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Ambiguous Wiki Ed course name

Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Madison College/English 2 (Spring). Madison College is a disambiguation page listing several schools. It should presumably be renamed to Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Madison Area Technical College/English 2 (Spring). * Pppery * it has begun... 21:10, 15 January 2024 (UTC)

Course coordinator currently involved in an ArbCom case relating to a course they are teaching

There will likely be an ArbCom case (Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Holocaust in Poland) relating to User:Chapmansh. To rehash the drama, Chapmansh/Shira Klein recently published an article in an academic journal [1] accusing several Wikipedia editors of coordinating offsite to distort facts relating to the Holocaust. This has prompted ArbCom to propose a case in which Chapmansh may be made a party. Needless to say, this is going to be a big case especially given that it involves Icewhiz.

The reason why I'm posting this to the education notice board is because User:Chapmansh is teaching the course Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Chapman University/Jewish Life from Napoleon to Hitler (Spring 2023). In past iterations of this course,[2] students have edited in the Holocaust topic area.

I would say that if Chapmansh coordinates editing offsite in the Holocaust topic area during this ArbCom case it will probably not be an enjoyable experience for the student editors. Regardless of whether there is a conflict of interest, the students will probably be under a microscope the entire time given how many people are involved in this case. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 16:58, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Oy. Well, at least given that the class clearly includes a lot of historical scope prior to the Holocaust, we could presumably direct Klein and her students to stick to the non-Holocaust stuff, at least for this semester? signed, Rosguill talk 17:07, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
@Rosguill: That's what I would imagine is the best choice here onwiki (as well as to avoid Poland). I'll ping User:Brianda (Wiki Ed) who is the Wiki Ed expert assigned to that course. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 17:21, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Pardon me for butting in, I saw this mentioned at WP:ARC and thought I could help by clarifying a few things. The topic area of the Arbcom case, and the journal article, is not "Holocaust", but "Holocaust in Poland". In Wikispeak, that's part of WP:APL. WP:APL has, since May 2020, been covered by (what we now call) WP:ARBECR, which means that non-extended-confirmed editors can't edit in that topic area. If you look at the "past iterations of this course" link by Chess above, none of the students listed are extended-confirmed, and none of them edited in the WP:APL topic area--all those articles are outside of WP:APL. In sum: apparently WikiEd students already stay out of the topic area, and have for a couple years. Levivich (talk) 17:58, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
@Levivich: That's true, though keep in mind offwiki coordination by Klein has come up during the ArbCom case. There's nothing wrong with student editors contributing to our coverage of the Holocaust, but the perception that Klein is trying to influence Wikipedia's coverage of certain topics by using her position is something that could be discussed during the case.
Regardless of whether or not this is true, student editors could very easily wander into a minefield they aren't remotely prepared for. Your claim that none of them edited in the WP:APL topic area isn't actually true. ZyerAbdullah123 appears to have removed someone else's talk page comment on Polish death camps during the 2021 course. [3]
While I doubt that was intentional and is very minor (not even worthy of anything beyond a gentle reminder), people have a habit of assuming bad faith during very controversial ArbCom cases. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 19:16, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
An unsupported claim of offwiki coordination was made by an involved party, it should not be repeated and has no bearing here. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:22, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Accidentally removing a talk page comment does not constitute editing in the topic area. And you say "trying to influence Wikipedia's coverage" as if it's a bad thing. I welcome scholars trying to "influence Wikipedia's coverage" by pointing out problems in that coverage. I welcome teachers trying to "influence Wikipedia's coverage" by teaching students how to edit. Levivich (talk) 19:35, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
Although an accidental removal is not topic area editing, I think the point is that these things attract excessive attention during controversial ArbCom cases, and it does no service to students, or to the students' educational experience, to unwittingly find themselves in the middle of that. It's not about whether or not the students do anything wrong, but rather, about trying to keep the students from getting needlessly caught up in wiki-drama. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:38, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
I think Levivich makes a valid point that due to not being e-confirmed, the students can't edit this area much even if they wanted to. On the other hand, there are still many minor articles related to this topic area which don't have the right protection level slapped in, I believe, so as Chess' correctly notes with their example, they may occasionally stumble into the "minefield". To add another example: in the companion piece that the authors published in a Polish newspaper a few days ago [4], they actually mentioned that Klein became interested in the Wiki-side of the narrative after one of her students editing the History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland article (which is now e-c portended but wasn't back in 2018) got into a dispute with an editor who told him not to cite historian Jan T. Gross (the authors erroneously claimed that editor was myself, while in fact that editor who criticized Gross was Xx236; meanwhile I defended Gross and helped the student, for which Klein thanked me - see Talk:History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland/Archive_4#Postwar_Antisemitism; that misattribution error confusing me with Xx236 already got fixed in the Polish news article which now sports a small correction note - one error down, dozens more to go, sigh). Anyway, the point I am making is that it is possible the students will occasionally run into issues, but I wouldn't worry to much about it, those have been and likely will be isolated incidents. Teaching experience on all sides, really. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:04, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
To be clear, nobody should be going around to stalk/hound these students' edits in the absence of clear evidence of (a) bad faith, or (b) significant policy violations. Their professor writing an article about a topic shouldn't affect the status of their students. The reality, however, is that students in this class will simply be more likely to run into this kind of problematic behavior, and should be aware of what they're getting into. For what it's worth, anyone following these students around and/or undoing their work will themselves be subject to heightened scrutiny, too. A good practice would be to encourage anyone who's wary of jumping in to just edit in userspace rather than article space, moving good content into articles after some review (a good practice with controversial subject areas regardless). But Chapmansh has run many Wikipedia assignments in the past, and likely knows a thing or two about editing controversial topics from both teaching and research, so I don't anticipate anything in this thread coming as a surprise. At the end of the day, if there's something the article and the arbcom case make clear, it's that there's room for improvement in Holocaust-related articles, and it would be great to have additional editors making policy-based improvements. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 23:07, 14 February 2023 (UTC)
I'll confirm here that User:Chapmansh's students will not be working on topics related to Poland. We at Wiki Education understand the sensitivity around this topic, and are working closely with Champansh to ensure students are adequately supported for any edits they make. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 01:33, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

New Wiki Education Dashboard feature: preventing assignment of specific articles

I have a new feature ready to deploy soon (thanks to volunteer developer Abishek). It will let us prevent student editors from choosing specific articles for their assignments, based on an on-wiki category. The idea is that we can add a hidden category (or talk page category) to an article like Bubble tea that perennially attracts student editors but isn't actually a fruitful article to work on, and the Dashboard will prevent anyone from being assigned that article.

I can configure it to point to any single category; I was thinking something like Category:Wiki Education assignment blocklist, but I'm open to suggestions. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:39, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Hi, Sage. Great new feature; this should help. The block in Blocklist seems too close to WP:BLOCK, which can't apply to an article, of course, but might make me think that it goes on the User talk page of blocked students, so that doesn't seem like the right idea. Also, a category name usually suggests some attribute of the articles or pages that are members of the category, and the only type of articles that should belong to a category that is a "something-something-list" is an article whose title has "list" in it, or that amounts to a list without the word list. I'm thinking something like, Category:Articles restricted from Wiki Ed assignment. (Other possibilities: excluded, unsuitable, discouraged, inappropriate, etc.) But I'm not a category-gnome, and I think you might get better feedback if you cross-posted or linked this section from Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories; they'll have good advice for you, I'm sure. Mathglot (talk) 08:59, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
I like the feature! But I dislike the implementation. Using a category seems too decentralized, and therefore difficult to audit/control (and therefore prevent abuse and disruption/confusion). And this really is only about WikiEd's inner workings, not about the page. How about instead a page that lists all the restricted pages? That way it's a single location to monitor and control. This new feature would therefore be parallel to MediaWiki:Bad image list, another single-page centralized list of other pages that have restricted use. DMacks (talk) 09:00, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
They would be centrally listed at Category:Wiki Educational assignment blocklist, no? And you could watchlist it to monitor things being added and removed. I like the idea of using a category because it makes the status visible to editors of the page, not just watchers of the central list, and means we can include it in templates like {{Pp}} or {{ArbCom Arab-Israeli enforcement}}, that define classes of articles that students really ought to steer clear of. – Joe (talk) 11:38, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Do any editors except WikiEd actually care (or even know what it means)? It seems like you're ceding control of limiting the students to anyone and everyone (WikiEd can watch the cat, but any editor at all can add/remove the cat tag on any article).
Having it automatically applied by Contentious Topics tag is nice though. But isn't that tag placed on the talkpage rather than the article? Thinking in that direction, so are all the other WikiEd messages. So if this is a cat feature, maybe it should be cat of the talk pages of the articles for consistency. The talk-page is the place for everything about development of the article, which this is, rather than the actual article-topic prose. DMacks (talk) 11:56, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Do any editors except WikiEd actually care? It started with requests from community members if we could find a way to give certain articles a break from student editing (it started with the bubble tea article).
The idea of having it apply to pages rather than a centralised list is something that I think is important. In my mind, the decision that an article is getting too much unwanted student attention is something that an editor interested in the article should decide.
Student editing in no big deal for people who know this noticeboard exists, but I come across a lot of editors who seem to feel powerless against what feels to them like a tsunami of student editing. My advocacy for this change came from an editing perspective, not from a staff perspective. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:36, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
My concern would be nearly the opposite. There are a lot of editors with strong feelings about student editors and their pet topic/articles. If there's a simple technical intervention (adding a category/template to a talk page) which would prevent it, it will not just be used but abused. What guidelines are in place to prevent someone from just adding it by default to every article they work on to avoid having to interact with student editors, or an especially protective wikiproject from, say, incorporating it into their wikiproject tag? — Rhododendrites talk \\ 14:52, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Exactly. Maybe the system could use a central page-list entry of a category as being 'exclude every page in this category' (and again, using the article associated with a categorized talkpage) rather than 'exclude this Category:... page'? Like cascading-protection. Then the idea of excluding CTOP is easy, and likewise any other swath of pages that has consensus to do so, but again "not just anyone" can block any random page from students. DMacks (talk) 19:06, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

I can imagine a system where we have a subpage under ENB called Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Requests for page restriction that would operate somewhat like Wikipedia:Requests for page protection. So, rather than any editor adding a category that would automatically block a page, we'd have a forum where such requests could be made, just like requests for page protection. Probably we'd create a handy template to make it easier to do, along with accompanying template doc explaining what is expected of a requester, including the justification for the request, and so on. Wiki Ed folks would play the same role that admins at WP:RPP play, i.e., examining requests and make the call whether to add the page (or category, or whatever) to the restricted list, or not. Mathglot (talk) 09:18, 12 January 2024 (UTC)

I think that we could just use an edit filter to enforce the ability to place such a category on a page. We could limit it to a group of users that are trusted to make these sorts of decisions (for example, admins and WikiEd staff). This is the sort of thing that Commons does for controlling file overwrites, and I don't see a problem with it here per se. The question would be more about having a board where we can obtain consensus for these sorts of listings; that could either be this one, or a subpage of this one, but I think it's feasible to implement in some form. — Red-tailed hawk (nest) 21:04, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

"a project to create a Wikipedia Page for my student club"

BizRes Honors claims that they have an assignment from school though that seems unlikely. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:12, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Student editor needs help

Faizæ self-describes as a student in a course a year ago, and another course currently, but doesn't indicate the institution. He keeps getting into trouble over copyright violations and the like, and could definitely use some guidance. It's possible that the school is outside of North America. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:35, 2 January 2024 (UTC)

Just found this: [5], so he's in Turkey, and thus outside of WikiEd. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:41, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
There's a classmate at Talk:Autism spectrum#Suggestions from Gizempsy. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 01:30, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Since they're in Türkiye, pinging @HakanIST, Zafer, and Basak: in case they can help! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:15, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, LiAnna. My concerns are:
  • I have not checked that Gizempsy's talk page section for copyvio
  • I'm uncertain if they have learned the guidelines on biomedical information.
Hopefully, we can make the students' experiences less frustrating and more fruitful. Thanks again! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 23:08, 11 January 2024 (UTC)
Also: Scientific Pen, per [6]. Student has problems visible on their user talk page. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:53, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Continues at #Student assignment at Uskudar University editing medical articles, below. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:38, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Student assignment at Uskudar University editing medical articles

Some users have posted on a health/medicine-related talk pages that they are students at Uskudar University editing for a course called Biotechnology in Neurosciences (NEU547/1). Possible WP:MEDRS checks and copy editing/cleanup needed.

I found these users through their article talk page comments:

It seems like these students may be part of Flower of truth (talk · contribs)'s Brain, Neuroscience, and Biotechnology Edit-a-thon or something similar. I'm not sure why their pages don't have the typical student notices/WikiEd staff interaction. Wracking talk! 21:02, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm so glad that you tracked down what the course is. This is the same problem that I reported in #Student editor needs help, above. I hope that Flower of truth can help with this, because the subset of these students that I've seen have been raising all kinds of trouble, and appear to be in serious need of guidance. (By the way, because of the geographical location, this is not within WikiEd's remit.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:37, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
I knew it felt familiar! Thanks for connecting the dots. Wracking talk! 22:52, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
(Also: thanks for explaining the WikiEd/WMF Labs difference... I think my eyes have glazed twice over now) Wracking talk! 22:54, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
At least some of these folks have not been trained very well - I was very confidently told by one of them that anything found on PubMed is reliable, which is clearly not in agreement with WP:MEDRS. MrOllie (talk) 22:39, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
@MrOllie: Hi, thanks for the note. You comment about my students it seems. All students got the initial training by completition of Wikipedia training modules, so I believe they can not be so bad. Students were advised to use secondary sources in Pubmed. Nevertheless, there may be some students, who cite primary sources from Pubmed. I think such things are normal and happen all the time. We do not expect everything to be perfect at once! As a Doctor of neuroscience, who is a published author in biomedical sciences, I can say that Pubmed is an internationally recognized database for biomedical research which covers the primary and secondary sources published in respected peer-reviewed journals. Why are you objected to Pubmed, in general, may I ask? Please note that my students are afraid of editing Wikipedia and then during their editing experience some felt discouraged and quite exhausted due to some unfriendly approach or comments from some users, -I am not sure if you are one of those. I think it is important to be supportive during critisism, if fostering a diverse and inclusive community of Wikipedia editors is important. My students edit in English since the course they take from me at Uskudar University is taught in English. For this reason, I am not sure I could get help from Wikipedia Turkiye team as they should be dealing with Turkish Wikipedia but I will contact with them (@Basak @Zafer) otherwise, I feel quite exhausted with the current situation, which I find not quite judgemental. Flower of truth (talk) 13:33, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
correction: which I find quite judgemental. Flower of truth (talk) 13:34, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I did not objected to Pubmed, in general. I noted that many sources that are found on Pubmed do not meet the requirements laid out in WP:MEDRS. Even in your message you wrote that Students were advised to use secondary sources in Pubmed. - while some secondary sources will not meet MEDRS either. If your students have received some unfriendly approach it is because when they have been approached about the errors they were making they began arguing or continued making errors even after being made aware of what the requirements are. MrOllie (talk) 13:58, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
4 January 2024:
--Dustfreeworld (talk) 14:10, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
@MrOllie I appreciate your dedication to Wikipedia. On the other hand, it is also important to be flexible and constructive. Remember: "Wikipedia does not have firm rules". (1) if there is an argument, as you mentioned above, I do not think that it is always one sided for each case, but it seems to me that you tend to label my students from your side directly, without thinking their side of the story. (2) Secondly, indeed, I had the impression that you mentioned your opposition to reliability of the sources in Pubmed in the beginning, not to the profile of the sources to be secondary or primary. If you must know: by checking the website you can also see- and I would like to say, as well, yes Pubmed is one of the most respected database in biomedical sciences and yes, scientifically, all sources in Pubmed are considered as reliable source (as much as possible), but not all sources in Pubmed are secondary sources and all students know that. (3) Please also note that, when I mention "students" I refer to graduate neuroscience students who already have a degree. For instance a graduate neuroscience student who has a degree in Psychology should be able to edit an article about "binge eating disorder" and should know which source to cite. All students are aware of choosing reliable secondary sources but sometimes they may choose primary sources by mistake or so but also due to their proficiency and background in the field that they might think of citing that primary source. and why? here is why: (4)Indeed it is not uncommon that a lot of primary sources are cited in Wikipedia including subjects in Medical articles and students see them. Under these circumstances, your actions of focusing on one specific student (this is what the student told me) and erasing completely their valuable efforts and edits for something not a deadly mistake, without giving the chance of revision does not sound to me constructive and flexible enough to maintain a positive and inclusive environment especially for beginners, who have are already afraid of editing in Wikipedia. Thank you! PS. I will not comment on this anymore. I will look for help from Turkish Wikipedia team but also semester is over so the wikipedia editing assignment will be over soon. Flower of truth (talk) 16:31, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Secondly, indeed, I had the impression that you mentioned your opposition to reliability of the sources in Pubmed in the beginning - I said nothing of the sort. There is obviously a language barrier here. I think that Zefr's advice, linked above, to edit in the Wikipedia project corresponding to your native language is good advice. all sources in Pubmed are considered as reliable source - No. That is exactly the problem, most do not meet WP:MEDRS and are not considered to be reliable on Wikipedia. For instance a graduate neuroscience student who has a degree in Psychology should be able to edit an article about "binge eating disorder" and should know which source to cite. And yet they were making obvious errors, and when this was explained instead of correcting their approach they kept making the same errors, and became hostile and made personal attacks. MrOllie (talk) 17:06, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
@MrOllie, I think the link you mentioned was posted by me, not by Flower of truth. Editors are people, we all make mistakes. And those may cause misunderstanding as well.
As a side, I did see some very humble students being wikibullied. [7]
I believe people may become hostile if they (believe they) are attacked first. You may want to continue the discussion at How do we welcome new medical editors? --Dustfreeworld (talk) 17:32, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I've posted about this at WT:MED#Problem with class assignment in medical topics. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:42, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
First of all, you should read every single content added by every student before mentioning them and overthrowing them by saying "They have not been well trained". Secondly, we have pointed out the purpose of the editings we have made, on the talk pages. Either way, our content will be checked by professionals and if it needs to be deleted, it will be. If you are willing to help us, I would like you to read every content and give specific arguments regarding why our editings are not following the guidelines according to you, this would be absolutely the right thing to do rather than signaling us this way. Thank you for your concern! Yasmine Gana (talk) 06:07, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
That's not how it works in WP:MEDRS topics. Those articles have much more strict editing standards, and students should not be touching them without very clear understanding of the rules. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 12:56, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
WP:MEDRS does *not* override policies such as WP:OWN, WP:CIVIL and WP:PRESERVE. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 14:00, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Of course not. But it does require a higher standard of citation and fact-checking prior to addition, which seems incompatible with the above statement that edits will be made then if it needs to be deleted, it will be. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 14:25, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I agree that some form of review (in sandbox?) *prior* to addition would help. I don’t know what’s the current official suggestions about this from Wiki Education, or other related authorities. I don’t think it should be compulsory though. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia that *anyone* can edit. It’s always in an imperfect state that’s under improvement. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 16:24, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
And being imperfect shouldn’t be an excuse to violate WP:OWN, WP:CIVIL and WP:PRESERVE. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 16:48, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
@HandThatFeeds, MEDRS isn't intended to be a "higher" standard. It's intended to help editors find out how to translate the "normal" standard into medical topics, because "normal" isn't quite what editors – even senior academics – expect. For example: academics care about Scientific priority (e.g., giving credit to the original scientist) and Wikipedia cares about being up to date (i.e., using a recent textbook). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:18, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
It's higher in that medical topics can lead to actual harm if they contain poor or incorrect information. Perhaps "more strict" would've been a better phrase for me to use but, regardless, MEDRS subjects are going to be scrutinized a lot more closely than other articles. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 17:36, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I'd have picked one of the geopolitical areas as the one that gets the most scrutiny, but I'm not sure that the scrutiny is helping us. The demand for MEDRS-ideal sources not only sometimes involves thoughtless reversion, but it has extended even to claims that a particular plant oil is red (they objected to the supposed "promotional tone" of the peer-reviewed review article), or that people wear makeup to cover up acne (they claimed that if there weren't multiple medical articles mentioning this, then having a single sentence about the zillion-dollar cosmetics industry in the article on Acne wasn't WP:DUE), or that certain substances are used in cosmetics because of their effect on skin tone (=skin color. If it's not obvious why that's silly, find the nearest teenage girl and ask her if she thinks there'd be any point in buying colorless Rouge (cosmetics)). We're not necessarily making things better by driving away people who actually know something about the subject matter with our "Tut tut tut, didn't you know that MDPI journals are supposed to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, which is why I mindlessly insta-revert every addition of them by newer editors?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:56, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
Other students (based on talk comments), for anyone checking contribs:
I also noticed discussion at Talk:Neuroenhancement, as a few students congregated there. Dustfreeworld and Zefr were involved in that discussion. Wracking talk! 23:22, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks Wracking. The related discussion can be found at: How do we welcome new medical editors? --Dustfreeworld (talk) 11:36, 26 January 2024 (UTC); 18:32, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Someone has also started this: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Strange editing from Uskudar University --Dustfreeworld (talk) 17:18, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
Thank you very much for pinging me. I am from the user group in Türkiye. We are experienced about helping students editing WP but do not have experience about students editing medical topics. I will try to help by informing the users about using sandbox first.Basak (talk) 14:24, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
I will note that some of the edits from this group, such as this and this, have fabricated facts based on citations that had nothing at all to do with the facts in question. I find this to be very problematic. WikiDan61ChatMe!ReadMe!! 15:45, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Issues of concern at the Neuroenhancement talk page are 1) absence of WikiEd staff notification about the course (responsibility of the instructor), 2) absence of the course outline, a Wikipedia user-instructor supervising student edits, and list of participating students with their assignments, 3) students making their first edits, with no apparent knowledge of medical source quality, to complete a homework assignment, and 4) Turkish students editing with poor English skills.
Wracking - is there a proposal you have in mind for resolving this to support article quality while enabling WikiEd-qualified students to participate? Student edits of diverse medical articles with little/no review by instructors have a history of damaging articles and consuming time of other editors to maintain the quality of medical content.
It's possible a bot could be produced for medical articles via the Idea Lab using factors like those above to assure basics are in place on an article talk page before students make their first edits. Zefr (talk) 16:02, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
@Zefr: FYI WikiEd is the support system for classes in the US and Canada. Courses everywhere else fall under the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Program. The notifications and staff support you're referring to generally do not exist for the latter, unfortunately. There are templates students can use to tag article talk pages, of course (Template:Educational assignment), but it must be done manually. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:20, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Oof. That seems like a recipe for disaster. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 17:00, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Indeed, it is. I'm going to be blunt, and this has nothing to do with OWN or bullying or anything like that. The purpose of class assignments at Wikipedia is to have students learn what editing Wikipedia is like (and hopefully to improve content). It's not for other Wikipedia editors to suddenly become unpaid teaching assistants for a class, or to provide special editing conditions that would not be offered to other new editors (including having to clean up a mess). Problems I've been seeing, including copyright violations, are far from trivial. I highly recommend that Flower of truth, and perhaps the students, read WP:ASSIGN, because that reflects community norms for class assignments. This class needs to conform with that, and receive the kind of guidance that they will need to do it – and not to scold other editors for being "judgemental". (Finding out how other editors react to student edits is part of the learning process, too. And if it's not what you want for your class, you are free to teach it in some other way, outside of Wikipedia.) So there are two ways that this can go. One is that the class is taught about this the right way, and conforms with the community norms of the English Wikipedia. Content is improved, and it's a happy outcome. The other is that the student edits get reverted when they are not improvements, and if things get bad enough, the students get blocked. Just as we would do with any other new editors. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:44, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the link, Tryptofish. I think it’s mutual, and how do we welcome new medical editors is very important too. [8] --Dustfreeworld (talk) 15:18, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
In my experience, WT:MED has a tendency to be a walled garden. As for mutuality, I'll say more on that just below. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:24, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
I have no specific proposal. I am unqualified both on the MEDRS and WikiEd (or Wikimedia education program) sides of things, so I brought the conversation here.
As far as I know, WikiEd discourages students from taking on medical articles and makes them aware of MEDRS. I don't know if the less-centralized model does/can do this. Also, see the conversation above about potentially preventing certain articles from being assigned to WikiEd students.
That said, I think we need to pay mind to WP:BITE, as we have a group of new editors who seem to be editing in good faith and engaging in discussion with editors outside their classroom. WikiEd projects have gone much worse than this. Wracking talk! 00:05, 27 January 2024 (UTC)
Of course we should keep BITE in mind, and of course there are mutual responsibilities where other editors should consider the feelings of student editor newbies. After all, I started the original thread on this noticeboard by seeking help for one of the students. But I'm very serious about the need for the instructor to work with us. Class projects are different than other kinds of editing by new editors. The edits show up suddenly, and in large quantities, where it becomes much more work for other editors to fix anything that needs to be fixed. And student editors differ from other new editors in that someone (the instructor) has made them come here in order to get course credit, as opposed to people who just decide on their own that they would like to try editing. So we have to treat it differently.
In any case, we have a problem here, because at least some of the students are not engaging productively with other editors. I've seen student talk pages where the students tell other editors that the other editors are wrong, when the opposite is the case. This looks to me like poor guidance from the instructor. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:24, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
Agree with most of what you said in the first half of your comment.
The question is, if Alice’s mum made her come here in order to get her next new toy, or, Bob’s girlfriend made him come here in order to get her agreement that he can buy his next new car, as opposed to people who just decide on their own that they would like to try editing, do we have to treat it differently?
Further, I've seen student talk pages where the editors tell other students that the other students are wrong, when the opposite is the case. This looks to me like poor guidance from ___. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 03:33, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
Presumably neither Alice's mum nor Bob's girlfriend are sending dozens of people at a small subsection of articles in a short amount of time, and therefore Alice and Bob, whatever their motivation for editing, differ far less from "typical" new editors than editors coming here as a result of class projects do. (Unless their motivation for editing turns out to actively conflict with the purpose of Wikipedia, in which case the most likely result would be that they sooner or later end up blocked as not here to build an encyclopedia.)
But let's say Alice's mum/Bob's girlfriend were to send large numbers of people at a small number of articles, and the instructions given to these new editors conflict with the Wikipedian rules and guidelines, or fail to properly guide them in how to edit, or otherwise result in a high volume of subpar edits; and their motivation for editing makes them less likely to listen to the advice of other editors as opposed to that of Alice's mum/Bob's girlfriend? These folks would almost invariably get blocked as meatpuppets of Alice's mum/Bob's girlfriend. (And very frankly speaking, typically with less hesitation and fewer attempts to guide them into editing in a way that confirms with English Wikipedian norms than what happens with student editors)
The different way in which student editors are treated does not solely involve strictness that might or might not happen with individual newbie editors making similar edits. It also involves a good deal more leniency and attempts to get the coordinating party behind the group to actually coordinate and work with the English Wikipedia than what almost all other forms of new editors appearing as a group get, especially when it's a group that causes a significant amount of work for other editors to clean up. AddWittyNameHere 12:34, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
Ah ... I see a lot of assumptions in your post ... I’m not sure I understand all of them ... I don’t see much leniency that you mentioned; and “significant amount of work for other editors to clean up” may have been an overestimation as well. I don’t think your assumptions like “fail to properly guide them in how to edit” align with our definition of meat puppets. With all the discussions so far, I seldom see people talking about the benefits of having undergraduate/ postgraduate editors (who know much in the area they study) decide to stay and becoming part of us. We are talking about around 27 postgraduates just for this course. What if, say, 4 of them decide to stay, and 2 of them become our Featured article editors? How many more FAs will we get? How many positive contributions are we going to have from them in the years coming?
Of course I’m over estimating. If I were them, to say for sure, I won’t stay (why would one decide to stay after being wikibullied, without any apology from anyone, and who is still the subject of discussions being accused of making “subpar edits” after weeks, decide to stay? If they do it’s just too naive, isn’t it?). After all, fail to make new participants to become part of us is what killing the project. Cooperation, good communication and assume good faith are what make Wikipedia great, not warnings and the desire to punish. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 12:43, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but hyperbole about what['s] killing the project is as old as the project itself. It's a tired argument and not a valid one. Wikipedia is not going to shrivel up and die because we told a class they need to follow our rules. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 14:12, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
I don’t know what’s *our* rules vs *their* rules. I don’t think *all* of *us* are following *our* rules. I see many of our articles are dated. I see many information that should be there isn’t. I don’t think people are telling others to “follow our rules”. I see people telling others *not to edit here*.I also see people posting multiple warnings in a very short time without explaining any *rules* beforehand. I don’t think the project will “die” tomorrow. Just that it’s *not* a great project anymore. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 14:30, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
It's the same project it's always been. Everything else is projection on your part. Proclaiming things were better before is just rose colored glasses.
We've improved tremendously since the Wild West times of the early project, when MEDRS, BLP, and many of our other safety policies just plain didn't exist. People wanted more content, regardless of whether it belonged or not. Growth was paramount, and it led to all kinds of problems.
So no, I don't agree with the idea that this is "not a great project anymore". We've always tried to help newbies, but we've also drawn a line where people quite clearly don't belong. Nothing worse about how it's done now, and in fact it's a lot better than it used to be.
That said, we're going around in circles, so I'm bowing out. I've said my peace. — The Hand That Feeds You:Bite 14:45, 29 January 2024 (UTC)
I’m not comparing between now and before. Perhaps it’s better if I say “just that it’s not a great project” without the word “anymore”.
I’ve never said that we don’t need rules. Quite the opposite, I’m saying that some of us(?) are violating some of the rules. It seems that we aren’t talking about the same rules.
It’s good to have rules. The problem is, people who know the rules very well are violating them blatantly without being punished (i.e. rules not enforced).
On the other hand, people who have never heard about some rules are being accused of violating them (while most of the time it’s just content disputes, which might even have been caused by the WP:OWN mindset of the other party), without adequate explanation given, and are threatened with blocking or not to edit.
Repeat: After all, fail to make new participants to become part of us is what killing the project. Assume good faith, cooperation and good communication are what make Wikipedia great, not (unwarranted) warnings and the (inappropriate) desire to punish. --Dustfreeworld (talk) 17:32, 29 January 2024 (UTC); 12:36, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Improving information for non-NA educators

I'm setting up a small one-seminar assignment for my students. It's UK-based, and I'm struggling to find the relevant information.

  • I started at Wikipedia:Education program/Educators. Here we link to the historical page on how to set up course pages. Given this is the North America instruction, I'm not certain if this is something I also need to do. Should these links be deleted, given these instruction are superseded?
  • I started with the Instructor Orientation Modules; the heading colours need tweaking to have sufficient contrast with the with text per WP:CONTRAST.
  • This training directly point me to the generic Programs and Events Dashboard (as I'm not North America based). I assume instruction exist for educators in other world regions too. Could the NA training
    • Either point to these resources?
    • Or have a "non-NA" fork, which only goes over the more generic training?
  • I've condensed the The education header a bit, but it still has information overload, and lacks information for non-NA instructors:
    • "Wiki Education Foundation only supports classes in Canada and the US. Classes in all other countries are supported by other organizations." Is there a list of other other organisations supporting classes?
    • Any objections to me removing the information about how to stop archiving / archive faster? Seems to advanced for the intended audience here.

—Femke 🐦 (talk) 08:31, 28 January 2024 (UTC)

The programs and events dashboard is based on Wiki Ed dashboard, but intended for a broader range of uses. Most of the time, it's for tracking metrics and edit-a-thons, by Wikipedians-in-Residence, GLAM outreach efforts, etc. But it's also a tool for instructors. The big difference is the WikiEd dashboard is there to help you structure and track a whole assignment, with milestones, tracked training, discussions, etc. The P&E dashboard has some training modules and such, but it's all with the new editor in mind, not necessarily student editors. It's useful to track a group of users' edits, and it's useful for those training modules, but it's not the assignment-running machine that the other dashboard is. The WikiEd dashboard training modules, which again are designed for instructors and students, are accessible by anyone. The differences are that (a) they'll talk about some specific features in their Dashboard that I do not think are in the programs and events dashboard, (b) there will be frequent mentions of staff support where there is no staff support outside the US/CA, and (c) those trainings cannot be tracked or integrated into a course page (because you cannot create a course page on the Wiki Ed dashboard if you're outside the US/CA). In other words, it might be more confusing than it's worth when working with students who already have a lot to learn about this place.
All of that dashboard content, however, is CC BY-SA licensed, so you could theoretically fork it and develop better education-specific training for the p&e dashboard, if the WMF were ok with it, and otherwise start a separate dashboard altogether (I think the dashboard code itself is open, too). My understanding of why the WMF hasn't invested more in the p&e dashboard (and the education program generally) is that it would require a huge amount of resources to translate the content effectively, to build a tool that can work in many languages easily, and which considered the specificities of educational situations in different parts of the world. As a result (or perhaps for other reasons), the international education program has been extremely under-funded. Meanwhile, it seems like there are fewer resources for educators outside NA today than there were ~8 years ago. The education program extension has been deprecated after it was abandoned by the foundation, there were once a lot of resources over at the Outreach Wiki, but that's been rolled into meta:Education, which has almost no content. I hope that's temporary, and that they have some big moves in the work, but I'm not in the know.
For now, the best bet is typically to use the P&E Dashboard resources and reach out to your local affiliates. Wikimedia UK has certainly supported educational projects in the past, and may have more infrastructure in place for it than is evident from education program documentation. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:59, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
Thanks for the detailed reply! A large share of the world is English-speaking (especially ESL) and not in NA. So I imagine it wouldn't be too much tweaking required to point educators to the parts of the existing instructor orientation modules that give you information (rather than helping you create assignments directly).
I'm aware of Wikimedia UK's literature on this, have chatted to them before and have used the Dashboard before for an edit-a-thon. For myself, the only extra information I need now is whether I should make a course page. Is there enwiki policy around this? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 17:42, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
No policy, no. It is encouraged by Wikipedia:Student assignments, though that is an information page rather than formal guidance. The reality of these assignments is the rules for how they're organized only really matter once there's a problem. If there's no documentation about a course and students are making lots of mistakes, the volunteers involved get a little bit extra irritated. Back when I was first teaching with Wikipedia, the process was pretty decentralized. There was WP:SUP, but people also frequently just created a new page in projectspace or on their userpage, and had students point there. The course page extension streamlined that a bit more, but was clunky to use and then development was abandoned. The Dashboard is better, but has the geographic downsides above. If I were running an assignment in the UK these days, I'd create a course page on the p&e dashboard and add pointers to it from all the students' user pages. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 20:38, 28 January 2024 (UTC)
Ah, so the dashboard counts as a course page. That makes a lot of sense :). The WP:student assignment page requires some TLC; it has a lot of wall of texts. I'll see if I can find some time to improve the useability of that page, when I understand how everything works here a bit better. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Ed course submissions archiving and header

Please note that the subpage at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Wiki Ed course submissions was over 700 kb; User:Graham87 archived a big chunk of it and set up automatic archiving so it won't get this large again. I tweaked the archive box display params for banner style and bot notice advice (the Talk header failed to display the bot notice for some reason). Can someone monitor the page to verify that the first archiving run looks good, whenever that occurs? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:00, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

 Done. Lowercase sigmabot III has now had two archiving runs, and all looks good. Mathglot (talk) 01:09, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Concerns about WikiEd course assignments

I first posted yesterday on Ian (Wiki Ed)'s User talk with Serious concerns about a Wiki Ed assignment about this. Haven't received a reply there yet and then thought this issue might also belong here on the noticeboard, especially after seeing Wikipedia:Education noticeboard#New Wiki Education Dashboard feature: preventing assignment of specific articles above.
A university course page - Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Southeastern Oklahoma State University/COMP II (Spring) - states For one of their primary assignments for the course students will select an under-developed Wikipedia article with instructor guidance.
So...the underdeveoped article one student picked?
Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
Am here to ask if it's possible for someone who is active in WikiEd to contact the course instructor about the student having this shooting article as their course assignment because, yeah...not a Good Idea because not underdeveloped & in my estimation one of the most contentious/vandalized/scrutinized articles on Wikipedia - probably not something a new editor should tackle.
I have no official standing with WikiEd but I think it would be prudent for someone from WikiEd to contact the instructor and the student and maybe suggest that some other, shorter, start-class/stub article or some article with loads of maintenance templates would probably be a better choice. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 16:01, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I've emailed the instructor. Thanks for flagging this. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:07, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Multi-section courses

Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Allen University/English 102 Section 6 (Spring 2024) and some of the lower-number sections showed up on my watchlist. It got me thinking that, when multiple sections are happening here at the same time, that amounts to a large-enrollment course that will result in a large number of simultaneous student edits. Maybe WikiEd treating each section as having its own course page, with its individual supervision, is a good approach. But we've had problems with overly large classes in the past, and I want to make sure that we are not encountering a new source of potential problems here. --Tryptofish (talk) 00:28, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

@Tryptofish This is something Helaine takes into account when approving courses. Both course size and multiple sections of the same course (it looks like there are three sections here are issues that Helaine takes into account when approving courses. These courses are small, so it's probably less of a worry. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:02, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! Good to know. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:00, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

I think I posted Wikipedia talk:Education program#Projects in contentious topics area to the wrong board

Should I move it here? Doug Weller talk 17:34, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

I was able to follow your link, and find the course page via the student's user page. I see that it is a course under WikiEd. That means that the WikiEd people who are assigned to the course, User: Helaine (Wiki Ed) and User: Ian (Wiki Ed), can tell the student to select a different page to work on, make sure of the same for the other students in the class, and let the instructor know what the situation is. WikiEd generally steers students away from CTOP topics, and certainly from pages that the students will not even be able to edit. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:21, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
@Tryptofish Thanks. I hope that User: Helaine (Wiki Ed) and User: Ian (Wiki Ed) will also advise the gender related courses. Doug Weller talk 08:44, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
User talk:OsaRosa is asking for advice as to what they should do about their project in the gender topic area. I'm not sure where to point her. Doug Weller talk 09:31, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
Is anyone going to respond to her? Doug Weller talk 14:56, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
@Doug Weller I will ask Helaine or Brianda to get in touch with her. Thanks so much for flagging this here. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:58, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
@Ian (Wiki Ed) No problem. I originally found a student planning to edit a page under ECP and then found two instructors with courses in the gender area. Doug Weller talk 17:07, 12 February 2024 (UTC)

The student welcome template identified in the subst'ed hidden comment as <!-- Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org welcome --> contains a link to a FAQ at https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/faq, however that page is devoted solely to the questions instructors might have, and nothing about students. The instructor FAQ page does have a link on it to the student FAQ page at https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/faq?topic=student_faq, however that page is devoted solely to username issues, and lacks any of the kind of common issues that I imagine would be useful to a student enrolled in a Wiki Ed course. Mathglot (talk) 07:30, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Featured article assigned to student editor

Thought I saw a notice about this previously at this board, but can't find it now. Communication is a featured article, and has been assigned to an editor at Fairmont State U.. I don't know if featured articles should be automatically restricted from student articles or not, but it sure is a tough hill to climb for any new editor, to try to figure out how to improve a FA in their first few edits at Wikipedia. Seems like a poor assignment choice. Ping Brianda (Wiki Ed). Mathglot (talk) 09:33, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot, Definitely a challenging assignment for a first time editor. After @Chipmunkdavis's ping about it, I left a message on the student's talk page. I just followed up with them in email to make sure they get the message, and choose a better article to work on. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:00, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Peer review page

It looks like a student has opened a peer review page at Wikipedia:Peer review/Deficiency judgment/archive1, mistaking it for part of their classroom review process. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:32, 18 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping @Thebiguglyalien. I've contacted the editor and looped in the instructor to orient the student. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:31, 20 February 2024 (UTC)

Possible unknown class

There's been a sudden influx of brand new accounts over at Pesticide drift, a contentious topic.[9]. The edits definitely have the look of coordinated class edits happening at once, but I'm not seeing any indication of an class dashboard, etc.

I only had a remove a WP:MEDRS issue so far, but do any WikiEd folks know what class this may be? As mentioned in the section above, controversial topics are best avoided for class editing, and this is one we've frequently had issues with student editors in. Hopefully it's nothing for this one, but I thought I'd check in on this one now rather than later. KoA (talk) 18:44, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

These editors aren't affiliated with us, but if you do find out any contact information or name for the instructor, feel free to ping me and we can try to offer our support! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:04, 14 March 2024 (UTC)

Contentious topics

Is there any guideline, recommendation, or opinion at Wiki Ed about whether students should be assigned articles designated as a Contentious topic? Currently, Gender and Technoculture 320-01 (assisted by Brianda) has students assigned to Gender-critical feminism, Feminist views on transgender topics, and Transphobia, all designated as contentious. (There may be others, I only checked the ones I thought would be.) I checked the archives, but the only discussion related to this topic was this one, and it isn't directly relevant. Tryptofish started that one, so might have an opinion on this. Mathglot (talk) 05:14, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. My understanding is that we have a consensus that student editors should steer clear of CTOPs, and that WikiEd advises students of this. But of course, some students initially do it anyway. In my experience, once the WikiEd advisor finds out about it, they can be counted on to tell the students to find a different page, and point it out to the instructor. I expect this will happen here. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:12, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
Thanks Tryptofish & Mathglot. We do try to steer classes away from contentious topics, but given the large swaths of Wikipedia that are or were covered, we take a more nuanced approach. For example, climate change articles have rarely proven to be a problem for student editors (at least in the dimension of them being contentious), so over the years we changed our approach from steering classes away from those topics to encouraging certain types of classes to participate.
We've supported a large number of feminism-related classes (this class alone has run 22 times before this term) and improving the topic area is important. While the arbcom ruling is limited to "gender-related disputes or controversies and associated people", it isn't always clear up front what's disputed or controversial and what isn't. But telling instructors and students they need to stay clear of "gender", as a whole, on Wikipedia, probably would be.
We try to strike a balance between steering students away from categories of articles where they're unlikely to have a good experience, and trying to help them understand how to edit collegially. In this case, Brianda has gone over the list of articles that students assigned themselves and suggested that they might want to drop certain topics, while also trying to provide extra support in the event students do run into problems. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:15, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Focusing my reply only on the following:

it isn't always clear up front what's disputed or controversial and what isn't

By "contentious" in my OP, I meant strictly: "article whose talk page has one of the (four, I think) contentious topics templates". If it has one of them, then it's contentious for the purposes of this discussion; if it doesn't, then it isn't. So students and instructors would have a way of determining it. Not yet ready for prime time is a template I'm working on which will detect this; e.g.:
Draft template examples here, but see below for dedicated "{{Is contentious}}" template
  • {{Draft:Article attribute decoration|contentious|Transphobia}} → contentious
  • {{Draft:Article attribute decoration|contentious|Iguana}} →
(Don't worry about the icon; you can either embed it in an #if, or maybe I'll provide yes-no booleans later; also, this draft template may cease working or work differently at any time; it's still in development.) The point I wanted to make, though, is that "contentious" can be well-defined, if we want it to be, by associating it with presence/absence of Talk page templates. Mathglot (talk) 22:36, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Ian, one approach that I think would be helpful to WikiEd staff when deciding whether or not to steer a student away is to look for whether or not there is a CTOP warning template, or edit notice, on the talk page. If there is such a warning already present for a given page, then it should probably be pretty close to automatic to tell the student and the instructor. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:03, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
Ian, I've written Template:Is contentious which will detect this as a standalone template you can use, copy, or reengineer if you are using wiki ed dashboard software in a non-wikipedia environment:
Hope this helps. Mathglot (talk) 00:04, 23 February 2024 (UTC)
  • The reality is that student edits to these high-traffic, highly controversial articles are simply going to be reverted. Frankly it's a waste of both the student's and community's time to be assigning articles like gender-critical feminism as Mathglot mentioned, whose student editor just got predictably reverted instantly. An article which has already gone through lots of debate and consensus-making is not going to be the type of article which is accepting of the (typically lower quality) contributions from student editors. Endwise (talk) 00:03, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
    • I want to add that simply and predictably ending up reverted is a poor educational experience for the student. I realize that sometimes editors can be reluctant to say "no" to students or instructors about page choices, but we do the class no favor by having things go this way. (And I also want to add that editors should never hesitate to revert student edits that need to be reverted.) --Tryptofish (talk) 19:26, 19 March 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Caramseyphotog

UNLV related madness. Well, confusion and weirdness. Thanks -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 19:15, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

Fashion/textiles class is back again (n+1)

Ayup, just like clockwork, Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Archive 23#Surprise, another semester, another undeclared school project making a mess of fashion articles is ramping up with one-off uncited edits to a not-small pool of articles. They never discuss. They often don't ever make a second edit. They do not always hit the same articles, so protection is not very useful. But they often do hit the same articles, so better to leave them unprotected as a honeypot with a hair trigger? That's really a horrible non-solution. I'm fairly confident I know which school it is. DMacks (talk) 03:13, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

Block the entire class. I know it's an extreme solution, but I think we've hit the point where anything less will not be sufficient. Primefac (talk) 13:46, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
While I do support that, the past two semesters they have switched to mostly single-edit accounts. As if the assignment has become as lame as "make an edit to a WP article related to our class" or even "prove that WP is editable by anyone". Is there a set of IPs that can be blocked to help make a dent in it? DMacks (talk) 14:14, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
Jeez... if that's the case, we're almost running into meatbot territory... could probably justify a rangeblock based on that. Primefac (talk) 14:24, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
It is still on-going, and as usual oozing into more and different articles. One of them confirmed on-wiki that it is a class project and has a username with the string "CSULA" in it. That confirms the school I had in mind, consistent semester-to-semester. DMacks (talk) 03:27, 29 March 2024 (UTC)
With that school name, we can try to find the instructor and reach out to offer our support so the students hopefully can make more productive edits. But if anyone hears the actual professor or class's name, please let us know. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:45, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
I was able to find the professor! I've connected with them and asked them to have the students stop editing for now, and to schedule a call with us to provide better support in the future. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:07, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
The professor apologized profusely -- they inherited this assignment from someone else and have just been following what the previous person did. They have agreed to have students stop editing for now so hopefully the disruption will end shortly. We will meet with them next week to ensure they better understand Wikipedia and are following our best practices before tackling it again. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:27, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for your follow-up here! Wracking talk! 21:27, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
Thank you thank you thank you! DMacks (talk) 07:35, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
Do we know if this is the same project as Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard/Archive_23#"Off_the_rails"_school_project_resuming, which has been recurring twice a year since at least 2021? (Students make a few edits to fashion/textile articles and return two or three weeks later to create draft fashion/artist biographies from an out of date list, some of them duplicates, many using copyrighted images taken from the web.) Belbury (talk) 16:05, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
I think so, yes. We'll make sure to address this when we speak to the current instructor. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:22, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Undisclosed class? Gone haywire

See User talk:HJ Mitchell#About blocking some of the users, this mentions a bunch of student accounts being globally locked and blocked here. I have some knowledge of this, given that I made this Steward requests/Global report that most likely contains some of the mentioned locks. Anybody know of this class? Pinging HJ Mitchell. v/r - Seawolf35 T--C 08:15, 7 April 2024 (UTC)

This is not one of Wiki Education's, and looks like it might not be in the U.S. If you do find out the name of the school, I can try to connect them to support in their location. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:33, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
This looks like it's related to Government Medical College Bhavnagar (this link, provided by AminMDMA (talk · contribs), does not work for me). See discussion at User talk:AminMDMA and User talk:Arjayay. Wracking talk! 05:37, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Concerns about Algoma University student editors

It appears that several students from Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Algoma University/Introduction to Community Economic and Social Development II (Winter 2024) have been making some substandard edits, including the creation of Indie dog of India (see that page's history), and other edits using first person, with unsourced additions, copy pasting copyrighted material, etc. None of the edits seem particularly malevolent, but it makes me question whether proper Wikipedia policies were fully discussed in class.

Not sure if this is something someone should bring up with the instructor. I haven't checked all the student editors, and some are just editing in their sandboxes, but others (including User:Abhi Suthar, User:Hr54ankush, User:Jashann, and User:Amrsandhu) are not. ForsythiaJo (talk) 04:14, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

@ForsythiaJo I got in touch the instructor yesterday and they've agreed to tell their students to stop editing, at least until we can figure out what's going on with so many of the students. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:43, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
@Ian (Wiki Ed), whatever you did isn't working, because I've just had to revert @Abhisheksaini007 twice for adding crap to International students in Canada. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 04:33, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
See also:
Wracking talk! 05:17, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
Ugh. Thanks for the heads-up Wracking. The professor told the students to stop editing in mainspace, but the ones who aren't good at following instructions are likely to be the hardest to reach. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:05, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
(Also my apologies for having missed this message.) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:07, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Arizona State University (ASU) class

I just (mostly) reverted this edit. In looking at the user's page, I noticed they indicated it was for a class project.

With this query, I found many other user talk pages stating they are for an ASU class. Based on some of the students' user pages, it seems that the school is Arizona State University.

Pinging LiAnna (Wiki Ed) for a potential outreach opportunity. Wracking talk! 22:55, 22 April 2024 (UTC)

Here are the accounts I found that look to be from this semester:
Wracking talk! 23:08, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! I think we've found the instructor and we'll reach out to offer our support. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:58, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
Super cool. Thanks for the support! Emonico1 (talk) 10:44, 23 April 2024 (UTC)

Minneapolis

  • Some background. About four or five students from a University of Minnesota class on "social computing" have been making their edits to Minneapolis. I welcomed the first one. Then we decided something was up and I erroneously reported the whole bunch as part of our years-long sockpuppet farm. I wrote to their instructor, who says he's had students editing for years and that this class has completed their assignment. This class was unlucky to coincide with an old page protection removal on March 4, which was restored on March 29.
  • I apologized and emailed the first person who I unfairly accused of sockpuppetry. I hope he forgives me.
  • The Minneapolis article is in extended featured article review, and in the middle of a contentious RfC, which has postponed the FAR process. Then came this class on top. I skimmed a bit of WikiEducation; it says that if they choose their own, students should select underdeveloped articles to work on. Minneapolis is as far from underdeveloped as one can get.
  • Spicy kindly supplied the link to WP:Student assignments during the sockpuppet investigation. It's completely new to me.

-SusanLesch (talk) 15:17, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

It sounds to me like you handled it very sensitively, thanks. The one additional thing that needs to be done is to tell the instructor that he is expected to conduct his on-Wikipedia classes with WikiEd. The educational institution is in the US, so it's within WikiEd's remit, and working with them would have avoided any of these problems having happened. The links to WikiEd are at the student assignments information page, and also at the top of this noticeboard. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:15, 2 April 2024 (UTC)
Tryptofish, thanks for your kind reply. Done. -SusanLesch (talk) 21:16, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

- SusanLesch (talk) 18:10, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi SusanLesch, just letting you know my organization, Wiki Education, exists to help support faculty who are teaching with Wikipedia in higher education institutions in the US and Canada. The course page you referenced there is one of ours; the course from the social computing class isn't one of ours, but after it was brought to our attention earlier this year, we reached out and asked the instructor to join us in future terms, to which they seemed amenable. We also understand that course is over for this term. So hopefully any future students of theirs will receive our support. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:07, 4 April 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply, LiAnna (Wiki Ed). Last week's train wreck doesn't appear to correspond with "earlier this year". But I put in my request to you guys and that's all I can do. Best wishes, -SusanLesch (talk) 13:32, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Ah sorry by earlier this year I meant this thread: Wikipedia_talk:Education_program#College_student_asking_for_help_at_University_of_Minnesota. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:26, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
Would anyone here like to send an email to GroupLens? -SusanLesch (talk) 13:05, 6 April 2024 (UTC)
No problem, moving on. Roadkill happens. -SusanLesch (talk) 16:49, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

User talk:Shreyaaherr

Could someone talk to this student and the instructor about not creating spam in main space? Thanks -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 02:08, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Seems like the course finished in December and doesn't have anything to do with the instructor (or this noticeboard). Treat this individual as any regular editor and not a student. OhanaUnitedTalk page 04:10, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

Questions

I asked a bunch of questions over at User_talk:Ian_(Wiki_Ed)#Back_again, please respond there. Polygnotus (talk) 04:14, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Please do not, a user talkpage is not an appropriate location for extended general discussions. CMD (talk) 05:10, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
@Chipmunkdavis: Yeah but I don't really want to do a bunch of work rewriting everything so that it can be placed here. Especially since one of the problems is that I feel that a bunch of my time is being wasted and undervalued. Polygnotus (talk) 05:15, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
I've transcluded the discussion in question so that folks can see it without necessarily needing to go there. Primefac (talk) 11:36, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
Content of the link in question

@Primefac: Thanks, but please revert yourself; I got bullied off that page. Predictable, but incredibly disappointing. So my options are to waste yet more time trying to improve Wikipedia, or go descale the washing machine. I'll go descale my washing machine. Polygnotus (talk) 14:43, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

I will respectfully decline. Primefac (talk) 14:47, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
Ok, whatever. But one needs the context to see DARVO in action. Polygnotus (talk) 17:04, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
Polygnotus, please refrain from making personal attacks and assuming bad faith of other editors. Several editors noted why they thought your behavior was inappropriate, especially for the venue. I encourage you to reflect on their feedback. Wracking talk! 17:35, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
I did reflect on their feedback. And I am going to have to agree to disagree. Sometimes, when people view a situation radically different that is the best we can do. I have moved on and will do my best to avoid those users (and I sincerely hope they will do the same). I am very disappointed. Polygnotus (talk) 18:19, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Alerts for contentious articles

I'll address the technical problem that came up on Ian's talk page. Wiki Education Dashboard had a feature to monitor for any time a student in a supported course edits an article that was under discretionary sanction. The feature was based on the category, and it broke when DS was renamed to 'contentious articles' last year, and the category was renamed correspondingly. (I fixed it last week, so we're getting these alerts again.) --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:11, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. It sounds like we could, in theory, add other categories to that list. I would recommend adding Category:Pseudoscience and Category:Fringe science and Category:Alternative medical treatments (at depths higher than 1).
In \config\wizard\researchwrite\wizard.yml around line 150 I see "Medicine and other tricky topics".
It asks the teacher if they "expect any of your students to work on medicine-related articles" but that should be reworded to "articles that potentially contain medical claims".
For example, one of the schools is the "Niagara Parks School of Horticulture" so it makes sense that the teacher answers "No" to the question.
But the correct answer is yes, because one of their students is going to pick Nature therapy.
I understand that teachers cannot predict the future. A simple solution would be to always include the training module that covers MEDRS (but perhaps there are alternative solutions).
Polygnotus (talk) 18:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
That step of the assignment wizard has a fair bit of explanatory text beyond what the above quote to capture the breadth of what falls under MEDRES. Information overload is one of the constant risks with training material, so we generally avoid things like assigning a specific training module to every course when it will only be relevant to a portion of them. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:13, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
Sage (Wiki Ed), what is the rough frequency of that alert, and is it an alert I can sign up for? Alternatively, I wonder if the core of your detection code could be reengineered into a User script which would add something to the page (perhaps another icon between the alert bell and the notices icon at the top, or a sidebar item) that I could click to unroll a list of brief text and link, analogous to how the notices icon works. Ideally, it would superimpose a '1' or other indicator to flag 'something new to see here'. Tagging Certes and Nardog who may have good input about this. (In brief: some kind of opt-in notification mechanism which displays on demand a list of recent (last N?) edits by student editors (defined as a user page having {{dashboard.wikiedu.org student editor}} on it) of a page designated as contentious (see {{is_contentious}}). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 18:53, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
Lately, it's been about 1 per day, but this is somewhere close to the peak time period for student editors doing things in mainspace. The Dashboard doesn't have public feed of alerts; we generate an email for each alert, which is the main way Wiki Education staff handle them. It would be tough to repurpose the detection code for a script as it relies on queries against the Dashboard's database. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:09, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
Actually it does have a public feed of alerts: https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/spring_2024/alerts. * Pppery * it has begun... 23:30, 22 April 2024 (UTC)
Oh, right! That is specific to a campaign, though, so the location would change every semester. There is another feed of *all* alerts (which includes some types of alerts that contain non-public information) that I had in mind, but I forgot about that campaign-based feed. The data for that also comes via a JSON endpoint (eg, spring_2024), so it would be possible to make a user script out of that. However, I'm not sure how well that data would match up to the use case you have in mind, as the alerts are a mix of page-specific, user-specific, and course-specific events. (I assume a well-engineered user script would not do something like make a new request every time a new page on Wikipedia is visited, so assuming that the request frequency from such a script is low, there shouldn't be any performance impacts on the Dashboard.) Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:01, 23 April 2024 (UTC)
Sage, it's off-wiki or I'd do this myself, but would you consider adding redirect: https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/campaigns/current/alerts (or similar), which today points to */spring_2024/alerts and then gets updated 4x/year? Thanks Mathglot (talk) 03:43, 30 April 2024 (UTC)
Sure, I'll add an issue for that. It should be pretty simple, as we already have the 'current' term concept in the codebase. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:35, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

CIA class assignment

I encountered a class assignment that initially appeared to be a sockpuppet farm. It looks like at least one other person had the same initial impression because it was the subject of a sockpuppet investigation in February. There's some more information about the class on that page. I'm somewhat concerned about WP:PRIMARY and WP:NPOV based on some of the edits. There are also some more typical new user issues such as overuse of the minor edit flag. I directed several of the students to Wikipedia:Student assignments for guidance and asked them to consider passing that link along to the instructor. It might be a good idea for someone from Wiki Ed to reach out and offer support. I'm open to contacting the instructor myself, but I wanted to get input here first. Thanks. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 08:00, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for letting us know about this. It's a course we supported in 2017. I've reached out to the instructor who taught it with us back then to see what's going on. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:54, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! Daniel Quinlan (talk) 22:31, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Genetically modified food controversies

Genetically modified food controversies is under CTOP, and I just had to revert a massive sandbox-to-mainspace copy-paste of content that was inappropriate, and undo a page move. The class is this one. Facepalm Facepalm --Tryptofish (talk) 22:29, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Sorry this situation happened @Tryptofish. I messaged the student last month to choose another article to work on but... here we are. I've reached out to the instructor and the editor to no longer edit that page. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:46, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
@Brianda (Wiki Ed), there was also another one that just popped up from a different class at Genetically modified maize I had to revert. That got especially bad when the student was posting information contradictory to the scientific consensus on the subject.
I know in the past Wiki Ed folks have mentioned it's hard to keep track of all the potential CTOPs out there, but when it comes to the GMO subject, possibly adding some sort of blacklist for keywords might be helpful since many of the more prominent article title terms in this subject are going to contain "genetically modified". KoA (talk) 18:31, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
Brianda (Wiki Ed), this student at Genetically modified maize is now edit warring in violation of 1RR at the page. Edit warring like that has been very destabilizing in the topic, which is why 1RR was imposed there, especially things that touch on WP:GMORFC. That's a large part why student editing is heavily discouraged in this topic because of how often they try to reinsert content (and if I recall correctly, grades should not be dependent on if their edits remaining in mainspace, which should negate the need for edit warring).
Is there any required guidance the course instructors get (and give to students) on edit warring? In another class I had to deal with some problem student editing (Ian (Wiki Ed)'s domain on this one), their class dashboard practically has guidance encouraging edit warring or WP:MEAT with language like this on how to respond to student edits being removed: If it is because the others felt the material did not fit, and you disagree, argue with them. Get help from others in the class to participate. Do your best to keep your material up there, even if modified.
It seems like a simple statement to both groups would help to the effect that:
If a student edit is reverted, do not try to reinsert it. This is considered edit warring and can result an an account being blocked for disrupting a page. Instead, a student, like any other Wikipedia editor, should use the talk page to propose a fix or learn what problems were present that may not have been clear in the edit summary. Generally, disputed content needs WP:CONSENSUS on the talk page in order to be reinserted unless the problem is straightforward to fix based on other editor's comments or edit summaries. If there is any doubt, propose edit modifications on the talk page first. KoA (talk) 14:57, 2 May 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, Brianda. I did see that you had left a message at the student's talk page a pretty long time ago, clearly telling her that she should choose another article. But it's obvious she never looked at it, even when coming to make the edits I had to undo, or she disregarded it. I feel that it's a failure on the instructor's part not to have made this an expectation. I know it's hard for WikiEd staff to keep track of so many students all at once, and I recognize that students are going to slip through the cracks, even when given the right advice. Maybe after giving students such a message, staff could check back after a while to see if the assigned page has been changed to another. I also see that the instructor hasn't edited here since January, when the course started, and that's always a recipe for problems. Another thought: maybe we should make it standard practice to put Template:Contentious topics/alert/first on the talk pages of students (and maybe instructors?) when CTOP pages are selected. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:22, 1 May 2024 (UTC)
@KoA I noticed the GMO maize article talk page is missing the typical Discretionary Sanctions template, and I think this is why our dashboard didn't notify us of this article assignment. Yesterday, I contacted the instructor and the student and explained the specific discretionary sanctions on this article. And they got it and were apologetic about the disruption, and won't be editing the page.
In our trainings, we instruct students to look at the talk pages to get a sense of what's going on with that article. We also instruct them to engage in discussions, especially if their edits have been reverted, to avoid edit warring. I know it's been mentioned on this noticeboard before, but it's expected for student editors to be treated like other Wikipedia editors, and learn that they're responsible for their edits. They might still miss the messages on a talk page, or move forward with edits without taking the proper considerations. When that happens, editors can always ping one of the Wikipedia Experts, and we'll do our best to contact the student and instructor.
As for the template, @Tryptofish, I feel like it serves the same function as the message I left and might get the same results (student not reading it). Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:48, 3 May 2024 (UTC)
Brianda, thanks. I had looked at several of the GMO-related talk pages, and noticed the same thing that you did: that we have notices about the WP:GMORFC language, but we don't have the overall CTOP message for GMOs. I saw that first at the GM maize talk page, and thought it was an oversight that I could correct, but then I looked around and found it to be the case at numerous other topic-area talk pages. I'm not sure – maybe this happened at the DS-to-CTOP conversion?
As for your message on that student's talk page, I saw that too, and I agree with you that it likely will go unread. In general (not for student editors in particular), ArbCom requires that the "official" templates be used, unmodified, for anyone to be "aware" such that WP:AE can enforce anything. But for a student editor, and particularly one who is likely not coming back here, that may be a moot point. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:06, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute students

I used Wikipedia assignments in a 2012 course for undergraduates and in a 2019 course for graduate students. I'm now considering a course on editing Wikipedia for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute students. OLLI students are typically older than college students. Although things like grades and tests are frowned on, and required homework might not fly, these students are highly motivated learners. If anyone has embedded Wikipedia into an OLLI course, I'd like to learn from how that went. Cecile McKee Cecilemckee (talk 22:30, 8 May 2024 (UTC)

Topics relating to deaf people and Nazi Germany

Hi. This is my first time posting here. When reviewing AfC submissions, I noticed a similar pattern between the drafts I linked above. All of them seemed to be essays about similar topics, which felt like a education assignment of some kind. Following a discussion at WP:AFCHD, I decided to come here and ask. What can be done about these drafts? The users don't have WikiEd notices on their talk pages, so I'm not sure if this is really an assignment. Thanks. '''[[User:CanonNi]]''' (talk • contribs) 07:31, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

I have posted the following notice where participants, if participants they be, can see it: "If this is an education project please ask your tutor to contact the Wiki Education Foundation for guidance" 🇺🇦 FiddleTimtrent FaddleTalk to me 🇺🇦 07:40, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
Thanks! I replied on the AFCHD thread -- not much that can be done unless we can find the instructor. Hopefully if they are students they pass along your message! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:32, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

AI -related assignment?

I've reviewed at AfC three drafts today, all by different users (seemingly, at least), and all copyvios from https://www.mygreatlearning.com/blog/expert-systems-in-artificial-intelligence/ , plus another by one of these users which was copied from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349449607_Design_of_an_expert_system_architecture_An_overview instead. Anyone know if there's a student assignment/project going on somewhere? -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:54, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Said users:
-- DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:57, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
add Artificial Intelligence MLIS DAY 🇺🇦 FiddleTimtrent FaddleTalk to me 🇺🇦 14:08, 26 May 2024 (UTC)
Could this be linked? @DoubleGrazing @Timtrent Draft:R.B.T.S_Ruwange Qcne (talk) 17:57, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
I think it might be, @Qcne, I'll ask the creating editor. {{Education project}} (SUBST essential) makes this easy 🇺🇦 FiddleTimtrent FaddleTalk to me 🇺🇦 18:25, 28 May 2024 (UTC)
If you want to get really fancy, you can {{subst:education project}}. Primefac (talk) 12:04, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
I reviewed another, User:Place_of_AI_in_Information_Retrieval/sandbox. I tagged it for G12. I have also tagged the one remaining copy for G12. Obvious copyvios should be tagged for G12. Even if no one else on the Internet takes copyright seriously, Wikipedia takes copyright very seriously. DoubleGrazing says that these are all by different users, seemingly, at least. I think that a sockpuppet report may be in order. They may be one troll. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:58, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Sockpuppet report filed. Only a Checkuser will know whether they are coming from the same IP address block. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:04, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
They were all confirmed by Checkuser and blocked. This was not a class project but some sort of misconduct. These were stupid copies, copies of web pages created by copying and pasting, losing the formatting. We see some of these stupid copies at MFD, found after having been sitting in a user page or user sandbox page of a user who came several years ago, created an account, left the coprolite, and departed. We don't know why they do this, but the stupid copies get deleted seven days after being nominated for deletion. This was a slightly different subspecies of a species of misconduct. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:47, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon another one? User:Tokyo5359/sandbox Qcne (talk) 14:53, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
User:Qcne - Likely another. SPI submitted. MFD submitted. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:59, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Two drafts so far by editors:

It would be lovely to help these students, the more so if their grades depend on it 🇺🇦 FiddleTimtrent FaddleTalk to me 🇺🇦 16:38, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Medical drafts

In the past couple of hours there's been a flurry of drafts, probably some sort of (pre-med? medical sciences?) student assignment. So far I've spotted at least:

A few of these have noted on their user pages that they are studying at the University of Hong Kong.

BTW, should we be pinging these users when filing such reports, or not? -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 13:36, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Pinging @Venuslui:, who used to help support education work in Hong Kong. Also pinging @無聊龍: and @だ＊ぜ:, who are listed as contacts for tutorials at m:Wikimedia Community User Group Hong Kong, so might be able to help. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:32, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Thank you, User:DoubleGrazing. You and User:Jlwoodwa and I have looked at these drafts. I have posted the Student welcome on these user pages of the ones whose drafts I saw. The instructor may be User:G.J.ThomThom. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:32, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Hi there! Yes I'm the instructor. The topics for these articles came from Wikipedia's own list of requested articles for medicine. We consult one of the Wiki contacts in Hong Kong. What I'm learning is that some of the topics on the list of requested articles may already exist but use other terminology. This may explain why some of the articles the students draft don't make it to the main space. I'd be grateful for tips for how to navigate this better. Happy for any advice and guidance. G.J.ThomThom (talk) 18:03, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
@G.J.ThomThom: Please read WP:ASSIGN if you have not read it already. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:03, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
Also Draft:Shortening of the eye muscle by Aalpaca92, possibly? jlwoodwa (talk) 17:36, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Deakin University medical anth course

Just a heads up that there is a Deakin University (Victoria) level 2 anthropology class with an assignment to find a contested topic and edit / contribute to a Wikipedia page from an anthropological perspective whilst adhering to the core content policies of the platform.. This is of course "contested topic" in the usual sense, not the WP:CTOP sense, but these editors may still run into some trouble. Alerted by WP:TEA#Contributing to an extended protection article - which is to say, so far I've only seen perfectly model editors from this class and no ongoing disruption. It's not being done through WikiEd, but maybe one of the WikiEd folks can contact the instructor to offer assistance for the future? I can't remember if Australia is one of the countries WikiEdu works with or not. -- asilvering (talk) 00:39, 12 August 2024 (UTC)

Australia isn't in Wiki Education's support network, but pinging @BindiS, Aliceinthealice, and AlphaLemur: from Wikimedia Australia. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:59, 12 August 2024 (UTC)
Thanks LiAnna and asilvering for flagging this. Will follow up, as this one is not on our radar at all. BindiS (talk) 10:07, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

Students editors at Gregory Clark (economist)

Per Talk:Gregory Clark (economist)#WP:DUE weight and WP:TONE of recent edits there's a least 5 student editors wanting to edit that article for a project. It's not clear if that's the only article which might be involved nor which institution or even where but I think it might be the US. Nil Einne (talk) 18:16, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! I just posted a note there offering our assitance. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:03, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Teahouse discussion about students creating articles on medical topics

Alert: could some folks here please monitor and/or contribute at the discussion going on at WP:Teahouse#Medical article creation for students - Topic selection and audience level ?

First sentence there:

Hello, I'm an instructor guiding students in creating Wikipedia articles on medical topics. We use the list of requested articles for medicine as a starting point. I am now planning the semester 2 syllabus and would like to establish best practice around 2 areas: ...

(Cross-posted at WT:MEDRS.)

Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 15:37, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Mathglot
Thank you for directing me to this page. I've already found some of the conversations here to be useful and informative. I have a lot to learn! G.J.ThomThom (talk) 23:02, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Statistics about use of sandbox vs Draft space, and about Afc

A couple of statistical questions about where Wiki Ed students develop their articles, and their release process:

  1. Dev location: What number or percentage of students use a sandbox (theirs, anybody's) vs. Draft space for pre-release development?
  2. Release method: What number or percentage of articles developed by students are submitted for Afc review, vs. released directly to main space (either by themselves or someone else like their instructor or WP expert)? If there is a third category, such as remaining stalled in their sandbox, please include that as well if possible.

This is to inform a question (diff) by Piotrus about the release of new articles by new editors which is a tiny part of a long VPP discussion unrelated to Wiki Ed about paid editing. Thanks for any light you can shed on this. Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot From the paper me and Shani are working on and that will be presented on Wikimania next week (do stop by :>):
  • Q15 Did the students work in drafts, directly on Wiki or using any other method?
  • A (N-~200): user sandbox (65%), copied to mainspace from Word (17%), directly in mainspace (5%), draftspace (~2.5%), other/I don't know/they can do whatever (~10%)
PS. Do note that our study goes beyond Wiki Ed, and concerns all educators, not just those in US&Canada which is where Wiki Edu operates (although majority of our respondents come from US...).
Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 11:46, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I'd love to hear feedback from folks involved with Wiki Ed about this, as my impression from occasional interactions is that the percentage using user sandboxes is very high (basically, every case I have encountered, but numbers are low), likely because their training modules instruct them to do so, and some of the exercises begin to create data there. Whether they are actually developing their prospective articles in the user sandbox or copying into it from an offline location, I don't know. More solid data about this would help. Mathglot (talk) 17:59, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot! It sounds like this is a question just about new articles written by students supported by Wiki Education? If so:
  1. Dev location: I'd say nearly 100% use sandboxes to draft first. Some may start in Word or Google Docs but they all copy it over to their sandbox at some point and add citations using VE's cite tool. If they *don't* draft in sandboxes, they typically don't have enough edits to be autoconfirmed so they technically cannot create one in mainspace in English Wikipedia.
  2. Release method: It's also close to 100% that go directly to mainspace. None of them go through AfC first (unless they somehow find it on their own -- we strip out the encouragement in their sandbox template to go through AfC, as our volume would overwhelm the AfC volunteers). Here are our training slides for creating new articles for students. For our process, our Dashboard creates a ticket each time a student creates a new article (this was one that broke this spring, causing us to not realize we weren't seeing all the new articles anymore for a few weeks; that's now fixed). Our Wiki Experts (Ian and Brianda) then take a look at the article; if it has problems, they'll move it back to the student's sandbox. Sometimes another Wikipedian will catch the article first and either move it to draft space or elsewhere, but that's not our typical process. At the end of the term, Ian and Brianda go through student work left in sandboxes and move anything that's ready for mainspace live; they leave half-formed drafts in sandboxes. If there's just minor cleanup needed, they'll also do that and then move it, but if the article draft would require substantive work we just leave it in the sandbox. I don't have a good sense of what percentage of the articles get left in sandboxes (many students start a topic and then abandon it to change to something else if they discover there aren't enough sources, for example, so will leave a few sentences behind on their old topic but will successfully add a different one).
I'd also add here: Overwhelmingly, our students edit existing articles. In the most recent term (Spring 2024), our students created 426 new articles but edited 5,660 existing articles. So only about 7.5% of articles we're supporting edits to are new articles. Hope this helps! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:27, 8 August 2024 (UTC)
Hi @Mathglot
  1. Dev location: In our case, 100% use sandboxes. Because the sandbox doesn't easily support collaborative editing and our students work in pairs on their articles, our programme also advises students to work collaboratively in cloud documents before moving it to the sandbox.
  2. Release method: 100% go directly to main space. None go through AfC. Many do not know about Afc review, vs. released directly to main space. We do have an experienced wiki editor in our location that we consult when it comes to moving articles to main space. This editor was not available in our last semester but we will return to this process going forward as teachers are not equipped with time or knowledge for this side of Wikipedia. One issue we encounter is that students frequently struggle to locate the sandbox after logging in, and as a result, they draft on their User Pages. When in the sandbox, some mistakenly believe that by clicking the "Submit your draft for review", the assignment will be sent to their teachers not realising it initiates a review process within the Wikipedia community. This often leads to premature submissions, especially before we have conducted necessary steps like plagiarism checks through Turnitin. If there are alternative spaces within Wikipedia that could simplify the drafting process and reduce these misunderstandings, I am eager to learn about them.
G.J.ThomThom (talk) 23:52, 13 October 2024 (UTC)
G.J.ThomThom, thanks for this, it is helpful. I hope you get more feedback here from the regulars, but your comments spur some questions or comments:
  • With respect to sandboxes: what is the difficulty you see in collaborating in a sandbox? As it is a named page on Wikipedia, I don't see why collaborating in a sandbox is any different from collaborating in, say, a published article? I'm not sure if there is any reason why students shouldn't collaborate at first offline in a cloud document, other than the fact that Wikipedia editors will not be able to mentor them there or correct any mistakes or misunderstandings of offline material. For that reason alone, if I had my druthers, I would urge all students to collaborate within the pages here (sandbox, or not) for better transparency, and so that experienced editors here can better help them.
  • Release method: is the editor at your location there fortuitously, or is this something like the WP:Wikipedian in residence program?
  • Locating the sandbox: again, I do not understand; can you describe the difficulty in locating it? The location of a student's user sandbox is linked from literally *every page* at Wikipedia. In my device and skin, it is top right between the links for 'Talk' and 'Preferences'. In mobile view, click the person icon top right, and it is the third item in the drop-down.
  • Meaning of 'Submit your draft for review': I do understand, and do you think a simple change to the wording of the prompt to make it clear it is a Wikipedia submission and not a class submission would help? This might be amenable to a fix either through an enhancement to an existing template, or a wrapper template around the existing one which would alter the wording, but only for students, to clarify the target of the submission.
  • Alternative spaces: I assume you already are using Draft space, but if not, that is the dedicated space for developing articles in relative peace and quiet, with full transparency and the possibility of collaboration from anyone.
Hope this helps. Mathglot (talk) 04:52, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
@Mathglot. Here are the answers to your questions:
What is the difficulty you see in collaborating in a sandbox?
Lack of real-time, synchronous editing capabilities. In cloud-based platforms, multiple users can edit simultaneously whether physicslly together or at a distance whereas you can only edit a wiki space, one at a time. We stage all the processes with the students. Using a cloud doc provides a space for the pre-writing stage: brainstorming ideas, outlining, planning roles and contributions, making decisions about a topic, compiling sources, using the annotation feature for communicating decisions on the document. Once they have built some content, they then move it to the sandbox to apply all the wiki features.
As for mentoring provided from outside experienced Wikipedia editors while their drafts are in the sandbox, I have not observed this in practice. The only actions we have encountered from outside editors is account cancellations due to misconceptions of sock puppetry when students inadvertently duplicate content across their accounts. We've tried to mitigate this by assigning one sandbox per pair of students for the draft itself and ensuring they clearly state their intentions on their User pages. Both students still need accounts to access each others sandbox since they're working in pairs. Arguably, the cloud doc comes in handy in preventing students violating Wikipedia protocols in the early stages.
Is the editor at your location there fortuitously, or is this something like the WP:Wikipedian in residence program?
Neither. The editor lives in our location and is a seasoned Wikipedian editor.
Can you describe the difficulty in locating the sandbox?
It's not a huge problem. The students are coming to Wikipedia spaces for the first time. We get them set up with opening their accounts etc. For new Wikipedia users, distinguishing between different user spaces like the User Page, Talk Page, and Sandbox can be confusing at first. I have discovered over time too that landing pages of new accounts have different components to accounts that have been going for a while (like mine). I have noticed that now, new accounts even have an assigned mentor to ask questions to and some links to help a newcomer get started. This is great! When was this feature added? When students return to their accounts after absence from it for a few days, some assume they have logged back into or have arrived in their sandbox when they enter their accounts. Or they assume the User page is the sandbox. The tabs for User Page and Talk Page are visible immediately on entering but yes you have to navigate to the drop down menu along the side to locate the account sandbox which is where they place the drafts. This is straightforward for me and you but not always for a newcomer. This issue is with a minority of students though. Most students understand it and we get there in the end.
Do you think a simple change to the wording of the prompt to make it clear it is a Wikipedia submission and not a class submission would help?
I forgot to mention how the word "publish" causes confusion too at first. Some new users think they are moving their work to main space by clicking this. I tell them to consider this button as a "save" button. As for a change in the wording of the 'Submit your draft for review' prompt, this would definitely help but only if it is considered a big problem for many and if we insist that the sandbox is where they draft. If they are better off drafting in another space to avoid the issues, then we can also guide this. But then this raises the question of how we pass the article to the main space without causing headaches for everyone. I feel the 'Submit your draft for review' is an important step we need to take which is not, as far as I can tell, in other drafting spaces. G.J.ThomThom (talk) 12:16, 14 October 2024 (UTC)
Alternative spaces: I assume you already are using Draft space, but if not, that is the dedicated space for developing articles in relative peace and quiet, with full transparency and the possibility of collaboration from anyone.
I have not actively encouraged the use of the Draft space as you mentioned since we always target the sandbox. But some drafts do end up scattered across various spaces, which complicates the review and grading process. Ideally we would like to aim for a work flow that is standardised so that both students and teachers can follow and find the drafts etc. Is the Draft space a better space for students to draft in? What do you recommend is the best way to handle moving the drafts to main space? From where? G.J.ThomThom (talk) 13:53, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Edu student repeatedly disrupting an article

This student has repeatedly (1, 2, 3) edited Conflict of interest to remove large portions of the article (seemingly at random) and replace them with brief, poorly-written sentences (e.g., it occurs in personal intrest like family friends and intrest thast as a workplace to judge them). Are they being instructed to do this? jlwoodwa (talk) 16:13, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

@Jlwoodwa - Sorry this happened. Since it doesn't look like they're seeing talk page messages I'll get in touch with their instructor and ask them to intervene. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:17, 15 October 2024 (UTC)
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