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Best Practices for Teaching Students to Write Effective Lead Sections

Hello everyone,

I am an instructor guiding students in composing medical articles for Wikipedia. Currently, I am focused on updating our guidelines and have several questions that I hope you can help with. My questions here are generic questions concerning the lead section.

In our academic setting, we emphasize the importance of supporting claims with citations, and our grading reflects this by marking down submissions that lack adequate citations. However, the Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Lead section suggests that while the lead should be well-sourced, citations are commonly found in the body of the article rather than the lead.

Q1: Are we being too stringent expecting our students to include citations in the lead section since this is not an expectation from Wikipedia? Is it a major problem if they do provide citations throughout the lead? What justification can we provide for not including citations in this section?

My second question is on structuring. We currently teach our students that the lead section should not only summarise the main content but also reflect the order of that content as presented in the body of the article. We use Wikipedia's "featured articles" as exemplars and models for this. However, we recognise that Wikipedia articles are subject to ongoing edits and updates that may shift the content and structure over time. This dynamic nature can lead to discrepancies between the lead and the body of an article, especially if the lead does not consistently mirror updates made to the article's main content.

Given this:

Q1: Are we guiding students correctly on the arrangement and order of information in the lead?

Q2: When significant changes are made to the body of an article, is it a common or recommended practice to revise the lead accordingly to ensure it remains an accurate and concise summary of the article and mirrors the order of the content?

Thank you in advance for your advice and suggestions! G.J.ThomThom (talk) 01:25, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

@G.J.ThomThom I personally enjoy the essay Wikipedia:How to create and manage a good lead section, I highly suggest you take a look at it as it covers a lot of these smaller details. In general if content is sourced in the body of the article it does not need to be cited in the lead. The exeption to this is controversial material. However quite a few medical articles will have citations in the lead because pretty much anything in the feild of medicine can be considered controverial in a way. As far as order I do typically follow the order of the body of the article but I don't think that is a strict rule. If siginificant changes are made to the body the lead should reflect that as well. IntentionallyDense (talk) 02:15, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Firstly, thanks for the link! We've had disagreements as teachers about what we mark down re citations. We understand that citations are required if the points being made are controversial but alas it's not always easy to identify if the content is controversial. So far we have told them, if in doubt, cite! Secondly, I take on board your suggestion regarding stubs. This is something I will bring to the team G.J.ThomThom (talk) 02:26, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I would generally agree that with medical content it's better to cite than not to cite. IntentionallyDense (talk) 02:39, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

First, your course on medical topics is relevant to two boards, this one, and wP:MEDRS, but given that most of your questions are about citations, WP:MEDRS is the governing principle here and this discussion would have been much better placed at WT:MEDRS, and not here, in order to get definitive answers to your citation questions. I urge you to move it there (see {{Discussion moved to}}; if you agree to move it but need technical assistance to do so, just ask).

Briefly:

• Too stringent? – maybe, but they don't hurt, and no one will complain unless you pile up five at a time. There is no guideline saying you cannot place citations in the lead, so your are not violating anything by doing so.
• Order: the lead need not follow the same order as the body, though often it does. Editing order is: body first, lead second (because it is a summary of the most important points of the body).
• Discrepancies: Yes, revise the lead after altering the body if the changes there significantly alter the most important points of the body. A great many body edits will not be in this category, and require no changes to the lead. A typical newbie mistake is to head straight for the lead and start altering it (or worse, the lead sentence, with no consideration for the body. I have often thought it would be useful to programmatically prohibit lead changes from new users, but there is no general support for that view that I am aware of, though it would save many experienced editors lots of time undoing edits to the lead by new users.

Think about moving this. Mathglot (talk) 05:36, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot Happy to move this and yes to technical assistance please G.J.ThomThom (talk) 12:38, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine § Best Practices for Teaching Students to Write Effective Lead Sections

Please add your comments and feedback there, not here (unless specifically relevant to ENB and not WP:MED). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 17:45, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

A whole class writing promotional/resume-like articles

I've been noticing a whole bunch of promotional/resume-like articles about maybe-notable academics coming from students involved with Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Marymount University - FLP Program/FLP511AB (Fall 2024). I've tagged a few of them, but every article I've looked at from the class has the same problems. @Ian (Wiki Ed), can you or someone work with the class to get these articles cleaned up and brought in line with NPOV? Honestly, they all read like they were written by someone with a deep conflict of interest, but that doesn't seem to be the case since they're connected to this student project. :Jay8g [V•T•E] 18:02, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Students made 43 new NOTRESUME articles, most on decidedly non-notable academics, entirely sourced to their own university profiles and publications (which, granted, isn't necessarily unworkable), with no consideration of independent appraisals of impact. JoelleJay (talk) 21:34, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

@Jay8g@JoelleJay Sorry about the delay - I've been a bit swamped this week. I will get started trying to salvage what I can from these today. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:12, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Students publishing essay-like articles about mostly non-notable paintings

The WikiEdu class Writing on Art at the University of Rochester apparently has students publishing articles about paintings at the University of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery. Most of these articles contain little significant coverage about the paintings, except for coverage published by the Memorial Art Gallery, which is generally non-independent. Instead, these articles are filled with tangential material and "analysis" that is original research. It looks like several of these articles do not pass WP:GNG, as I could find no significant, independent coverage about some of them.

I have draftified three of these articles that clearly did not contain any sources to demonstrate notability; a few other articles were already draftified or moved to a sandbox. Can the staff help deal with these articles by cleaning them up and/or moving out of mainspace as applicable? Pinging @Helaine (Wiki Ed) and @Ian (Wiki Ed). Helpful Raccoon (talk) 01:09, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping Helpful Raccoon. I'll try to get some of my colleagues to help with this. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:11, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Nearly 3-year-old editing problems discovered

Yesterday, in the process of working on a plant species article to make some improvements, I was verifying sources to article content and found that there was, to put it kindly, a bit of a gap between the two. The more I investigated, the more problems I found. After checking the article history and looking at the talk page, I discovered these changes were performed by a student editor in early December 2021 who was a part of a course supported by Wikipedia Education Program. Is this older problem of any interest now? Is it something the instructor should be made aware of? – Elizabeth (Eewilson) (tag or ping me) (talk) 03:46, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

I suppose it largely depends on whether the student and/or the instructor are still active on Wikipedia. Certainly if neither are around any more then it's a case for the community to take up and fix themselves. Even if the instructor is around, they are probably not going to be wanting to fix the issue (as they rarely do anything more than tell the students what and how to edit), but I suppose it can't hurt to check in with them. Primefac (talk) 12:41, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

@Eewilson: Can you specify which page you're referring to? While this isn't good news to hear, I'm mindful of the timing (December 2021) which is in midst of the second wave of pandemic (delta variant) and both student & instructor have limited, appropriate educational support (and library access for that matter). Without any evidence presented, we don't know if this is an innocent mistake or something bigger (e.g. reference mis-attribution). OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 13:10, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

During the course BIOL 3575 Plant Taxonomy - 2021 at Catawba College, everything the student editor changed in the article Phlox nivalis was bad and had to be removed after I discovered it. It was not salvageable for reasons I will describe here.

It appeared that the article had been improved because of source citations and text that sounded good. What I found instead was that text was inserted that was completely unrelated to this species, almost as if it had been copied and pasted from random sources or other articles, as well as were the sources the student editor cited.

This link shows the article before the student's changes: https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Phlox_nivalis&oldid=1013711613

This link shows the article after the student's changes: https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Phlox_nivalis&oldid=1058145579

At a glance, it certainly looks improved, but it was not. One of the sources the student cited, two pages from Westcott's Plant Disease Handbook, were specific to the genus Phlox, but only in that the source refered to pathogens which Phlox species can host. None of that information was in the article. This source was cited in seven locations of the added text as proof of verification and reliability of nearly everything the student added to the article: parts of the sections on description, distribution, habitat, horicultural use, and wildlife.

The student editor removed an existing legitimate source and citation to the Phlox nivalis species data from the website Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN) and replaced it with a completely unrelated source from a journal article entitled "Updated review of potential medicinal genetic resources in the USDA, ARS, PGRCU industrial and legume crop germplasm collections". This is a Phlox species. It has nothing to do with legumes or crops. The journal containing this article is Industrial Crops and Products. It's an actual journal and an actual article. It looks really nice as a citation, but it is a bad citation for the facts it attempted to prove.

There were more instances similar to this. The student editor also randomly changed the NatureServe conservation status for the species from G4 to G1, moved the Species box from the beginning of the article to an area in the middle, and moved the Short description, which was and is always on the first line of the article, to another random location.

Most of the article was incorrect for nearly three years as a result of this student editor's changes. The aricle change history shows that the instructor, who I believe may still be active, had reviewed and made apparent copyediting changes to the article after the student had made their changes.

Although all changes on Wikipedia can be undone, and it is true that Wikipedia cannot be broken, it is sad that all of this happened and was let through into a live, real-world encyclopedia.

I have seen many articles with innocent problems, and sometimes they are made by students. I would not have brought this up if I thought these changes fall into that category. My hunch is this is a situation of the student crashing at the last minute (maybe the final day of the course) to finish the assignment.

The article has now been "fixed". I have made a few changes after removing the student editor's modifications, and you can see the current version here: https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Phlox_nivalis&oldid=1255672855.

– Elizabeth (Eewilson) (tag or ping me) (talk) 18:14, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the article and diffs. A stable version of the student's version can be viewed in this sandbox. Upon closer inspection, yes I start to see a more troubling pattern. References 3-7, 9 and 11 in the sandbox version all point to 10.1007/978-1-4020-4585-1_2395, which is non-existent. The resource cited was "Westcott's Plant Disease Handbook" (the book is accessible via The Wikipedia Library if anyone wants to verify my claims). Student wrote that the information was found in pages 1018-1019, yet the book itself only has 826 pages (and pages 701-826 were back matters like glossary and appendices). Sounds like it was reference mis-attribution, but not ChatGPT hallucination due to the year of occurrence. Given the high uncertainty of the text, I recommend nuking this student's all contributions to this article and leave a strongly worded warning on the student's talk page. If you want, I can also delete the sandbox page given that it's highly likely to be inaccurate. Not sure about the instructor's part, though I think a note should be made to the instructor that a student in their class from 2021 likely committed academic violation (whether the instructor wants to take further action is up to them). OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:44, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Pinging Isoetid since this discussion can be valuable to him. He is teaching a course on same subject now. Ixocactus (talk) 20:04, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Here's another questionable edit from that class (from the 2023 cohort). In Cornus drummondii, Jwarstle20 added the distribution section with an improper reference. It was spotted and cleaned up in June because the paper was "about physician pay in France and Canada" and irrelevant to the distribution of this plant species. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 21:00, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Wow. – Elizabeth (Eewilson) (tag or ping me) (talk) 00:34, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

@OhanaUnited, are you checking others from Catawba College, or did you just happen upon this second one? – Elizabeth (Eewilson) (tag or ping me) (talk) 00:35, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I was looking at the instructor's fixes and found this one. I haven't gone through the entire list of instructor fix to see if any other errors eluded instructor's detection that were later caught by the community. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 03:07, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I stumbled upon a bad link on this term's course page (was seeing if the instructor is still active) and placed a note on the instructor's talk page. It's a redlink because the article title is misspelled. I have not received a reply. I checked the sandbox of the assigned student, and they are working on it. I suppose if an article is created with the incorrect spelling of the species, it can just be merged into the existing. But, I thought it would be easier to avoid that. – Elizabeth (Eewilson) (tag or ping me) (talk) 03:58, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I just discovered one in the wild. An IP presumably tied to this class (due to IP address consistent with the city of this college) and likely logged out of User:Tigeressann (because the IP edited the page and Tigerssann's sandbox) added these texts to Rhododendron atlanticum. I removed a bad reference just now because this species is found in USA but the cited reference talks about... Philippines literature lol. (Thanks to The Wikipedia Library again for access to the full paper.) This is not a good record for the 2023 class with such a small class size. I checked 4 articles and 2 of them had mis-attributed references. Supposingly another student in the same class serves as a peer reviewer, yet I spot-checked 1/3 of the 2023 class to find that the peer review was either absent or superficial (example 1, example 2). OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 05:50, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I think I will start perusing others. – Elizabeth (Eewilson) (tag or ping me) (talk) 06:23, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I'll dig into reviewing these. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:04, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

I have emailed the professor to loop him in. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:52, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for looping me in. I'm the professor. I agree that what you detected is troubling, and I apologize that I missed those types of errors. I have an active class and will endeavor to edit more closely, its difficult but not impossible (obviously) to detect misattributions of references and deliberate changes that are incorrect. I assume the goodwill of the student to do the right thing. The Phlox nivalis student is long gone.

The students are currently working on peer evaluations, they don't fully use dashboard/interface for that, they hand edit a hard copy and write general comments using the dashboard in my class.

Thanks for noting the student misspelling of Iliamna corei Isoetid (talk) 20:41, 7 November 2024 (UTC)

Possible unofficial student editing project

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed a bunch of what appeared to be student editors working on fish-related articles. I finally asked one of them, and apparently this is a fairly large UC Davis class. I'll note that they seem to be doing good work (as far as I can tell -- I don't know much about fish species), but it doesn't appear that this class is running in an official way. :Jay8g [V•T•E] 06:00, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Thanks so much, Jay8g! I left a note for the student on their talk page encouraging them ask their instructor to connect with us. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:25, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Women's Rights Pioneers Monument

I think the recent edit history on Women's Rights Pioneers Monument might be some kind of education project. Many of the editors also edited Wikipedia:Sandbox in the same one-hour period precisely one week ago. jlwoodwa (talk) 20:49, 13 November 2024 (UTC)

If you find out what class they are from, let me know! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:45, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Are there translation projects?

I have been perusing WP:Translation, which contains the section § Classroom collaborations, and which links Wikipedia:Student assignments (without mentioning Wiki Ed) as a good way to set up a classroom translation project. Are there translation projects extant among Wiki Ed classes, and have there been in the past? If so, can you provide a few links? Mathglot (talk) 00:24, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot, we do support a couple of them each term, but it's not very popular, unfortunately. I wish there were more translation classes! Here's one that translated to Portuguese from the spring, and here's an example from this fall of a small med school elective that focused on Spanish translation. We also offer a training module specifically for instructors on designing a translation assignment. Hope this helps! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:49, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it does, thank you! If you (or anyone) knows of other translation projects, past, present (or future), please do link them here. In the meantime, I was planning on adding a link to Wiki Ed from the WP:Translation page which landing page do you think it should link to? Thanks again, Mathglot (talk) 01:59, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot: Thanks! Probably teach.wikiedu.org would be the best, but you can also link to m:Wiki Education Foundation if you want to keep it on-wiki. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:56, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

LiAnna, I've updated section WP:Translation § Classroom collaborations, please have a look. I felt I had to mention the US/Canada-only coverage and the into-English-only translation direction if only to forestall pointless inquiries. (Am I correct about that? Do you have any translation projects going into French, say, in Quebec, or into Spanish in the US, and would you accept such a Wiki Ed class project if it were proposed in an inquiry?)

Inevitably, some viewers are going to have questions about class projects elsewhere, or translations into other languages, and I would like to add a third paragraph to the section about that, but I don't know what to say about it. I'm sure you've dealt with those questions a thousand times before; do you think you could edit that section directly and address those questions, or else point me to where I can find what to say about those two questions? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:19, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Looks great! Thanks! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:47, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Can we say something about those two issues? Mathglot (talk) 19:12, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

In terms of non-U.S. and Canada, I don't have a particularly good answer; maybe reach out to your local Wikimedia affiliate (m:Wikimedia movement affiliates)? I know most of the people doing education work globally so I usually individually connect people to someone who can help in their region, but that's not an easy "general guidance" answer. For non-English in the U.S. and Canada, they should still reach out to us and we'll try to guide them to our best practices. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:37, 20 November 2024 (UTC)

Multiple students publishing a lot of redundant, sometimes essay-style, content with weak MEDRS sourcing at pregnancy

It looks like students in this course are publishing their individual responses to (seemingly) the same writing prompt at pregnancy#exercise, resulting in basically quadruplicated content of wildly varying quality. The students should also be instructed not to add descriptions of primary research studies as a general rule (and yes I realize it's a little more nuanced for experienced MEDRS editors). JoelleJay (talk) 01:08, 15 November 2024 (UTC)

JoelleJay I've emailed the instructor and asked them to intervene with these students. Thanks for bringing it up. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:33, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! JoelleJay (talk) 01:13, 19 November 2024 (UTC)

Crosspost from WP:AN: possible group of West African student editors

Please see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#New seemingly-related group of good-faith but deleterious West African copyeditors. Remsense ‥ 论 06:33, 25 November 2024 (UTC)