Wikipedia to actually train students to use talk pages, edit summaries, etc., so they may just be completely clueless since they haven't gone through Wiki Education's trainings. :/ Sorry I can't be more helpful! If you do find out it's good-faith editing and who the professor is, let me know so we can try to bring them into our program so they can be properly trained if they are doing the project again in the future. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:25, 16 December 2019 (UTC)

Autism Project ?

Is there a class project involving drafts on aspects of autism? I have just reviewed two drafts concerning aspects of autism spectrum disorder. Both drafts are technical and difficult for a reader with a physical sciences background to understand. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:14, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Not that we know about! If you do find out it's a class project, encourage them to have their instructor visit teach.wikiedu.org, and we can better support them if they do the project again. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:27, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
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