User:Wugapodes/WikiEd Brainstorm

Following up on Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard#Sourcing_and_POV_concerns_with_Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/UCSD/IPE_Money_and_Finance_IMF_WB_(Fall_2019) this page is a place to brainstorm and improve ways academic courses engage with the community.

Shared goals

Students editing Wikipedia adds value to the encyclopedia, and editing Wikipedia benefits the education of students. This mutually beneficial collaboration should be encouraged, but expectations and limits should be developed to prevent negative affects on student education and the encyclopedia. To help develop these boundaries, it is useful to consider what goals are shared between the Wikipedia community and participants editing Wikipedia as part of an academic course.

• Subject-area specialists many areas of the encyclopedia lack editors who have in-depth knowledge of the topic. Wikipedia editing allows students to apply the information they learn in their course while Wikipedia articles get attention from editors with in-depth knowledge of the topic.
• Is there value in encouraging students to work collaboratively on articles? Should they collaborate with their peers? With established editors?

What articles should student editors work on?

• Students should edit articles with over 30 page watchers but fewer than 100
  • To introduce students to the collaborative nature of Wikipedia, having them edit articles that other editors steward is useful (the software doesn't count watchers below 30). To avoid contentious topic areas or being overwhelmed, limiting the number of active editors on the project article is useful.
    • How reasonable is it for students/instructors to know this? Is there evidence that these numbers are the right ones for successful approach?
• Students should not create new articles
  • Given the numerous ways in which the creation of new articles can bite new users, and given the nearly 6 million existing articles, the community would like student editors to focus on improving existing content rather than producing new articles
  • Instructors should understand the difficulties of creating new articles so that they know why students are discouraged from creating new articles.
    • The community should develop concise statements to help in this (and for our own self interest, to help resolve pain points)
  • Alternatively, students should only create articles in areas identified by the community

Controversial articles

Students should not edit in controversial topic areas. Students lack the expertise and guideline/policy knowledge that editing in such areas require, also may have incentives (in their minds or in reality) that cause them to act in ways contrary to the BRD cycle, and may not be around long enough to see conversations about their content changes achieve talk page consensus (or not). Controversial topics include, but are not limited to:

• Featured content (FA/FLC/GA) (not exactly controversial but also a clearly delineated standard that will frequently not be helped by the kinds of edits done by student editors)
• Entire classes should not all be creating articles on different subtopics of what is fundamentally the same subject. I'm penning this restriction with "World Bank in Country X" in mind, but this shouldn't be read as a ban on classes that have a topic such as "African American music from the 40s-60s", because even if the subjects all have something in common, the various subjects are not literally the same organization
• ...(other ideas)...

Topics under active sanctions

Topics currently under active (DS/GS) sanctions should not be edited by students. The only potential exception is biographies of living people, but students should consider alternate topics. Students may edit biographies of living people under certain circumstances

Cases where students may edit BLPs

• When the student started working on the article, there was no notice of sanctions on the talk page
• ...

Cases where students may not edit BLPs

• The biography falls under any active sanction other than the BLP sanction
• ...

How do we handle problems?

• Suggestions on topics to edit should be tightened to policy
  • While educators and students are counseled to not choose certain kinds of articles, the community should impose restrictions as a matter of policy on the kinds of articles student editors can take on as projects (i.e., tag with {{Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment}}
• When should blocks be used on student editors, if at all?
• Should there be some kind of CSD?
  • What would the objective criteria be?
• Should some subset of users (sysops? new page reviewers?) be authorized to DRAFTIFY on this basis?
• What new tools/procedures, if any, are needed when the articles for improvement are existing rather than new?

Sample from Spring 2020 term

We have a sample of a course doing considerable damage in this discussion, and we have yet to even evaluate the previous courses from the same instructor. Using this as an example, how can we:

1. Make sure the instructor gets the message and is put on some sort of "probation", just as we would a regular (non-student) editor, so that she better supervises her students?
2. Make sure Wiki Ed gets the message that this instructor's students should not be let out of sandbox until she can pass "probation", just as we would a regular editor?
3. Take admin action if her future courses violate "probation", just as we would a regular editor?
4. Do this in a way that she won't just run unregistered courses.

I suspect that all of their past coursework will need to be cleaned up. If this happens again, we need to be able to take the kind of action against this instructor that we would take against any other editor. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:33, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Thoughts/Opinions by Specific Editors

Barkeep49

• I have a lot of concern over how these efforts play out in relation to the third pillar.
• I also don't want to create incentives for classes not to register with WikiEd.

---

I don't not have concerns about the 3rd pillar, but it's worth considering what are the extreme positions. In some ways I think about it like COI editing, but where the conflict of interest is the student's grade. It's not that editors with a COI cannot edit the encyclopedia, rather, their editing needs to be within certain guidelines to make sure their engagement with the encyclopedia is mutually beneficial. Your second point is a good one because we don't want to make the process so annoying that it backfires and we have a bunch of rogue courses. — Wug·a·po·des​ 22:16, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

Rosguilla

• Not sure we want to encourage students to engage with Wikipedia as subject-matter experts, as new editors who are subject matter experts often have a hard time understanding that they can't add OR
• I think that there's likely certain topics that student editors can safely create articles in. Major historical events and state or federal level government agencies for countries/regions affected by systemic bias are almost always notable, and yet we are sorely lacking these articles. As far as Wikipedia is concerned, almost nothing has ever happened in the Caribbean of sub-saharan Africa, and students would be well positioned to fix that. What we don't need is biographies of obscure playwrights (even if the bio's subjects are also affected by systemic bias, the inherent notability isn't there the way it is for world history and government)
• I think a blanket ban on BLPs is appropriate
• I don't think that the proposed Draftify and blocking measures will be particularly useful, as in my experience we usually come across problem WikiEd articles well after the course has concluded and the students have disappeared.
• Instead, maybe we should have some way to review a class as a batch, and have some sort of heuristic where if a class has more than 10% of its articles have significant problems that would normally result in draftifying or deletion, the rest of the pages can be tagged for CSD G5 (or an analogous new CSD protocol), with the assumption that articles that are clearly acceptable should not be tagged. Instructors of such courses should also be prohibited from teaching additional courses (maybe with some sort of method of regaining the community's trust?)

AugusteBlanqui

• I'm not sure if this is well-known, but WikiEd only supports class projects from North American universities. There are many academics outside of NA that use English Wikipedia for class projects. Some of these use the "outreach dashboard" (outside of NA we do not, unless policy changed recently, have access to the same tools that WikiEd provides NA academics), others are completely off the radar.

• Education and socialization of academics to Wikipedia's norms and culture is arguably more important than training students.

• In terms of contributions a useful approach is to work within a Wikiproject. All of these have "to-do" lists that range from requested articles to clean-up.

Dialectric

Following up on AugusteBlanqui's point that WikiEd only supports class projects from North American universities, it seems that no one from wikimedia (or related orgs) supports English-speaking students outside of North America at this time. In the past, an employee of wikimedia UK handled some of this. Currently, Nichole Saad is the 'Senior Program Manager, Education' at the WMF and has not responded to pings on the Wikipedia:Education noticeboard or my request on her talk page on meta. Meta also has a meta:Wikipedia & Education User Group, but they don't seem to be very active, and also didn't respond to my questions on meta. Dialectric (talk) 00:53, 24 March 2020 (UTC)