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The CCCC Wikipedia Initiative

I recently learned about the Conference on College Composition & Communication, and its "Wikipedia Initiative" (CCCCWI). They mention Wiki Edu on their Wikipedia Initiative page. I don't quite understand if this is just a passing mention, or if there is some connection between Wiki Edu and the CCCC WI. If there is one, maybe we could have a Wiki Edu page briefly explaining what it is, and linking to it? Adding User:Breadyornot, who may know more about this, or who may be able to point us to someone on the CCCC side who could weigh in here on their perspective about this. Mathglot (talk) 20:39, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

We've worked with CCCC in the past, running a workshop at their conference (I think in 2015...?) to present to members about Wikipedia assignments and joining the Wikipedia Student Program. At the moment, our relationship is mostly through individual members who are a part of the program and assigning their students to work with Wikipedia. Typically, if they know of any members teaching composition courses and using Wikipedia as a teaching tool, they make sure they know about Wiki Education and the support we offer. Jami (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:21, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Several months ago, I tried to reach out to a member in CCCC group, who gave a presentation, through LinkedIn. No response. Communication appears to be poor. OhanaUnitedTalk page 20:19, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Teacher running into trouble, their project described as "highly disruptive"?

See User_talk:Onwuka_Glory#Your_students (which are mostly blocked now)? It's likely they can use a helping hand in sorting this mess out. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:30, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

As the blocking admin for most of these accounts, I've unblocked them all now after the conversation there and on my talk page. Graham87 14:40, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Misleading Wiki Edu sigs at student tutorial pages

@Sage (Wiki Ed):, there appear to be four signatures in your name at the page User talk:Baruch Omale/talk page tutorial, in the responses to section § Hello 3. However, page history shows no activity by you. If there's a procedure or bot placing your sig at Talk pages based on activity by another user, I'm pretty sure that is a policy violation of some sort. Can you look into this?

Secondly, according to the timestamps on the sigs in your name on that page, four identical messages were placed within the same minute. Only, the timestamps aren't accurate, they are unsubst'ed timestamps that always show the time when the page was last loaded, instead of when the messages were saved. Checking page history, it turns out they really were all placed within the same minute, but a year ago. Given the elapsed time since then, maybe this has been fixed already, but I thought I'd better bring it to your attention. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:22, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

This comes from the talk page tutorial guided tour — MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-wikiedtalkpage.js — which gets launched from this training module. Specifically, the signatures come from Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/tour/talk page preload and Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/tour/talk page preload 2. In that particular case, the student must have navigated back and repeated the tour step that posts the message with my sig multiple times.
If this is against policy, I wasn't aware of it... it hasn't caused any problems that I know of, until now. I believe The Wikipedia Adventure does some very similar things. However, it should be simple to avoid realistic-looking sigs by changing those two preloads. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:21, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
Hi, Sage. Checking Wikipedia:Signatures (a behavioral guideline, thus not a policy), it does say in the lead sentence that "[s]igning your posts... is required ". The second paragraph essentially restates this requirement, and goes on about sanctions for signatures that are intentionally disruptive, clearly not the case here with the student editors. Down the page, section § Signature forgery starts off with the bolded statement, "Never use another editor's signature". Topping the section, is a box stating that this section of the page is, in fact, Wikipedia policy.
The unusual aspect of this case, is that the signature on the page was not intentionally placed there by the Wiki Edu student, but rather by an external process (the Wiki Edu training module, via the script), which, as I understand, is a tool that publishes content on a Wikipedia Talk page on behalf of Wiki Edu students. Imho, any content thus added falls under the responsibility of the student who uses the tool and publishes a Talk page change, for the same reason that someone using a script or bot or semi-automated procedure is responsible for those changes. One analogy might be the semi-automated procedure AWB, where the user interacts with the external tool while making edits. A key difference in how AWB and the training module work, is that if the user agrees with AWB's proposed change, the edit is signed under the name of the user operating AWB, not as, e.g., the name of the programmer who wrote AWB, thus preserving the policy requirement concerning signatures. Otoh, the training module, apparently doesn't do this, substituting your name for the name of the student user who is completing the training module.
This seems like a policy violation to me, but the WP:SIG page doesn't specifically call out anything about bots or editing assistance procedures, so it's not clear whether there's a policy issue here or not. This is the first time I've run into something like this, and isn't my area of expertise, so I'll list this discussion and ask for help. Probably the policy section of the SIG guideline should be modified to address the script- or bot-assisted procedures that place signatures on talk pages so we know for sure what is and isn't covered by the policy. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:38, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
As far as the incorrect timestamps, I know there's a way of preventing a WP:Substitution from taking place in a transcluded file by judicious use of <noinclude>; but whether this would work in the preload file case, I'm not sure, as it would be the {{Edit}} template doing that, not the page that transcludes the edit, so maybe some tricky, double-noinclusion would be necessary to get it to work, if it's even possible. But that seems secondary to the userid issue, however. Mathglot (talk) 03:58, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

New pages being created with invalid syntax that needs to be cleaned up

I'm hoping that this is the right place to get someone's attention about new pages that are being created with many wikitext syntax (Linter) errors. For example, this page was created by Chapmansh in October 2022, via a process described in the edit summary as "Updating course from dashboard.wikiedu.org". It was created with 23 Linter errors.

How can I track down the source of these syntax errors so that they can be avoided in the future? In addition to the syntax errors, there is a large amount of unnecessary text formatting (span tags specifying fonts, which is not necessary or recommended for normal pages on Wikipedia) that should ideally be removed. Thanks for any tips about tracking down the source of these problems. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:52, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Just a note that this seems to be the same series of class projects as in #Course coordinator currently involved in an ArbCom case relating to a course they are teaching, above. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:58, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Also, when I clicked to edit the page and fix the syntax errors, I found a big red edit notice that told me any changes would be overwritten from a different site by some automated process. It looks like we may have to get an external tool fixed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:07, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Those pages are a combination of free-form content that is coming from markdown that gets converted to mediawiki, some standard structure that comes from the Dashboard code, and a set of templates. Hopefully the problems are coming from either the Dashboard code or the templates. What's the easiest way to see the details of these syntax errors? Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:51, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps the easiest way to see the errors on this page is to look at the edit I have made to clean them up. There were span tags wrapping multiple lines, unclosed or unopened wikitext formatting codes, large amounts of span tags containing useless or broken font formatting, LISTGAP errors, and a missing {{end of course timeline}} template at the end of the page, among other problems. I have found that "end" template missing on some other Spring 2023 course pages as well. I'll be happy to help track down the sources of these errors with you. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:18, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. Looks like you created that 'end of course timeline' template, and the Dashboard code doesn't use it (so course pages that it gets added to will get overwritten). What problem does that template solve? (Currently, I think it won't be found on any course pages except ones where someone manually added it.)
For the errors such as span tags, I believe those are particular to that course's timeline content. The Dashboard lets instructors include arbitrary content in individual timeline blocks via a WYSIWYG editor, which then gets converted to MediaWiki markup to be posted on course pages (via Pandoc). Most instructors don't significantly customize their timelines, so it includes a standard set of content with relatively simple formatting, but for customized timelines, I'm not sure there is a complete solution aside from disabling timeline mirroring altogether. (I'm open to that, as I'm not sure whether anyone finds it useful, but I don't want to make such a change unilaterally.) Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:33, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
The end of course timeline template fixes a problem where there was a missing closing </div> tag at the end of the page. The <div> tag is opened by {{start of course timeline}}. Tags that don't exist in pairs generally constitute invalid syntax. Span tags in themselves are not errors, but when they are used to wrap block content, or when they do not have closing tags, they create errors. Bold markup that tries to wrap multiple lines also creates errors. Those sorts of errors appear to be created by the WYSIWYG editor or during the migration of the text from the dashboard to Wikipedia; whatever process creates the errors should be fixed, otherwise edits to fix the syntax will continue to be undone by page updates. The page I fixed once again has 22 syntax errors on it because it has been reimported with updates from the dashboard site, along with the errors created by the dashboard site or the migration process. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:50, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: Wiki Education has a Dashboard where professors/students engage with a course page. The dashboard automatically updates a copy of that course page on-wiki for ease of viewing/linking. In other words, this professor isn't responsible for technical errors on the page, and if there are errors on that course page there are likely errors elsewhere. Sounds like something Sage (Wiki Ed) should be able to help with. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 23:51, 4 March 2023 (UTC)
Sage (Wiki Ed): Wiki Education declares "Wiki Education engages students and academics to improve Wikipedia." Improving Wikipedia includes following Wikipedia style and standards, and that includes avoiding unnecessary HTML such as <br> tags where Wiki markup doesn't need them. Improving Wikipedia also includes avoiding lint errors. Just as we don't want educators confusing lay and lie, we don't want educators using markup contrary to Wikipedia style standards, especially on pages that instruct students what to do on Wikipedia.
I found Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Chapman University/Jewish Life from Napoleon to Hitler (Spring 2023) listed on Misnested tag with different rendering in HTML5 and HTML4 lint errors, so I edited it, and in the editor, at the top, it says, "DO NOT EDIT OR MOVE THIS PAGE! ... Be aware that any changes you make here will eventually be replaced by the official course page at dashboard.wikiedu.org...." Clicking the link takes one to the course page, but it's not apparent where the "replacement markup" is stored. Perhaps it would be apparent to someone who knows how to log in. There should be better instructions for those preparing that markup. Wiki Ed educators should be encouraged to familiarize themselves with, regularly consult, and abide by the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, and they should know about lint errors and strive to avoid them. I hope you will be a champion for good markup and good style on Wikipedia on the part of the Wiki Education project. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:26, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Discussion about student editing at WikiProject Medicine

There is a lively, ongoing conversation at WT:MEDICINE which started out as a commentary about a course in which most students have been assigned medical topics. Initially, the subject was about whether it's reasonable to expect students to be able to tackle such medical topics as a student, but quickly became active, and branched out into questions about editor retention, student writing quality on various topics, stats or demographic issues about student editors and new editors more generally, plenty of opinions, and more. Your feedback would be welcome at WT:WikiProject Medicine#Student editing. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:18, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Student editor retention, or re-welcoming

Hi. Is editor retention a goal at Wiki Ed? It would be good to have some solid data about student editor behavior after their course ends, so that the past/current situation can be quantified, and so we know if current retention efforts are having any impact. I don't usually see student contributions after the end date of their course, but as it happens, I just recently ran across a student editor from 2019 ( Jmjosh90 (talk · contribs)[noping] ) who now has 800 edits to their credit and is actively contributing, most of it recent. I was not at all surprised to see a bivariate distribution in their editing pattern, with a flurry of edits in 2019 ending around mid-December when their course ended, followed by a three year lull when they had almost no edits (no doubt while they were busy with school), followed by a ramp-up to active editing again (after graduation, one presumes).

This editor decided to come back of their own accord, but I wonder if we could significantly improve on that by some kind of outreach on our part at the appropriate time? I can imagine an editor retention project—possibly a collaboration between WP:Editor retention and the WP:Welcoming committee—to recontact student editors, say, two-to-four years later with custom welcome messages aimed at checking into how they are doing, and a friendly message that we'd like to see them back. This might depend on keeping e-mail notifications for student users active after their course ends, so they see the ping at their UTP. In order to know what works and what doesn't, some kind of data collection would help. The folks at WP:RAQ may be able to help with this, and I'll make a request there to see what might be possible. If this is already being done within Wiki Ed, please lmk so I don't make a duplicate request unnecessarily. If there is already a project page about Wiki Ed student editor retention, can someone point me to it? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Adding Sdkb, who has a good head for this sort of thing, and Shibbolethink, who has a unique background as far as understanding what juggling Wikipedia and intensive studies (med school, in his case) is like. I also left messages with linkbacks at WP:WT, WP:QUERY and WP:RETENTION, so hopefully we'll get a variety of feedback. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:55, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
  • I'm not convinced of the 2-4 year mark, simply because by that time, most people would have moved on. I don't believe everyone would have email notifications or similar set up for their talk page, and maybe emailing just for retention would be too intrusive? Either way, my point is... I think if you're executing something like this, a shorter time period after the course ends would be much better. Say roughly 6 months or so, which feels like some sort of sweet spot in my opinion.
    Otherwise I think the idea is worth trying. You just need a list of editors and a rough timestamp for when their courses ended, so you would want a friendly welcoming message N months afterwards. It seems not high effort, and retaining just a couple more of them might be worth the effort anyway. Soni (talk) 01:19, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
    Thanks for your comments. Compiling a list of editors is the easy part; here's a link to the first 100 of 80,000 Wiki Ed students. For the hard part, see WP:RAQ. Mathglot (talk) 01:31, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
    I think it would be desirable to plant a seed immediately at the end of the course with a message selling the virtues of contributing, and then a followup perhaps a month later. Six months feels a bit late to me. isaacl (talk) 01:56, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
    I agree. It's better to remind students at the end of course (or shortly afterwards since they may be preparing for final exam) rather than wait a year. The end-of-course message can mention things like "you can still contribute to Wikipedia even after the course is over" or "take a look at these WMF projects and see which one interests you" OhanaUnitedTalk page 02:30, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
    First draft of a template responding to comments so far is at: {{subst:Student retention}}. Mathglot (talk) 08:12, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
    • Reading the draft, and I think it's too much of a wall of text. Twinkle welcome templates have perfected this art, but there's a few things you should ideally do. Links to have "Oh I can read more" if someone's interested, but without overwhelming someone who doesnt need more. Splitting paragraphs into lines and maybe separate points too. Formatting as a way to highlight some things more. Some images if possible.
    Twinkle templates that might be good inspirations would be Template:Welcoming, Template:Welcome cookie
    Soni (talk) 12:11, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
    • I suggest a very short message covering the following points: thanks for contributing; Wikipedia has a wealth of material that only exists because of editors like you; Wikipedia makes its information available freely to everyone with its share-alike licensing; we hope you will continue to contribute. isaacl (talk) 16:15, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Researching student editor retention is one of my potential future projects. We need a survey and a list of students. Do keep in mind that limiting ourselves just to Wiki Ed means limiting ourselves to just US & Canada. Probably not a big issue as I expect the results might be similar for most countries. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:10, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Piotrus, Yes, I had 'survey' in the back of my mind, too. Not sure what you had in mind, but I was thinking about finding out who *does* stick around, and then survey them to find out why, and to include some open-ended questions in the survey to get their feedback, such as, 'Why do you think that most of the students in the class you participated in didn't keep editing here? What do you think we could do to get more students in your class to stick around?' and things like that. As a first step towards that, we need to find out who is already in the "still-active" group, and that is one of the points of my db request, which already has returned some interesting results, thanks to some great work by Soni. I will be back here later with some easy-to-read tabular displays of that data, but see WP:RAQ if you want the raw form. Mathglot (talk) 22:16, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
@Mathglot I'd be happy to be involved in this, I can help design a survey. We could also try to contact students who are not active and ask them why they never came back. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 01:36, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
@Piotrus: I would be happy to, as well, although I'd probably play second fiddle most of the time, as I feel oversubscribed as is (aren't we all?). In any case, I had this thought in the back of my mind, that if we (or someone) did our homework first as far as gathered more data as Soni has started to, and do a bit of analysis based on it, and then drafted a fairly professional or at least decent-looking proposal, this is something that Wikimedia might be pretty interested in, and either take on themselves if we're happy with that, or else if we/someone wanted to pilot it ourselves, they might approve a grant which we could use to implement some professional survey tasks. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but since you mentioned 'survey' a couple of times, thought I'd better spill the beans on one of the paths I thought this might eventually take. Far from the only path, btw, but it is one possible approach. What did you have in mind? (I'm subscribed, so you needn't ping; what about you?) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:50, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
I'd be interested in contributing some spoons on this, depending on what you need. I've been away from Wiki for a few years but should still have enough insights to Swiss army knife most things you need Soni (talk) 04:43, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
@Piotrus, I wonder how many of them create a new account or edit as IPs. Reaching out to the old account might miss people.
It might be worth asking in the annual editor survey as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
@WhatamIdoing What annual editor survey? Is this a thing? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:20, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
I presume she is talking about m:Community Wishlist Survey 2023. Mathglot (talk) 04:27, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
No, the big survey about demographics, which is called m:Community Insights at the moment. A lot of the information we have in Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Demographics comes from this. The surgey belongs to m:Global Data and Insights Team these days. In the last few years, they've been more assertive about random sampling (instead of posting the links on the village pump and seeing what happens, aside from proving that high-volume editors are more willing to slog through an hour-long survey on Qualtrics than average people), so you might not have seen it for a while. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:59, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
From my (limited) understanding, editor retention after courses end is indeed a significant problem, and I'd love to see some good research on this from WikiEd.
I think a fundamental part of the problem is that, when something is introduced as an assignment, people think of it as, well, an assignment, and who ever carries on with an assignment after it has been turned in? Even students that go so far as to nominate articles they create for DYK often then disappear. I'm not sure exactly how to overcome that hurdle, but I think that's the much bigger one than lack of time as a student. I certainly hope that courses that use WikiEd end with an invitation from the instructor to keep on contributing; a talk page message might not be quite as impactful but couldn't hurt either. Students will certainly keep on using Wikipedia, so a relatively small ask like "now that you know how to edit a page, the next time you see a typo, go ahead and fix it!" might be good. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:23, 31 March 2023 (UTC) (please Reply to icon mention me on reply)
When I think of student editors who became highly active long term Wikipedia editors, User: Kevin Gorman comes to mind. He was a student at UC Berkeley in 2011 when he started editing mushroom articles and later moved on to woman philosophers and the men's rights movement. I knew Kevin and met with him several times at Wikimedia events. He had chronic health issues. He became an administrator but later got desysopped at least in part because he was excessively combative with right wing POV pushers. Sadly, Kevin died in 2016 but vicious trolls sometimes attack him, even recently. He had about 12,000 edits at the time of his death. Cullen328 (talk) 04:42, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi all, my apologies for my delay in chiming in here, I've been away from my computer. I can confirm Wiki Education does *not* focus on attempting to retain any student editors that start through our program. Instead, our goal is to retain good instructors. For example, I met this instructor at a conference, convinced him to try our program, and he has taught with Wikipedia every year since, bringing more than 50 students who have added great content to Wikipedia. We support hundreds of good instructors each year who we've retained to continue bringing new student editors to Wikipedia.
We've brought more than 114,000 students to Wikipedia through this program, and very few remain as long term editors. This strongly leads me to believe that you either get the Wikipedia bug and realize you love editing an encyclopedia, or you don't — and if you're not the kind of person who thinks that sounds fun, it's not going to stick, no matter what. I can say anecdotally when we talk to students, most of them are very enthusiastic about editing Wikipedia and claim that they plan to continue editing after the course is over. But very few actually do — so it isn't a matter of them not knowing they can, or not wanting to, it's a matter of their own decisions of where to spend their time — and despite their assurances, only a few of them really get that Wikipedia bug enough to prioritize it over other demands on their time. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:02, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Hm, that's interesting, and I guess not what I expected, although I suppose I had thought it would be a goal, at least in theory, and hopefully in practice if and when feasible and if resources were available for it, which I know can be a problem. I guess I view the student retention issue more as Skdb does, with the distinction between *having* to do a task in a formal education environment, and *choosing* to do it on one's own, being paramount. I still remember my distaste at having to read "Tale of Two Cities" in high school, and being forced to spend most of one school vacation slogging through "Pride and Prejudice" to prepare for a semifinal after vacation. Now, I am a Dickens fan, and I can't count the number of times I've reread Austen's premier novel (and the others) with pure pleasure, and enjoyed the various film versions of them as well. For me, that distinction was everything, and I now credit those distasteful high school courses as having planted the seeds that sprouted later. (I'll just repeat a plug for the discussion about student editor retention going on right now at WikiProject Medicine: WT:MED#Student editing.)
"Instructor retention" is something I hadn't thought of; that seems like a great idea, and it's clear your efforts have borne fruit. I would hope that with a bit of attention and planning, we could retain a fraction of our Wiki Ed students as well and convert them into volunteer editors after their university course-mandated editing is over, but it sounds like that is not in the cards right now, or at least, not if piloted by Wiki Ed. I wonder if this could be subsumed under some already existing project at WMF; User:Whatamidoing (WMF), do you know if there is a task or project group at WMF that looks at editor retention generally? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:56, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't think that any team is assigned specifically to retain editors. Several teams, however, look at editor retention wrt to their projects. Mostly, though, the goal is to make sure that you're not screwing up editor retention. I hear that it's a difficult metric to increase. People's real lives and real-world habits may or may not have space for editing Wikipedia, and there's very little that a website can do to change those external factors. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Adding: It's not just Wiki Ed -- the whole world of programs and organizations which serve to bring people to Wikipedia in one way or another have been chasing "retention" from the beginning. There are lots of guidelines and best practices out there from lots of experiments and programs, but as far as I know, nobody has come up with a process to reliably retain editors outside of extremely narrow cases (or when you introduce paid editing, which isn't the kind of retention the community particularly wants). It's a perennial "nice to have" internal goal for many organizations, but for anyone that relies on WMF or other funders, they need metrics and other goals they know they can consistently achieve. It's the harsh reality of grants. So Wiki Ed retains instructors, affiliates retain partners, etc.
At Wikimedia NYC, we would love to churn out die-hard Wikipedians, and we do sometimes, but not in a predictable fashion. So we measure total edit-a-thon participants, total events, total partnerships, etc. and run initiatives with different kinds of deliverables. We can do the work to form and maintain partnerships and we can do the work to bring people to Wikipedia through edit-a-thons, but we can't make new editors stick around. A research project about retention in our programs is something I'd love to do, even if just to confirm it's not something we can do reliably. I think that would be useful for affiliates broadly, and perhaps it already exists. Thinking from the community's perspective, it would probably be best for it to be an independently funded grant rather than something conducted internally at one of the organizations, but that might be a big ask. Either way, if someone's going to make claims about retention, it should be done properly and at a large enough scale to be representative. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 20:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
I think this is an interesting question and I have a lot of thoughts. I taught Wikipedia for the first time this semester, and my students' final reflection assignment asked them to offer their own advice on how Wikipedia should attract more editors. tl;dr: I think WikiEd has successfully solved technological editing barriers for students, increasing the likelihood that they can be attracted into truly voluntary editing, but by shielding the encylopedia from students' unskilled article creation, WikiEd also shields students from the authentic community connections that would motivate them to return.
Long version: I think specific student outreach could be good for Wikipedia, but requires exposing students to wikipedia-the-hobby in addition to wikipedia-the-encyclopedia. My experience was that WikiEd provided truly valuable resources for wikipedia-the-encyclopedia, which my students found extremely useful in surmounting various technical barriers. I think it is a genuine change in norms that my students all reported that it was easy to learn how to make edits to Wikipedia! However, I think WikiEd (perhaps out of real necessity?) walls students off from real wiki culture, thus making it hard for students to imagine wikipedia-the-hobby. All the wikipedia-the-hobby things that we did came from my own experience. Some key points from my students' reflections:
  • My students universally had no idea they could edit wikipedia. They thought it would be technically challenging, and they expected their edits would be monitored and approved by official staff. They immediately got excited when they could make a "live" improvement. Any wikipedia assignment will get students past this particular hurdle, so WikiEd does well removing this block to editing.
  • My students universally had no idea that wikipedia was fully operated by volunteers, and we had to return to this discussion point several times. This I think is the next major hurdle to pass before a student can be come a voluntary wikipedian: they need to understand both that and why other people edit wikipedia as a hobby (not as a profession)
  • For example, they were deeply comforted to learn that Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol existed (since they actually wanted their edits monitored by "staff" to prevent mistakes) -- and then it was a real uphill battle to convince them that, for some people, patrolling wikipedia is a hobby. (It helped to tag wranglers at Archive Of Our Own.)
  • Things that seemed to help students get past this hurdle included showing them WikiProjects, and talk pages, and AfDs, and policy documents, and every single time saying "this is a person's hobby." It also helped that I showed them my own edits, and talked about how I decide which specific parts of Wikipedia I work on, and why I like this hobby.
  • Their own recommendations for how Wikipedia should get more editors were mostly things that I can't imagine Wikipedia would EVER do (for example, running paid ads on tiktok that explain that anyone can edit), but they focused on the idea that most need to be invited to join Wikipedia's community before they will even consider it.
Personally, I think WikiEd's emphasis on article creation sets students up for a walled-garden experience of Wikipedia that offers limited paths to entering the full encyclopedia. I thought the WikiEd interface wasn't well-equipped for assignments that had a mission in mind other than Writing An Article. The expectation seemed to be that students would write article drafts in draftspace and then the ones that got As would bomb the encyclopedia with content-drops that the student editor would never follow up on. That's a good way to keep incompetent and unwilling editors from disrupting the encyclopedia, but as a result it's also a bad way of inviting newbie editors into the reality of the community.
Now that WikiEd has a solid foundation of tools and trainings to guide students through the how of editing Wikipedia, I think it would be valuable to turn attention to assignments or modules that give students a truer taste of why people edit Wikipedia. For example, rather than asking them to "peer review" an article, it would be useful to expose them to authentic talk page conversations, or the Good Article process. It requires thoughtfulness to still prevent disruption from the students (and hostile reactions from editors who dislike student editors), but I think it would make students much more likely to respond positively to a post-WikiEd follow up that invited them to return to editing fully on their own terms. Or perhaps WikiEd doesn't need to change, but the student re-welcoming should focus on addressing the community connection aspect, by inviting them to join a specifically-chosen WikiProject or other group experience. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 18:31, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
@LEvalyn:, thank you, this is incredibly useful feedback, and makes me want to respond in detail, and engage with you further about how to follow up on your comments and experience with concrete steps we could take. (Just clarifying that I have no connection with Wiki Ed other than as a volunteer editor who is very supportive of them, so "we" is anyone who is interested and volunteers, not Wiki Ed specifically.) I think any response of mine here would be too lengthy, and I'll find a venue and link it from here. Just wanted to repeat that I'm very appreciative, excited even, by your response and look forward to hearing more about your experiences and ideas. Mathglot (talk) 19:54, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
I look forward to hearing your thoughts! I have gotten more and more curious about WikiEdu and the relationship between students and wikipedia as my wiki-life and classroom-life collide so I expect I'll see you around in this wiki-space. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:15, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
Also, to more clearly tie my comments to the others made in this thread-- I think even if students did have more involvement in the community of wikipedia (as I suggest), we're still just rolling the dice as to whether any given student will be bitten by the bug, and that their potential interest is largely based on things like personality and hobbies rather than anything we can change. But, I think we can always make it easier for the bug to bite the ones who are ripe to be bitten. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:33, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

"Duplicate key" error when merging VE-edited sandbox back into live article

A student editor in this course at Carleton recently ran into a "duplicate key" reference error at a live article after copying their modified sandbox content back into the live article Insects as food. This was not the user's fault; they did nothing wrong; they merely used Visual Editor to edit a sandbox containing valid content copied from the article, edited in their sandbox, and copied back when they were done. Nevertheless, this generated a H:CERDK error message ("Cite error: The named reference ':13' was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page). ); see rev. 1147591354[permalink].

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333911

This one occurrence has been analyzed and fixed; however, this bug could recur at any time, and Wikipedia experts at Wiki Ed should be aware of the causes, the risk, and what to do about it if it happens. In addition, if it starts to become a problem, it may require changes to the conventions about how student editors use their sandbox to develop content. Details of this one occurrence can be found at User talk:EaglesEyes1#Citation error at Insects as food; the general case is being tracked as T333911. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:45, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

As a practical matter, we already have the means to mitigate the problem in advance. Some may remember the plug I gave to the wonderful RefRenamer script (now in ENB/Archive 22). The RefRenamer script replaces VE's cryptic numeric references like ":1" with something like "Jones-2019". Running the script on a given article *before the sandbox copy is made* reduces the risk of any such duplicate key errors appearing to near zero. Once the error occurs, it's too late to run the script; it's not designed to repair problems that already exist. Mathglot (talk) 02:21, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
@Mathglot, scripts are a power user thing. I wonder if it would make sense to have an experienced editor (e.g., you or someone at WP:VPT – now that I think about it, it's the kind of technical task that I'd expect @Blaze Wolf to be good at) check the class pages a couple of times a year and run the script on all the linked articles as a "just in case" action, instead of expecting individuals to do this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Wait what- ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:24, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Waid was complimenting you, saying that you are among the technically-oriented, "power" editors who could efficiently and productively employ a script like that. Mathglot (talk) 19:51, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
I don't even know what's being discussed here... ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Errors sometimes occur in a Visual Editor environment under certain conditions, when Wiki Ed student-users copy sandbox content back to the live article, due to a combination of factors heavily related to VE's use of numeric ref names. Using existing script RefRenamer on Wiki Ed course-assigned articles before the student editors are let loose on them, greatly reduces the risk of citation-related errors occuring, and greatly reduces the effort in resolving such errors if a broken version of the article is published. The proximate reason for the ping, imho, is: who would be good at running the script? HTH. (P.S. Starting an entry with <Small> and ending it with </small>—i.e., mismatched capitalization of 'small'—breaks syntax highlighting on the page.) Mathglot (talk) 20:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Ah ok. I can definitely do stuff like that. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 20:42, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Indeed, they are. To a large extent, I'm on the same page with you: I noted in this discussion at Ian's talk page that in fact, I had run RefRenamer at all the articles assigned for the course in which this student editor is enrolled. This should greatly reduce the risk of this problem occurring during editing performed by the class going forward; but even more important, imho, is that it will vastly facilitate examination by experienced editors of *any* citation-related error that happen to occur due to the rational ref names, whether related to this bug or not. The script is fast, but it's not instantaneous, and sometimes requires some fiddling of ref names (notably, if author and publisher are missing) and although I was willing to do it for that one class, I wouldn't do it for dozens of them. Ultimately, the long standing issues with WP:VENAMEDREFS will have to be resolved to fully resolve it. But in the meantime, if we could distribute the work and get a bunch of people on board with, as you say, checking class pages on all the linked articles (especially *before* they begin editing), then I'd be willing to continue doing it on occasion as part of a team; but it's too much to ask of any one person. P.S. Had to smile at your last phrase, "...instead of expecting individuals to do this", but I know what you meant, Mathglot (talk) 19:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Usefulness of WikiEd

I'm curious as to what the usefulness of WikiEd actually is. The reason I bring this up is because in recent years, most edits having to do with WikiEd are highly problematic, so much so the point that WikiEd has become notorious for producing generally bad edits. In fact, most of the time while patrolling recent changes, I end up seeing student assignments added to talk pages or the sandbox guided tour (which is almost always marked with a high ORES score meaning it's probably bad, which is a bit of a concern), but nothing comes from them. When I do see something come from them, it's usually an edit that doesn't follow Wikipedia policy/MoS and is often reverted for that reason. I don't think I've seen any recent projects that have resulted in good edits from WikiEd. Keep in mind that based on what I've seen I'm of the mindset that we should either get rid of WikiEd, or completely reform how its supposed to function ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:08, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I think that is unfair to the staff at WikiEd. It's important to distinguish between WikiEd, and the use of the English Wikipedia for class assignments. WikiEd are a program of hard-working people who have limited resources and who try to keep class assignments on track. In my experience, they are very responsive to community feedback. Class assignments, on the other hand, spring up spontaneously whenever someone who teaches a class somewhere decides to make use of Wikipedia for the purpose. I've seen some excellent work by student editors, but there is undeniably a lot, maybe too much, that is a net negative. But we are better off when there is a WikiEd person communicating with the class instructor, than when class projects just show up from under the radar. By the way, see also WP:ASSIGN and, especially, WP:NOTTA. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:20, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
+1, regardless of whether student editors are a net good or not, having the WikiEd framework provides necessary structure to deal with the inevitable influx of student projects. signed, Rosguill talk 18:28, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
What evidence is there that most edits having to do with WikiEd are highly problematic? That's a strong claim and the evidence I've seen in the past suggests it's not true. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:22, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
THe only recent case that I've encountered is regarding Clarinet. I know some editors on Discord have mentioned their dislike of some edits from WikiEd (altho I don't remember any specifically). In any case this may simply be confirmation bias which results from me mostly patrolling articles that tend to be problematic and therefore seeing most of the problematic edits. I probably should rephrase that to most recent edits being problematic, and even then I might not be seeing the full picture. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 18:33, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
I think you are painting in much too broad of a brush here. The bad sticks in your memory more than the good. -- Guerillero Parlez Moi 18:55, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
That's probably the word I'm looking for instead of confirmation bias. Thank you. You are probably right, however I wanted to bring this up mainly to see other people's thoughts on the matter. ― Blaze WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 19:16, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Eliminating or scaling down this project would likely do little to deter teachers and professors from incorporating Wikipedia into their courses; it would only reduce or eliminate a source of guidance and wisdom for those people, making it likely that the perceived problems with novice, student editors would be even worse. ElKevbo (talk) 19:14, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Agreed. Seems to me a bit like proposals to eliminate the Bureau of Crime Statistics and cut back on neighborhood policing as a solution to crime. The initial view might be rosier (especially if you're not patrolling the bad neighborhoods) but the overall picture might not be. Mathglot (talk) 22:24, 31 March 2023 (UTC)
Yep. I am an instructor myself, but I follow a lot of wiki-education news etc. and my feeling is that generally everything "works". Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:25, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
Hi all, same apologies here as the earlier thread for my delay in replying, but thanks to those of you who chimed in! @Blaze Wolf: I'd encourage you to look through the articles edited by the student editors in the last full term (we're just really getting started this term) — this will give you a broader cross-section of edits. Of course, not every student follows directions! So please do ping User:Ian (Wiki Ed) or User:Brianda (Wiki Ed) if you are seeing problematic work from any student editors in our program, and they can step in to help. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:09, 5 April 2023 (UTC)
Volunteer-me is in the discussion at WT:MED. One of the themes there seems to be that student editors are persistent. Of all the new editors who make one edit, only 50% ever make three edits. This means that for the most part, if you revert a new editor's first edit, they'll just silently go away. Most students make more edits than that, and a few of them will ask why you reverted their edit or explain why they think their contribution was good. This seems to have translated into a perception that it's more work to reject their contributions than to reject contributions by non-students.
If these students were accustomed to our WP:UPPERCASE style of arguing, I suspect that they'd be throwing WP:OWN at us, and in at least some cases, we might deserve it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Possible school project off the rails

I've noticed a series of very similar users making consistently wrong edits (unsourced, personal opinion, etc) to similar topics (magazines). The last time I observed this odd pattern, another editor was able to track down a school project that needed additional guidance (see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Nwokenkwo Faustinus/Archive) and get it back on track.

Editors included this time seem to include User:BriannaI17, User:Lescas15, User:Hwbutterfly123, and I believe there are others but I was not able to catch their names.

Would this be the right place to start helping this group of editors get a better start? 49ersBelongInSanFrancisco (talk) 05:45, 21 April 2023 (UTC)

I've found instances of what may be the same project this week, after noticing a lot of copyright violations on Commons which I initially took to be self-promotion, but which seemed to be part of a wider, ongoing pattern.
I'm seeing a group of editors making a few source-optional edits to fashion or art articles, and then writing a draft/sandbox/userpage biography of an artist or a figure from the fashion industry, as if picking the subject from a list. Sometimes they submit the draft and it gets rejected, sometimes they abandon it. Many of these articles include copyrighted images which the students have taken from the web and uploaded to Commons as their own work.
Searching for a name like Emily Rinehardt or Bryan Ida turns up multiple sandbox drafts, with Ida having three independent draftspace articles from this year and last year. Artist Kim Abeles has multiple drafts being created even this month (eg. User:Mychelle28/sandbox), despite a full Kim Abeles article having existed since 2015.
This appears to date back to at least December 2021 (Special:Contributions/Lhcsu, Special:Contributions/Ltran14), with User talk:Lesliebloom saying in May 2022 that the Wikipedia page that I was writing was for a school project. It's unclear whether this is a single teacher setting and reusing a flawed assignment, or a textbook setting a flawed exercise.
I've given a {{Welcome student}} to all of the May 2023 users that I've noticed, but had no responses yet. Belbury (talk) 14:44, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
If you do get a response and it seems they're a higher education class in the US or Canada, we at Wiki Education are happy to try to support their instructor to have a better outcome. They should see teach.wikiedu.org or email us at contact@wikiedu.org. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:59, 18 May 2023 (UTC)
As a more general approach, would an additional, proactive talk page template ("your instructor or professor appears to be running a project which does not align with Wikipedia's goals, please alert them to this talk page message") be useful for situations where an educational project appears to be a net detriment to Commons and Wikipedia? The WP:NOTTA section doesn't give editors any specific guidance for dealing with clearly problematic educational plans. Belbury (talk) 15:21, 20 May 2023 (UTC)
We have Template:Welcome student, which is already linked to from WP:NOTTA, and it does get that message across. It does so in a friendly way, and I guess the question is whether we also need an alternative version that is less subtle, to be used in off-the-rails situations. I think it's a good idea to have a ready-made template message that editors can use when they come across class projects that are taking place under the radar, but I'm leaning towards thinking that it's best to stick with the existing, non-WP:BITEy, version. I'm wondering whether Welcome student should be revised to point to WikiEd? --Tryptofish (talk) 15:50, 20 May 2023 (UTC)

This seems to have stopped now, although I don't know whether that's because the teacher realised the problem and called a stop to the exercise, or it's just a month-long project that gets run twice a year and will be back in December. I didn't notice any responses on the student talk pages. --Belbury (talk) 09:33, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Undisclosed class assignments from 2011

Further info at WT:Tambayan Philippines#Philippine labor migration policy

Some Philippine economics-related articles such as Philippine labor migration policy and related pages have been linked to a class assignment by Ateneo de Manila University from 2011, and are quite badly written (article more of essay, dissertation or thesis). Also, users have not disclosed being in any academic project. TagaSanPedroAko (talk) 02:11, 19 May 2023 (UTC)

The Wikipedia:Welcoming committee—among other things—maintains a set of a set of welcome templates aimed at new users. Many of these templates include a list of helpful links. A proposal to drop the link to Help:Your first article from en-wiki welcome templates has been opened. Wiki Ed folks are particularly well-suited to comment based on your experience with new editors, some of whom create new articles, or try to. Your feedback would be welcome at WT:Welcoming committee/Welcome templates#Proposal: drop 'first article' link from all templates. In addition, please see the proposal discussion subtopic at § What evidence can we bring to bear?. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:39, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

IPE Money and Finance WB 2023

I have concerns regarding Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB 2023 (Summer 2023)--I previously raised concerns about the products of a prior iteration of this course way back in 2019, as the students of the course were producing material about countries' relationships to the World Bank and IMF that were overwhelmingly dependent on publications by WB and the IMF themselves (respectively). At the time, the community was assured that measures would be taken to address the lack of instruction provided to the students for future iterations of the course. It appears that this has either not happened, or had no effect, as students in the class are once, again, overusing primary sources to expand these articles. The course was also run in Summer 2022, and a glance at the articles listed there demonstrates the same issues exhibited here. I have not yet investigated the output of other Wikipedia courses taught by Matthew Bergman, although a review is warranted at this point.

Why is a class that has repeatedly failed to instill basic editorial competency in its students been repeatedly renewed? At the time of the 2019 report, LiAnna's final response on behalf of WikiEdu in response to demands for better quality-control and oversight was I went back and looked at the fall 2018 course record in our database; Shalor closed out that course and noted the exact problems you mentioned in the notes section, but an error from 2018 in how we identify which courses need intervention enabled that to slip through without an intervention. We've changed our internal processes to fix that mistake, so it shouldn't be able to happen again. The course has now been renewed twice since then, and nothing has changed. Pinging instructor Bergmanucsd, course WikiEd point person Brianda (Wiki Ed), as well as previously involved editors Mathglot, Barkeep49, LiAnna (Wiki Ed), Tryptofish, Wugapodes, SandyGeorgia, Oliveleaf4, Outriggr. signed, Rosguill talk 21:00, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping. I'm not familiar with the subject matter here, but looking back at what I said in the previous discussion, I'll say the same thing again now. Revert. Just revert any objectionable student edits. That should be the first line of action. After that, we can look at how the course is being supervised. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:12, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, equally. Quoting from this comment of 23:31, 30 December 2019 by Rosguill in the 2019 discussion:

One possible suggestion for partially solving this is to have students collect a GNG-worthy pile of sources before they begin work on an article.

Indeed. That ought to be what any editor should do, student or not, newbie or veteran, before expanding an article or especially, building a new one. Ought to be added to Help:YFA, as well, but in the meantime, should be emphasized for students. Mathglot (talk) 21:29, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
To be fair, that is somewhat tangential from the current issue: most of the current assignments this semester are expansions of pre-existing articles, so it's not primarily an issue of new articles being submitted that don't meet GNG. The issue is that rather than addressing the existing-issues of overreliance on primary sources, the work I've looked at has only compounded it. signed, Rosguill talk 21:34, 29 July 2023 (UTC)
Given that the instructor promoted Iraq and the World Bank to mainspace, perhaps GNG is a concern this time around after all. signed, Rosguill talk 15:25, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. I don't think it would be good to open a discussion at ANI without first attempting to discuss this with the editor in question. ElKevbo (talk) 20:10, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
Moved back to Draft, as the move to main was a controversial step, to say the least, while this discussion is ongoing. Mathglot (talk) 20:37, 30 July 2023 (UTC)
I had really hoped to hear from either the instructor or a WikiEd person sometime today given that it's a US weekday. I have left a warning at the instructor's userepage about the need to participate in this discussion before further edits for the class. Barkeep49 (talk) 23:57, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
Apologies for the delayed response. I want to let you know that we are taking measures to address the student contributions that are in the mainspace. Ian (Wiki Ed) and I looked over the student work and tagged where there were issues of sourcing and tone, and left messages on the students' talk pages. We are also in communication with the instructor to address this with their students. I agree, the majority of the student contributions rely heavily on non-independent sources. I think most of yall are familiar with our training modules, where we go over what are acceptable sources, and have the students create and complete a bibliography for them to gather RS for their topic. Sourcing quality is a common, recurring issue that I see pop up throughout the courses we support, and try to address these issues as soon as we see it (which for me was today). I believe as a team we could have been more vigilant in monitoring the student work, and had a discussion with the instructor regarding these issues before the course started. Please know that Helaine (Wiki Ed) is going to meet with the instructor to discuss and set a plan for any future courses. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:05, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
I appreciate the effort that you are now taking to better communicate with the instructor, but at this point I think they need to answer to the community directly, or else no longer teach these courses. I'm not comfortable with Wikipedia courses being taught by instructors that have so persistently ignored the community's standards and explicit concerns. Frankly, any regular editor responsible for the collective content and conduct displayed by Bergmanucsd thus far would be blocked by now. If there isn't a clear demonstration of accountability on their part, I intend to call for a topic ban from teaching further courses. signed, Rosguill talk 02:19, 3 August 2023 (UTC)
Having given multiple business and weekend days to respond, I've filed the ban request at ANI. signed, Rosguill talk 05:00, 7 August 2023 (UTC)
I had looked into it a bit earlier, and just left a message at Ian's talk page, and I can say that it's part of a problem that extends way beyond Wiki Ed. Mathglot (talk) 00:11, 1 August 2023 (UTC)
Oh, that's grim. And these articles have been tagged for years. -- asilvering (talk) 22:41, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
I forgot to thank you for that message Mathglot. It's been sitting open in its own browser tab for a week while I try to figure out how I can do something with your analysis. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:19, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

List of all Wiki-Ed students

Hi,

Is it possible to obtain a list of all editors who have participated in WikiEd? BilledMammal (talk) 08:37, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

@BilledMammal: yes. If you go to this page you can download a list of students for each term (Fall, Spring, Summer) and year back to 2014. You can ignore the campaigns that don't have the Term Year format (some of those are subsets of courses arranged thematically, others come from the Scholar & Scientists or Wikidata programmes).
You may need to be patient with the downloads (usually when I click on the link I get a message that says This file is being generated. Please try again shortly, but it's usually available for download as soon as I go back to the previous page and try again.
Bear in mind that it's about 120,000 students. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:16, 9 August 2023 (UTC)

Procedures when nominating student articles for deletion?

I came across first generation college student writing when looking through some backlog categories. Although it's a perfectly fine piece of writing on the topic, it's more of an essay than a Wikipedia article. It also seems to overlap a lot with first-generation college students in the United States. Because of these issues, I was going to nominate the article for deletion, but I noticed a student editor had created it for an assignment back in June. Are there any special considerations when putting student articles up for deletion (for example, should the instructor be notified?) – Teratix ₵ 11:05, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Not as far as I am aware. Primefac (talk) 11:44, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
No, there are no special considerations. But it can be worth telling the instructor on their talk page if their students are making bad edits, so future classes don't repeat the problems. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:39, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
@Teratix I agree with Primefac and Tryptofish - there's no special considerations, especially if the class is finished. (If the class is still running, I wouldn't mind being pinged in the hope that I could find another solution to the problem, but that's not a requirement.)
As as aside though, in this case a merge or redirect would be simpler than sending it through AFD. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:57, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
Best practices per Tryptofish, try to get in touch with the instructor. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:42, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
@Teratix Missed this earlier, but I'd add that a personal note on the student's talk page and a reminder in the AfD for people to keep the BITEyness down can go a long way. -- asilvering (talk) 22:09, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

Incoporating WikiEd into high school courses

Hi all! I am a high school teacher at a private school in the United States that gives us a lot of freedom in the sort of topics and assessment strategies we use. I'm interested in incorporating Wikipedia editing into my courses next school year, either as part of the assignments and assessments or as an entire course (like Composition 101, for example). Have any teachers here had success doing this who'd be willing to chat about it or have class-specific resources that could be shared with me? We have until December to propose new courses so I want to take my time crafting a strong proposal. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 15:52, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi Thaddeus! While I do not teach computer anything (maths/physics for me) I did an "edit Wikipedia" project during my degree course. I don't have much in the way of content or resources to offer, but I will offer one suggestion based on how my project was run and how I see a lot of courses (in my opinion improperly) run. I was tasked with a) improving a stub or start class article, and b) becoming involved in the Wikipedia community. The latter part is what I actually found to be more beneficial (clearly, since I'm still editing ten years later!), as it got me into a bunch of WikiProjects and the IRC help channel. On the other hand, a lot of courses task their students with writing something from scratch, so they throw together a few thousand words about a non-notable subject and then panic when either their draft isn't accepted, gets deleted as copyright or for being non-notable, etc. Most of those students never edit again. I guess it's just something to keep in mind while you plan things out. Happy to chat more about it either here or elsewhere as you flesh things out. Cheers, Primefac (talk) 19:05, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for that insight! The idea of focusing on "getting involved" is really interesting and I'll need to think about that a little bit. The basic idea I have right now is this: A "historical methods and research" course focused on local history where students would get to work with our local archives and historical societies, pick an event/place/person from local history, and either write a new article about that subject or expand an existing stub. If it's structured that way, it would be closer to an independent study course and students would get to work on a single subject over the entire semester, which I think is a much more manageable workload for high school students and would let me keep all their editing in class time, so I could be more proactive in fixing any issues.
From what you remember from your degree, what was the expectation for "becoming involved"? I could see that working as part of an "intro to Wikipedia" segment in the first part of the semester, letting kids choose RC patrolling/typo adoption/finding sources. I'm not sure administration would be on board with getting kids talking to strangers on WikiProject pages, though - Not sure I want to deal with that parental complaint! ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 23:16, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
If nothing else, student editors will be expected to engage with "strangers" on the students' own user talk pages, if editors contact them about edits the students make. Perhaps that would be worth thinking about before making the decision to go ahead with this. Because they are of high-school age, I'd also strongly advise them to use account names that do not reveal their real-life identity. Also, keep them away from controversial topics, so they don't unwittingly step on a hornet's nest. And I'll say something that I say so frequently on this page that I sound like a broken record: it's a good idea to read WP:ASSIGN to get a feel for expectations and potential pitfalls for class projects. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:26, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
I was just thinking out loud - I only meant that to people with no knowledge of Wikipedia it might seem unsafe at first glance. I'll definitely include an explainer on how collaboration here works in the actual proposal. I have read WP:ASSIGN, which was very helpful! I was really just hoping that some other teacher out here had a syllabus or class plan that they'd used at this level as I've never developed one from scratch before. And student safety is always the number one priority, so no issues there! ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 23:35, 17 August 2023 (UTC)
The "becoming involved" bit was less about having tangible evidence of collaboration and more of our weekly update about how and what we had accomplished (though we did have to include a section in our research paper about the various ways communities interact with each other and the public). Keep in mind also I was at uni so the "chat with random people online" issue was slightly less of a concern. Primefac (talk) 15:46, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
@ThadeusOfNazereth I would be really worried about that local history idea since the students will almost certainly run into notability issues unless you're getting really directly involved in helping them pick topics. My advice (I teach university courses, not high school, but I think it applies either way) is to start very very small and see how it goes before you do anything more ambitious. In my experience, students haven't really thought about who makes Wikipedia and why they do that - I expect you will be very surprised by the things your students assume or don't assume about both this project and the web in general. You might want to start with a project that gets them to think about the encyclopedia itself, rather than writing for the encyclopedia, as your first assignment(s) so you have a better idea of where your students tend to start from. Then you'll have somewhere firmer to start from when you're thinking about making it a major part of a course. Some suggestions for simple assignments: have students make a single edit - any edit - and explain why they did that; have students read a page like WP:YOUNG or WP:5P and get them to think about why they say the things they do / what they think is the most important point; have students find a conversation on a Talk page where at least two editors disagree and have them explain how the editors resolved (or didn't resolve) the issue. The hope is that this kind of thing gets them to bumble into your blind spots in an extremely low-stakes way. -- asilvering (talk) 04:48, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
Hi ThadeusOfNazereth, I frequently teach a Wikipedia-based writing course (first-year composition) at the postsecondary level - and can offer some resources and advice. First, here's a basic syllabus which outlines my basic approach to the course (though it changes every time and I also use the Wiki Education's program: Writing in Wikipedia. Others have said "start small" which I agree with, but if you did work up to a more scaled approach, I would recommend having students work in groups of 3-4 so that they could help each other evaluate, research, and make either a "mock" edit or actual edit to an article. If they are working up to one or two small edits, you would be able to assess their contributions BEFORE they try to go live with them, which would certainly help in terms of reverts, and/or negative interactions with other editors. Are you familiar with the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program? It is geared towards training secondary teachers and has some useful approaches and materials for teaching in this context: RWIC. Also, I have recently written an essay for students about how they can contribute to Wikipedia (while it's directed at first year college students in composition, your students might also find it helpful: You Are Good for Wikipedia. Would love to chat sometime if you're up for it. best! - Matthewvetter (talk) 14:03, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
Thank you so much for these resources! Feel free to send me an email, I'm happy to talk as well :) ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 14:07, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
For me, the RWIC and You Are Good links appear to be dead links. Could you please check them? I'd be interested in taking a look, and possibly linking to them at WP:ASSIGN. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:08, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
@Tryptofish it's RWIC and You are Good. Thanks so much for sharing your syllabus, @Matthewvetter! -- asilvering (talk) 22:05, 14 September 2023 (UTC)
Thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 22:15, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

How to check whether/which students completed the Training?

Wikipedia:Training for students at https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/students. Right now students are sending me screenshots like this. Not very efficient and I clearly need to tell them to send screenshots w/ their usernames, sigh. My courses are registered in the (outreach) dashboard (ex.). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:42, 9 September 2023 (UTC)

If they are logged in on the Dashboard, it will keep track of which training modules they complete (ie, reach the final slide). If you have specific modules that you have assigned for them to complete, you could enable the Timeline and then add that training module to a block on the Timeline; this would make the Dashboard treat it as an assigned module, and show completion status on the Users tab. Otherwise, the only place you can see which modules a user has completed is at the bottom their profile page (reachable from the 'profile' link when viewing an individual student from the Users tab). Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:50, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed) Huh. That sounds interesting, but where is that functionality? 1) Can the training be completed without the student being logged into the dashboard, and where is that track kept? 2) I've never seen any Timeline button nor seen anything about assigning modules? 3) I did find that but it tells me 'This user has not completed any training modules.' for each student I checked, which I think is incorrect - I am sure some did click through, many sent me screnshots etc. Wonder if this functionality is bugged (not turned on for outreach dashboard...)? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:58, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
Oh, sorry! I missed that the students are doing the trainings on dashboard.wikedu.org while the course is on outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org. The user profile pages will not show any data for a user who not participating in any courses (on that Dashboard server), so even though the system is keeping track of which training modules your students have completed on dashboard.wikiedu.org, that data will not show up on their dashboard.wikiedu.org profile pages. (The two servers don't share any data between them.) If you students complete any of the modules on Programs & Events Dashboard, data about that should be accessible to you.
For the Timeline feature, you can enable it via 'Edit Details' on the Home tab, and change the relevant setting to 'Yes'. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:13, 12 September 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. But. Sigh. When are you going to merge those servers and give the non-US&Canada users full functionality? It sucks feeling like we are discrminated again for so many years :( Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:42, 13 September 2023 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed) Do you have a video tutorial about how to assign stuff through the timeline feature? I was able to activate the timeline but the functionality that shows up is very limited or at least the interface is very opaque. All I can do is add a seengly pointless list of weeks, and the interface tells I may change the week names but I can't even figure that out. Terrible design - seems like a pre-beta feature (or, perhaps, broken again because it's the outreach dashboard?). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:47, 13 September 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, the UI for the Timeline was built around populating it automatically via a wizard, but the wizard content is specific to Wiki Education's program structure, so it's a manual process on Programs & Events Dashboard. Once you add a week, you have to add a "block" to that week, and that block can include text as well as any of the training modules from https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/training.
We're hoping to develop some video documentation on this soon; I've listed a documentation project for the upcoming round of Outreachy internships. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:37, 15 September 2023 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed) Please ping me once the video tutorials are live. Since my courses started and the week for doing the trainings has passed, I assume this is sadly of no use to me this semester, particularly with the current non-intuitive (for me) interface. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:24, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia Library - can we enable it for students?

As I was reading recent TS coverage of this great project, I noticed the requirement: "an active editor who has made more than 500 edits and has an account more than 6 months old". While it is reasonable to prevent abuse of the system by third parties, it also realistically prevents most student editors (and even some instructors) from being eligible. Can we think of any solution? Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:13, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Just as an initial thought, wouldn't most university students have access to the same resources through their own university? bibliomaniac15 06:25, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Students generally have access to hundreds of databases through their student registration. I haven't tried to line them up, comparing TWL with the repertoire available via a university connection, but I'm aware at least of the overlap in the ones I use most often. Are you aware of resources at TWL that are not available at a particular university? Also, students should be made aware of WP:RX here, and of inter-library loan via their academic or local public library; both have been useful to me. Mathglot (talk) 06:30, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Students at wealthy western institutions usually have access to online collections on a par with TWL. – Joe (talk) 08:49, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
Piotyrus appeared to be thinking of WikiEd, where they are all that. I very much much doubt that publishers/resources who signed up to WL were agreeing to allow access to anyone, anywhere, who says they are a student. Meanwhile JSTOR continues to offer 100 items a month free. Johnbod (talk) 13:20, 17 September 2023 (UTC)
I seem to recall a past thread at one of the Village Pumps, but I think the team is able to grant access on a case by case basis. 500/6mo just does that automatically to most resources (those in the bundle).
As an aside on overlap, I recently noticed that neither TWL nor my institution had Gale Onefile, which I distinctly remember being in TWL before via the default search and quite useful at that. I was fortunate to be able to get it via my state public library though. Alpha3031 (t • c) 06:22, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
What Joe said. In my experience, TWL has some but not full overlap with what my institution has, for example - often TWL is better. And @Johnbod, remember that there's a ton of wikipedia education stuff outside US/Canada. US/Canada is pampered in many ways, but we should not let that influence our concern for others (which, disclaimer, includes myself, as I teach outside US/Canada region, and I personally feel how much of the WikiEd stuff is not applicable to what we do...). Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:53, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
Forgot to ping @Bibliomaniac15 @Mathglot Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:53, 18 September 2023 (UTC)
I brought up that question about "500+ edits, 6+ month account, 10+ edit last month" requirement to access Wikipedia Library at a Wikimania session in Singapore. I was told by a foundation staff that the publishing providers (Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, etc.) imposed these access requirements. I don't know what are the account requirements for "manual approval" (if this process even exists, since it is not on wiki). Samwalton9 (WMF) may be able to answer better than I do. OhanaUnitedTalk page 02:12, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
Sam from the library here, I just wanted to chime in with some additional context on this. 500 edits / 6 months activity is a requirement that we set in place so that the publishers we add to the library feel comfortable that they are giving access to folks who are dedicated contributors to Wikimedia projects and will actually use the access to edit Wikipedia, rather than someone that's signed up for an account and only made a handful of edits. As @OhanaUnited suggests, because this is part of our partnership agreements with publishers, it's hard for us to make exceptions or change these requirements now - we'd need to go back and re-negotiate the agreements with our 75+ partner organisations. We actually did this once years ago, when we only had a few dozen partners, to lower the requirements from 1000/12 to 500/6, and it was a lot of work! I sympathise with the issue being described here, I'd love for more enthusiastic new contributors to gain access to the library to help them start editing, but I can't see us lowering the activity requirements further given the work involved and the likelihood that there are publishers who would not agree to the change. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 14:30, 20 September 2023 (UTC)
Yeah I probably misremembered then, sorry. Can't find it where I thought it might be. Possibly the discussion involved someone who met the edit/time requirements but had a technical issue due to IPBE but obviously my memory is not functioning properly for this so take with a truckload of salt. Alpha3031 (t • c) 07:50, 21 September 2023 (UTC)
@Samwalton9 (WMF): Can you clarify if there's a manual approval process for those who haven't hit "500/6"? OhanaUnitedTalk page 04:42, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
@OhanaUnited There's no manual approval process for users who are under the criteria. I think the only time we've done this was when someone who was already eligible vanished their account and started a new one. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 08:21, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

Editorial comments for WikiEd materials

I'm not sure where these sorts of comments go, but File:Editing_Wikipedia_articles_on_Chemistry_(Wiki_Ed).pdf information about "Writing about compound classes" (second page) has a bullet-point "Nomenclature" whose wording talks instead about "the compound". By definition, a class is not a specific compound. Instead is should say maybe "group of compounds", or "chemicals of this type". The compound-classes bullet-point "Properties" looks like another over-zealous copy-paste from the specific-compound list. and a useful aspect of chemical classes that I don't see listed would be specific examples of notable chemicals in the class. That might be a useful addition to the Reactions bullet-point, something like "focusing on notable chemicals in this class" so students don't just google-dump a bunch of primary-lit/one-off examples. DMacks (talk) 17:41, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Thanks DMacks. I appreciate the feedback. I should be able to fix that in the next few days. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:35, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Blocked student

Could a member of WikiEd please take a look at User talk:PKnight2020, who has been blocked for vandalism? They assert that they were making the edits as part of a class project, but they are indecipherable from vandalism. If there is a prof involved, and they are participating in WikiEd, I think someone needs to step in.-- Ponyobons mots 19:45, 22 September 2023 (UTC)

@Ponyo: - this edit suggests that they actually intended to make their edits as part of a class, but that's not consistent with even a major misinterpretation of any training module of ours.
They're not enrolled in any class we're supporting, and it's unlikely that they're taking a class we support and just failed to enroll. This edit changing "football" to "soccer", coupled with edits to the Perth Dance Music Awards and Kane Lambert (an Aussie rules footballer) makes me think they're likely to be in Australia. I probably should know who the education programme contact is for Australia, but I don't. I'll find out (though of course, if anyone knows, they can ping them). Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:43, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
I think WM-AU doesn't have a formal education program, but pinging @Pru.mitchell and Canley: who should be able to better direct the student to someone in Australia for help! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:23, 22 September 2023 (UTC)
I am watching their talk page to see if there is anything helpful coming from that user. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 21:18, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Surprise, another semester, another undeclared school project making a mess of fashion articles

Fast fashion, slow fashion, a bunch of textile-related articles, etc, and widely spreading from there. One involved editor has now confirmed what several of us had suspected. This happens nearly every semester. Starting tomorrow, I plan to start using a pattern of "warn2 warn4 block+protect", as many semesters of history demonstrate nothing else works. DMacks (talk) 08:01, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

@Materialscientist and MrOllie: who are whack-a-moling it and have experience with this sort of incompetence. DMacks (talk) 08:03, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
Example of history of this: Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Archive 22#Undisclosed art-class (fashion/textile) project is back. DMacks (talk) 08:06, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
This has happened every April and October for the last couple of years. I suspect if we could figure out which instructor or university was the source one well-written email could solve the issue. Maybe a checkuser could tell by looking at a few IPs, but I'm not sure if policy would allow for that. MrOllie (talk) 13:13, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
Without making a judgement on this particular set of incidents, I am frustrated that the foundation and its paid employees are not more available to support the project in situations like this where some institutional support seems very appropriate. More specifically, it seems like it would be appropriate for a Wikimedia employee to help identify the likely college or university and reach out to them on behalf of the project. It seems really odd for such a well-funded project to rely on volunteers to do this work. In the absence of such support, our tools are limited - if the disruption is severe enough, we could simply block the entire block of addresses used by the institution until we are assured that the disruption will be stopped. This is, after all, how we deal with disruption from schools and many other organizations. ElKevbo (talk) 23:08, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
@ElKevbo I'm not sure what powers you think WMF staff have that en-wiki admin don't? It's an undisclosed course, and they don't have any more ability to force students to disclose than we do. -- asilvering (talk) 23:11, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
Again, I don't know enough about this specific situation to know if this necessary. But in general, when this project is being repeatedly disrupted by editors at an identifiable organization it seems appropriate for someone who represents the project to reach out to the institution to let them know about the disruption, ask them for help, and let them know what may happen if they can't stop the disruption. "I am a volunteer Wikipedia editor..." doesn't carry nearly as much weight as "I work for and represent Wikipedia..." Nor should unpaid volunteers be expected or asked to do something like that. ElKevbo (talk) 23:17, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
@ElKevbo The problem here is that the organization is not identifiable. -- asilvering (talk) 23:25, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
Someone with checkuser tools may be able to identify the institution. ElKevbo (talk) 23:35, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
IPs have been used at various times, which at the times I've looked often have similar geolocation (I'm not a CU). One editor revealed an apparent professor's name last year on a sister-site (need special goggles to see that one). And there is also consistency with other things I have been able to find on various education-related websites. Can't say more. DMacks (talk) 18:21, 28 October 2023 (UTC)

Scoring for LLM generated Wikipedia Style models.

I am part of a team at a University where we are building a LLM style model which will be given a topic and will generate different subtopics and then text in order to write an informative article. We are going to be using several different types of scoring mechanisms, but we would ideally like to have frequent wikipedia editors collaborate with scoring the articles. Our goal is only for educational research, and we are not intending to try to publish these LLM generated articles on Wikipedia. Our LLM will ideally generate Wikipedia style articles with citations, and different sub-points. We will also have an automatic scorer that will score the essay based on 1. Well Written, 2. Verifiable with no original research, 3. Broad in its coverage, and 4. Qualitative comments (The first three metrics for a Good Article + Qualitiative comments). We would take a subset of our articles produced and score them by actual Wikipedia editors as a way to verify our scorer is within reason. We will have about 20-30 articles to be scored, and will be able to monetarily compensate scorers. Terribilis11 (talk) 20:02, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

What is the purpose of this educational research? What are you going to be using this LLM for in the future? -- asilvering (talk) 23:13, 27 October 2023 (UTC)
User talk:Terribilis11, do you have ethics approval for this research? If so which ethics board? Stuartyeates (talk) 20:22, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Gadget to identify students

Re this thread, has anyone tried to write a gadget that will mark editors registered on the dashboard? Administrators don't need to run to their teacher for everything, but it would give us one more tool to use in the unfortunate cases where a student keeps making mistakes but cannot or will not communicate. Bovlb (talk) 15:37, 27 October 2023 (UTC)

I support making this a thing. Maybe someone could start a bugzilla thread? Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here 05:25, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
This is also related to what we we are discussing just above. @MrOllie Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here 05:26, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
If someone works on such a gadget, I'm happy to provide support on the Programs & Events Dashboard side of things. All the necessary data should be publicly accessible, but it might not be obvious where to find it from the Dashboard's API. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:57, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed) i can try to work on this if you can link to the relevant API documentation. Galobtter (talk) 00:03, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

Unregistered student project

PrestotheUnicorn (talk · contribs) says they are a student. It seems like they could use some training in Wikipedia etiquette. Perhaps there's an opportunity for outreach with their instructor? Wracking talk! 05:25, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I just left a note on the student's talk page! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:28, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

Proposal to add user-defined Common edit summaries to Preferences

Editors here might be interested in this proposal that would allow you to quickly choose in Preview mode from among your favorite edit summaries that you pre-define yourself. Feedback at: WP:VPW#Proposal: add user-defined Common edit summaries to Preferences. Mathglot (talk) 23:44, 21 November 2023 (UTC)

UTRS

Y'all have access to UTRS? A user at UTRS appeal #81601 claims to be a student who is going to fail 'casue her draft got deleted as spam. No word yet on class/instructor/school yet. Thanks -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 16:43, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Although I don't participate in UTRS, I do want to leave a comment that we should never knowingly have class projects where a student could fail because their work was reverted or deleted. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:35, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't have access to UTRS but please do encourage them to have their instructor reach out to us at teach.wikiedu.org or contact@wikiedu.org. Of course, we never approve courses where the instructor is grading based on what sticks on Wikipedia, only those that grade on what work students do, regardless of whether it's live on Wikipedia or not. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:22, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

User survey of experienced editors includes a question about Wiki Ed

A user (ping) is doing a survey of experienced users with a simple, 7-question questionnaire, including one question (unaccountably in the past tense) about Wiki Ed. You can find that survey at User:Clovermoss/Editor reflections. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 04:00, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

ANI notice

Information icon There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding a student enrolled in a WikiEdu class. The thread is Plagiarism and copyright violations by User:Sedvabs. Thank you. — Red-tailed hawk (nest) 21:57, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Problematic course, still

Course: Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/North Carolina Central University/Artificial Intelligence and Law (Fall 2023)
Professor: User:9Starbucks
Wiki Ed: @Brianda (Wiki Ed), Ian (Wiki Ed), and Helaine (Wiki Ed):
Student: User:Oabrown23 (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · page moves · block user · block log)
Articles: (among others) Ralph Gilles, Melanie Harrison Okoro, Valencia Koomson, April Gordon Dawson
Images: Copyvio thread at Commons: Class uploads (multiple deleted or submitted for deletion)

See this discussion from 10 November where Brianda (Wiki Ed) indicated she had spoken with the professor and asked that articles be kept in draft space.

I am still working on the image copyvio concerns, an AFD, and yet today, April Gordon Dawson (or questionable notability and with another likely copyvio image) was moved to main space. The professor has not responded once. Wiki Ed; please engage here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:23, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi, Brianda (Wiki Ed) did email the instructor on Friday, and we have yet to hear back from her. I just emailed her again to ask her to have her students cease moving their work live right away. Thanks for letting us know, and we'll let you know when we hear back from the instructor. We're at WikiCon right now and may be a bit slower to respond. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 04:40, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, Helaine; the students I've encountered have been eager, polite and willing to learn, but appear to have been given no instruction regarding image copyvio, which as of now, is the biggest problem (besides the incommunicative professor). The content problems are fixable, but I'm not active on Commons, so getting the images dealt with has been time consuming. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:46, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm helping User:MathDementor with an article on Siobhan Day Grady, but unfortunately that one is likewise unlikely to pass the notability standards (I've just done my best effort at the checks you'd do in an AfD, and it doesn't look good). I worry that the student may have been given an impossible assignment here, since no amount of hard work or skilled editing can change whether a subject meets the criteria for inclusion. UndercoverClassicist T·C 10:44, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
And this is the very troubling aspect of this course; the students I've encountered have been wonderfully responsive, trying their hardest, and it bothers me to think that an unresponsive and ill-prepared-for-Wikipedia professor, would give a student a bad grade because they have been setup to edit problematic topics. Were these students allowed to choose their own topics, or did the prof assign them? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:58, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia The tone and language you use are very matter of fact but are not accurate at all. I appreciate feedback as it is an opportunity to learn and grow but there are assumptions being made here that are simply not true. The list I provided students was from here: Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/African Americans in STEM Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon . I shared this with @Brianda (Wiki Ed) from Day 1 and she attended my class and has worked with my students. To my understanding we are part of an initiative to work towards getting more BIPOC articles completed. I have no issue to remove articles drafted about myself or others but to try to disparage my response rate and to imply that I am not setting students up for success is not appropriate. I will meet with @Brianda (Wiki Ed) and @Helaine (Wiki Ed) hopefully later today. Additionally we will work with students to make sure they address all concerns however, this is all of our first times working with Wikipedia ask that you extend some grace as we are not Wiki experts yet. 9Starbucks (talk) 13:51, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Another troubling aspect of this course is that it relates to law, and yet we have half the students uploading copyright violation images. One would think a law course would hammer home the importance of respecting intellectual property rights. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:10, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
I am very responsive. I responded within 24 hours in email but was not able to access my computer over the weekend to respond here. @Helaine (Wiki Ed)@Brianda (Wiki Ed) @SandyGeorgia 9Starbucks (talk) 13:44, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Hi Helaine (Wiki Ed), I'd also like to raise as a concern the fact that the instructor of the course has apparently assigned students the task of writing an article about her??? And SandyGeorgia since you've been assisting with the Siobhan Day Grady article, you should be aware too: the class dashboard shows the instructor's name as Siobhan Grady. That strikes me as completely beyond the pale. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:14, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
OH my ... I had completely missed that aspect. Those poor students; talk about COI affecting their grade ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 11:14, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
@Helaine (Wiki Ed) please respond to my email so that we can meet sooner rather than later. I have worked with @Brianda (Wiki Ed) and this thread is very alarming. 9Starbucks (talk) 13:53, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia I did respond on Saturday and asked my students to stop moving things to the main space. @Brianda (Wiki Ed)@Helaine (Wiki Ed) . I want to ensure we are respectful when reaching out to my students. They are new to the community and excited about completing this work. They will work to address any concerns. 9Starbucks (talk) 13:42, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Hi all. I just had a great conversation with 9Starbucks and hopefully the concerns raised here will be sorted out. A few specifics

  • With regards to having students edit her biography, as she mentioned higher up this page, this wasn't something she assigned them; they found her name on the list from the Meetup. She has told her students not to move that draft to mainspace
  • She tried to respond to this thread over the weekend, but found herself caught behind an IP block. I've given her an IP Block Exemption, though I hope she never actually has to make use of it
  • With regards to the copyright issues - despite all of our best efforts (including instructors) students run into problems (as do many new editors). She said she will send out an email to her students this morning with reminders about the copyright issues.
  • As for the source that started it all - I've never heard of attorneyatlawmagazine.com, and tbh, the main thing that stands out to me that it might not be a real source is the lack of an editorial board or policy in its "About" section. (Yes, the tone makes me suspicious, but so much these days is written in that "puff" tone, even in reputable sources.) Without understanding concepts like WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS (a problem that's not unique to new editors), when people see the existent sources used on-wiki, they (not unreasonably) assume that those kinds of sources will work.
  • Finally, I think it's a bit unfair to characterise someone acting in good faith the way she has been here. Though new to the community, 9Starbucks is interested in improving Wikipedia, and plans to learn to edit herself.

I'm sorry this spiraled as it did, and that's my fault for not being around. It's also unfortunate that it happened during WikiCon when Helaine and Brianda weren't available. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:57, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Ian, thanks for jumping in, with your usual efficiency. I hope the prof knows her students have been wonderfully responsive, and their grades aren't affected. What is WikiCon? And in terms of responsibility for the big picture, just looking at articles of questionable notability at Wikipedia:Meetup/DC/African Americans in STEM Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon and all of these mean there is probably a) a very bad model of notability for these students and Edit-a-thon participants, and b) massive cleanup needs. Meanwhile, the image issues have been all cleaned up, best I can tell. It's unfortunate the prof was caught behind a proxy; that happened to me once when traveling and using a hotel internet connection. Perhaps this would have unfolded differently if not for whatever WikiCon is. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:18, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Also, would any Wiki Ed staff with admin rights like to go ahead and delete this image? I don't know how that works. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:19, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Thanks SandyGeorgia. Sorry about the abbreviation, it's WikiConference North America.
I've deleted the image. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:00, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, as always, Ian ... In all these conversations, I keep seeing wikicon, as if we all knew :) Bst, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:13, 14 November 2023 (UTC)

@Helaine (Wiki Ed), Ian (Wiki Ed), and 9Starbucks: On the bigger picture, I am not any less concerned than I was when User:LEvalyn pointed out the astounding conflict of interest. The explanations above (that the student picked the article from a list of suggestions of possibly dubious notability) does not minimize the severity of the COI concerns. It should be self-evident that grading a student who is writing an article about yourself introduces a conflict as well as raises ethical considerations. One big reason we have a COI policy is it can be hard to be neutral when you are close to a subject. That seems to have happened here, and it's concerning that a prof would put themselves in the position of grading a student writing about the prof. I accept that MathDementor's first edit was on November 9, so 9Starbucks might not have been aware she was picked as the topic by a student, hence may not have been entirely responsible ... but it would have been prudent, indeed professional and ethical, to make sure the students understood they should not pick their professor to write about. That's one COI too many, on top of an entire Meetup group that is promoting articles on subjects of possibly dubious notability already, based simply on demographics (leading the community to have to do extra work to deal with notability issues). It's not hard to see how the students were doubly misguided by this venture, and wonder what they could learn from it, or how Wikipedia could benefit. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:28, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

More broadly, there may be a learning point here (for us and for instructors working with us) that any sort of "choose your own article to create" list would benefit hugely from being pre-reviewed by someone who understands Wikipedia's notability criteria before being released to students. There's no reason that 9Starbucks should have thought of that, but perhaps we could do something to flag it through whatever process Wiki Ed has for onboarding new instructors and explaining how this place works to them? UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:57, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Yes; for example, I believe Ian (Wiki Ed) does that with medical content-- steering students away from certain topics. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:52, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
I want to make sure that everyone understands that the work the students are completing is to enhance, create, and or develop articles for underrepresented groups on Wikipedia. I appreciate the feedback but want to ensure it is not lost on what my students are trying to accomplish. @SandyGeorgia, as you are just meeting my students, yes, they are all quite pleasant. This is why I ask you to be thoughtful in your responses to my students and understand the importance of tone and the use of language. This is their first time working in such a large collaborative community.
Additionally, there is nothing wrong with ANY of the persons on the listing I shared with my students. They may not meet Wikipedia standards, but they are all quite deserving of being recognized for their work. My student’s grades are intact and not dependent upon their work here, so please have no worries. As @Ian (Wiki Ed) indicated, the article about me will not be submitted, but I appreciate my students’ work. I have concerns about the language and exclusive rather than inclusive commentary on this thread, especially given that you all have placed my real name here, yet I do not know yours. I will continue to work with the Wiki Ed Team (@Helaine (Wiki Ed) @Ian (Wiki Ed) @Brianda (Wiki Ed)) to finish out the semester with my students and address ALL concerns raised. It is excellent if any of their work makes it to the main stage, but if nothing more, they and I have learned valuable lessons about Wikipedia. @UndercoverClassicist @LEvalyn 9Starbucks (talk) 20:13, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
@9Starbucks thanks for your hard work with your students, and for participating in the discussion here. I hope your students learn a lot and contribute well, and it is always valuable to have new editors. I agree that all of the listed biographies are of worthy scholars who merit recognition, though I would note that the purpose of Wikipedia is not to provide recognition but rather to provide an informational reference. In general I'd say it's rare for a professor to be "ready" for a Wikipedia article before they have tenure, and the average Wikipedian sees a lot of paid self-promotional garbage that gets their hackles up when they encounter biographies of anyone early in their career (aka, under 45). A more effective and less frustrating approach can be to guide students towards improving existing articles, especially articles on the subjects to which the scholars have contributed-- e.g., not just improving Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's biography, but ensuring her work is addressed appropriately at axion and dark matter. It can also be very effective to direct students toward book articles, since the inclusion criteria for books is more clear-cut (two independent book reviews) and students can provide information of real value just by summarizing the book. For example, I can't believe we have no article on Prescod-Weinstein's Disordered Cosmos!! I wish you and your students good luck and happy editing with the rest of the term.
@Ian (Wiki Ed), also, a note to the WikiEd team: WikiEd might want to re-evaluate the way they handle posting professors' names. It sounds like 9Starbucks was surprised by the fact that their real name would be visible to the Wikipedia community through the WikiEd dashboard. (I would support fully suppressing that info in this thread.) I myself, as a more experienced editor, was also extremely surprised to find my own full name publicly posted when I taught with WikiEd last year, especially since posting it in conjunction with my university & class and adding the class to my userpage made me as an individual fully identifiable (down to the physical classroom I would be in, if someone consulted my university's catalogue!) Even editing under a username that I expect to be identifiable, I wasn't entirely comfortable, and would have appreciated at least a notice/warning that my name would be so public. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 20:47, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Real names of profs bothers me just as real names of students do. With students, it's doubly problematic, as they are young, they make mistakes, and those mistakes often involve plagiarism or copyright violation. Mistakes of youth shouldn't be recorded for the rest of their lives on the internet; I'm fairly sure that over the years that Wiki Ed has understood this, and steered students away from using their real names, as they often did in the earlier years of Wiki Ed. I don't see how the use of real name can be avoided for a prof, since anyone can look up a course syllabus at a given school. But personally, I use the editor's username here for that very reason; I refer to 9Starbucks here and the real name isn't recorded in my memory (I'd have to go look it up to remember it). They are learning, too.
Separately, 9Starbucks, I'm sorry the conference meant a few days without communication. Regular Wikipedians face multiple situations of COI, copyright, non-reliable sources, etc every day, and when it appears (perhaps unfairly in this case) that there's a communication breakdown, frustration grows and we jump to stop what could turn in to disruption (and in past cases have). Alternately, here, your students were responsive; our communication gap was hopefully all due to the conference and travel. But we need to be clear that moving non-notable bios in to main space creates extra work for regular Wikipedians, who are all volunteers. I hope someone can find a way to deal with that Meetup List of articles, because it looks quite problematic based on those I've checked. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:04, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
@LEvalyn: - it was before my time, and I don't know the details, but I believe having the professors' real names accessible was one of the conditions for the community to agree to the education programme in the first place. It might be time to re-evaluate that, but it's not for me to decide. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:05, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm concerned about where the instructor said here that there is nothing wrong with ANY of the persons on the listing I shared with my students. They may not meet Wikipedia standards, but they are all quite deserving of being recognized for their work. I don't think that anyone in this discussion intends to imply that there is anything wrong with the persons on the list, as persons. I'm sure that they are all people with fine qualities. But Wikipedia editing focuses on people who meet Wikipedia standards. We describe those standards at Wikipedia:Notability (people) and its subpages for people who are noted in particular areas of endeavor. We have good reasons for these guidelines, and it's not about the intrinsic worth of anybody. A central purpose of any class project on Wikipedia is for the students to learn about how Wikipedia does things – but it's not about students or instructors changing what Wikipedia does. Students should learn about how those guidelines work, at least in regard to what the students have been assigned. And instructors have a responsibility to know about those guidelines before the course begins, or to find out promptly if a problem arises during the course as it has here. So someone who does not meet our criteria for having an article about them may well be quite deserving of being recognized for their work, but that recognition is not going to happen on Wikipedia. And students as well as instructors need to understand and accept that. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:37, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Hi. I have just deleted a draft at User:MathDementor/Siobahn Day Grady. I don't know how this strayed through the net (I realise it was written before the above discussion took place, but it should have been deleted much sooner) but there is a very obvious conflict of interest. Tutors must make sure they discourage students from writing about anyone with such a close connection to them. Deb (talk) 08:48, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Helaine (Wiki Ed) I thought this course was not to be moving pages to mainspace? They still are: Elva Jones. And it looks like all of those images are copyvio; could you all please deal with that? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:14, 7 December 2023 (UTC) @Helaine (Wiki Ed): faulty ping, copyvio images to be dealt with.[2] SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:15, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

I moved to draft -- Guerillero Parlez Moi 21:18, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Thank you (even after I did what cleanup I could) ... the course runs another week, so there may be more to come. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:20, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi @SandyGeorgia, This is on me. I quickly skimmed the page and was focused on the content (didn't click thru the images - i should have) about Jones as the founder of the CS department (and current chair) and the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in engineering from NCSU - that to me seemed to satisfy #5 of NP:PROF, and so I gave the green light to the student. But I went over it with Sage (Wiki Ed), and definitely needs better and more sources to push them over that borderline notability. Sorry for this. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:13, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
As a clarification, being the department chair probably does not pass WP:PROF, because #5 is about named chair professorships, which are different than department chairs. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:26, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
@Tryptofish Yes, that's what Sage pointed out in our discussion. Thanks for clarifying. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:56, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
Brianda (Wiki Ed) one of the things that most concerns me about this course is the image copyright problem. Almost every one of them has violated image copyright, and I would have expected by now that the professor would have addressed this problem. Why is their prof lax about students breaking the law ? Why haven't the students been told they can't just get an image from <anywhere> and upload it to Wikipedia, and why hasn't she had them remove all of them? If they weren't a course, they would be blocked by now for repeatedly violating copyright. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:05, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia This term especially it's been happening so much with students across the classes. I've found myself repeatedly asking them to remove images and focus on the text content and sourcing rather than media. We have a training module that explains the different licenses and goes over the process of uploading media, but I don't know why it keeps coming up. I think one thing is that students probably rush through modules, but the other thing is images online are so accessible and easy to download, that it doesn't cross people's mind that you need a license to use them. I try to steer them away, but there are those that slip through the cracks. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:15, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
Maybe Wiki Ed would consider taking image uploading OUT of the training module, and telling students instead, "don't go there, it's complicated". SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:33, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Yes, please. So many of the student "peer reviews" seem to fixate on getting an image on the page, often with suggestions to take screenshots from videos... JoelleJay (talk) 00:29, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
From all of the literature we have available for how to improve an article (not just Wiki Ed, but all across the project), it's hard not to get the impression that uploading an image is an important part of the process -- and it should be, of course; images definitely do improve an article. But yeah unless you're uploading your own stuff, it can be complicated. Just a thought, but I wonder if it's tricky enough that Wiki Ed might want to build the process into the Dashboard to ensure additional steps. You can create custom upload wizards on commons, but there are a lot of limitations to that. Presumably you could have a user friendly step by step guide that includes things like "... then you can't upload it, but that's ok! you aren't required to find a photo as part of your assignment!" etc.
It also strikes me that image copyvios/deletions would be an easy metric to extract from the Dashboard (i.e. when the semester is over and the images have been checked out, how many of the ~1,140 uploads were copyvios?). I'd be curious how common of a problem it is for students vs. a standard new commons uploader. If it's less than average, something is going right. If not, or if it's not much different from an average user, surely something can improve. It's complicated, but the instructions are the same for everyone. That is, compared to editing an article it's more of a science than an art. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 02:06, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Ed course needs renaming

Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/NOVA/College Composition (Spring 2024) to whichever institution at Nova (disambiguation)#Schools is hosting the course. * Pppery * it has begun... 02:07, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Based on the professor's name and the subject of the course, it looks like it's Northern Virginia Community College. — Red-tailed hawk (nest) 05:26, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
Adding Brianda (Wiki Ed). Mathglot (talk) 09:36, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping. The page has been updated. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:08, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
Next problem: Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/GWU/CAH 1091 Historical Perspectives in the Visual Arts (Spring). GWU is a disambiguation page listing multiple schools. * Pppery * it has begun... 16:03, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Hi, GWU is George Washington University. I updated the page. Thanks. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:06, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

What about middle schools?

Is there any help/hope for them? For instance, User talk:66.19.20.50. Thanks -- Deepfriedokra (talk) 20:30, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

"Off the rails" school project resuming

Flagging that Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard/Archive_23#Possible_school_project_off_the_rails has started up again this month, with students being asked to create American artist biographies without much regard for copyright, and no course page.

It seems to be a project that's run every May and December for the last few years, and I've tried putting a custom notice on Draft:Kim Abeles and other relevant pages this time around. I did get one brief confirmation from a student last week that it's a class project (I looked up my artist on the site, and no results came up) and they said they'd tell their tutor to create a course page, but these articles are still being created today.

Given the apparently small number of articles, it may just be one tutor using an inappropriate lesson plan for a few dozen students. Not sure if there's anything else that can be done at this point, but I thought I'd keep the noticeboard updated in case anybody else was encountering it. Belbury (talk) 19:52, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

@Belbury: Any other potential members of the class. I am wondering if CU can be helpful here to figure out the school -- Guerillero Parlez Moi 21:22, 7 December 2023 (UTC)
A search for the names of artists whose drafts get recreated every six months will show you some of the student accounts who've created those drafts, or edited the actual biographies directly where they exist. These are the named recurring artists that I've noticed so far:
Talk:Rafa Esparza has a couple of educational assignment templates on it, but this is likely to just be a coincidence. These draft articles are still being created as of today, so the class is still active for now. There are also a lot of photos uploaded earlier in 2023 and even back in 2022 which are violating copyright on Commons, I've been flagging the ones that I've found. --Belbury (talk) 12:43, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
@Guerillero: I don't know what Wikipedia's best practice is for publicly identifying and contacting people in this kind of situation, but student Eebee Beebee is still being active and helpful on their talk page if it'd be appropriate to ask more about their school or their professor's contact details. Belbury (talk) 10:10, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Looks like the discussion with Eebee Beebee is going well so far (other than the teacher not yet reading their emails).
I had been wondering before reading that conversation if, for these pages, we might need to try having these identified repeats bumped up to extended confirmed edit access to curtail this 'redraft of an existing article' pattern and whether EC was the next logical step or something else might be better (AC would be too low). And what (if any) unintended consequences that might have for the Wikipedia community. Hopefully that conversation connects and this rogue assignment gets fixed without needing to consider any further steps. Zinnober9 (talk) 03:00, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
Even without page protection we've already had Draft:Rafa Esparaza, Draft:Rafa Esparza, Draft:RAFA ESPARZA, Draft:Rafa Esparza - his Impactful Work, Draft:Rafa Esparza (ART-2100) where multiple students have used a different title when their first attempt was taken. Some users will also make a user sandbox instead (there are already dozens of these about Esparza) which still might be submitted as drafts that get patiently reviewed and rejected.
I'd go for a clear "problem project" warning template at the top of relevant drafts: telling the students that their teacher is clearly running a class project that goes against Wikipedia guidelines, highlighting the big problems with it (that students are using copyrighted text and images from the web, and that submitting twenty different versions of the same biography doesn't help Wikipedia much) and saying that they need to tell their teacher to set up a course page.
Maybe it should even go as far as giving the students explicit instruction/permission in Wikipedia's voice to stop working on the project. Belbury (talk) 09:50, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
I've created a userspace template for this project alone at User:Belbury/Template:Abeles and put it onto the articles, as well as updating the context (and adding a fuller list of target biographies) at Draft talk:Kim Abeles. --Belbury (talk) 10:37, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
I have put two parameters in the template to tell students that an article already exists. The first parameter specifies the article's title if it already exists, and the second parameter is when Wikipedia had that article. Example: {{User:Belbury/Template:Abeles|Wikipedia|2001}} ~~2NumForIce (speak|edits) 16:18, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Would it make any sense to create a placeholder project page for this, rather than a discussion that restarts every six months, and drafts that expire as abandoned? I've been linking to Draft talk:Kim Abeles as a unified reference point, but that draft will probably get deleted again at some point. --Belbury (talk) 11:11, 8 December 2023 (UTC)

Should we start deleting the abandonded userspace drafts? They clutter up search-results, making it that much harder to try to track each new semester and potentially elicit a response from an active students. But they also demonstrate the depth and breadth of this ongoing disruption. Or should we replace them with the template (great job, Belbury!)? DMacks (talk) 16:24, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! Search results aren't too badly affected because you can sort by edit/creation date, but there are undoubtedly some outright copyright violations in there where a student has just copied text from the artist's web page (Draft:Bryan Ida had some redactions of copyrighted text today). Belbury (talk) 16:36, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
There's also BLP. While we sometimes let bare bio facts remain uncited for a while during GF article development (and just tag/remove them at the point of AFC triage and moving to mainspace), that's not the ultimate endpoint of them. My main goal is to stop the time-sink of everyone who cleans up here for what demonstratably does not lead to a WP benefit. DMacks (talk) 16:41, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
... and there are also copyvio image issues which I'm still finding today where a student doesn't name the artist (or spells their name wrong) when uploading a photo they found online to Commons, meaning that the file doesn't turn up in a cross-wiki search for the artist name. We will have to check all of these drafts by hand for copyrighted images, whether or not we delete them. Belbury (talk) 15:56, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
Could also start with the centralauth of the accounts. c:COM:PCP and "cross-wiki disruption" are valid rationales and there are some tools that can handle "all uploads of an account" in a single pass. DMacks (talk) 20:10, 15 December 2023 (UTC)
...which I now see you are well-versed in using. Thanks! DMacks (talk) 19:28, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Is {{uw-create3}} a reasonable starting-point? While the student themself might be making a good-faith edit because they're getting bad advice, that student's behavior is part of a long-term disruption from a CIR advisor, so there's MEAT here. I feel bad not AGF for each student, but seems like patience is wearing thin for the situation as a whole. DMacks (talk) 16:38, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Creating a draft/sandbox article is very consistently the last thing that these students do, it's presumably the final task in the Wikipedia section of their course. They only create one draft each; the entire contribution of 99% of these students is to edit three or four fashion articles in one week, and to create a single draft article in a later week. Then they abandon their Wikipedia account forever. Warning them against article creation isn't going to change anything that's happening here. Belbury (talk) 17:06, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

As in past years, this project seems to have ended before Christmas, with students abandoning their drafts and leaving Wikipedia. I'm assuming we never heard anything from the teacher, so we'll see if the next class is asked to write the same drafts again in May. --Belbury (talk) 14:08, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Academic studies of Wikipedia in education

Hi All,

I created a new page listing the academic studies available about the use of Wikipedia in education. I hope this can be useful for anyone considering using Wiki in education. It is still missing a lot of papers so feel free to expand.

Best wishes,

Adam Harangozó (talk) 14:42, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Awesome, thank you! Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:37, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
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