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Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Archive 20

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UCSF and Lewy bodies

Helaine (Wiki Ed) or Shalor (Wiki Ed) could you please explain to the people at this UCSF course that Lewy body dementia is not Dementia with Lewy bodies or the Lewy bodies article? WP:CIR does not seem to be activiated here, so I suggest they might remove Lewy bodies in general from their courses. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:52, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

  • Hi SandyGeorgia, are you referring to the edits made by Nickmsalcido? If so, I don't see where they are working with any of our classes. The UCSF course is no longer active (it was a summer course) as well. I tried looking into the user's edits to see if they are with a university class so we can reach out to them, but I can't find anything to suggest that they're with anyone. I will go and post a notification and link to our trainings just in case, however. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:22, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
    • I'm referring to the older edits (which need repair) from the USCF course, but was simultaneously wondering if the new editor may be related to the old UCSF course. At any rate, in case there are any future UCSF plans for a course, could you reach out to make sure they understand the distinction between LBD and DLB? One is an umbrella term for two conditions; the other is a medical condition. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:55, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
  • Ian will likely handle this course in the future, but I'll absolutely let him know about all of this. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:25, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

Campus Ambassador application: Harsh Thakur

2401:4900:4474:DDFD:0:23:D05B:1B01 (talk · contribs)

  1. Why do you want to be a Wikipedia Ambassador?
    I want to become Wikipedia Ambassador so that I could promote Wikipedia to all the people so that when ever they search anything instead of going to other websites they should go to wikipedia for searching.
  2. Where are you based, and which educational institution(s) do you plan to work with as a Campus Ambassador?
    I am based in Sangrur and pursuing my BTech in Sant Longowal Institute Of Engineering Technology
  3. What is your academic and/or professional background?
    I had pursued my Diploma from Government Polytechnical Kangra (Himachal Pradesh)
  4. In three sentences or less, summarize your prior experience with Wikimedia projects.
    Whenever I search anything I search through wikipedia as it is written in easy language and helps in understanding different concepts clearly and easily.
  5. What else should we know about you that is relevant to being a Wikipedia Ambassador?
    I will work harder and harder to promote Wikipedia so that students should open wikipedia whenever they are searching any topic and also to bring wikipedia on the top of the world.

Talk page template

Hello! First and foremost, I consider myself a supporter of education projects on Wikipedia. I noticed another education assignment template was added to Talk:Me Too movement. There are now quite a few of these templates now, which is great!, but also a bit repetitive in a high real estate part of the page. I wonder if there might be a collapsible template, specific to education projects or not, to communicate the same information but in less space?

I'm not opposed to a simple collapsing mechanism, or a fancy Education Program template. I'm not even opposed to somehow integrating with Template:Article history. I'm just posing the question and thinking out loud a bit. Thoughts? ---Another Believer (Talk) 04:04, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Another Believer: Putting large numbers of these into a collapsible template automatically is something I'd like to do eventually. Until then, here's the way to do it manually with {{WikiEd banner shell}}.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:06, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
Sage (Wiki Ed), Ooohhhhh, me likey! I have not seen this before. Thanks for sharing. ---Another Believer (Talk) 21:04, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

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

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for October 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 23:55, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

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

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for November 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 23:58, 6 February 2020 (UTC)

User talk:Munderscore

has been blocked for vandalismclaims to be a student. Guidance is needed by the student and the teacher. Thanks, Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:59, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, @Deepfriedokra:! I left messages for the student and potential instructor -- I appreciate the note here. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:12, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Unreasonable Requirement by Instructor ?

I have a difficult request to deal with. It is difficult because the student, User:Zzhu8516, has been put into an impossible situation by her instructor. She has submitted Draft:Triple pelvic osteotomy (TPO) (canine and feline). It was previously tagged for speedy deletion as copyright violation by reviewers User:Sulfurboy and User:Theroadislong and repeatedly resubmitted. I then Rejected it to try to stop the repeated resubmissions. She writes on my talk page: 

Maybe i had violated the copyright.But i did not mean to do it. This is my first time to edit a wikipage. For my uni, i am studying a course which asks me to write a wikipage and need to post it. If it is not published or delete or there are any problems with copyright i might get a failure to this unit.So i am so urgent as the assignment is already due. Also, my uni is in a English speaking country and i have to edit in English. I also dont have the right to ask my tutor to ask in the education board. I think i have the ability to do this by my self.What i am trying to do now is that fix all the problems and try my best to let it submit succesfully.That's the reason i resubmitted several time yesterday and i do revised a lot of places .But i am feel worried that i still have not got passed.

So it appears that the student has a problem with an instructor who doesn't understand Wikipedia.

I think that I have done what I can do, because it isn't my volunteer job to change Wikipedia policy for a student who has an unreasonable instructor (or who misunderstood what the instructor said, due to a problem with English). I agree with User:AlanM1 that the subject probably should have an article, but not the current draft. But does anyone have any comments or suggestions? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:49, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I am the writor of this article.The problem is not i violated the poiucy or what my tutor ask is unreasonable. It is that i am trying my best to revise it. I hope my effort could make sense. Or if i violate the policy for once, then i can not make some changes? I will be labelled as a rule breaker and i can not publish any article since then? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zzhu8516 (talk • contribs) 02:14, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

This is being discussed more completely at the Teahouse. And, yes, as User:Nick Moyes has explained to you, if that is what the tutor is asking, their request is unreasonable. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:50, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Sourcing and POV concerns with Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB (Fall 2019)

I've come across a few of the articles created by this course in the new pages feed, and I'm rather concerned with the output. While contributions from WikiEd courses often leave something to be desired, in this case the vast majority of the articles created by students appear to only include sources from the World Bank and IMF, despite those organizations not being independent of the World Bank. This is a disservice to both Wikipedia and the students, because it leaves Wikipedia with a bunch of one-sided articles and leaves the students with the impression that the World Bank is an uncontroversial and indisputable authority on its own operations. It is doubly concerning that this course appears to have been taught more than once. Is there any way to make sure that students in this course are properly instructed in Wikipedia's policies on neutrality and source reliability? signed, Rosguill talk 17:13, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Moving this discussion from Shalor (Wiki Ed)'s talk page to a more centralized forum at Mathglot's suggestion. signed, Rosguill talk 17:13, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
  • Thank you for moving the discussion here, Rosguill! I do share in your concerns with this and have brought this up with many students. We will reach out to the instructor to discuss this as well - it's imperative that there are secondary, independent reliable sources on this topic, especially as the World Bank and their efforts in various countries have been the subject of controversy on multiple occasions. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:21, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I see two issues, here. One is the more immediate one, relating to the content additions by this group, which Shalor speaks to above, and may benefit from other opinions. The other relates to a (perhaps) longer-term issue, namely, the question of the interaction between students and the training modules; do we know whether all the students concerned completed them, and in how long? I'm not asking for disclosure of any private student editor information, just whether WikiEd folks have access to such data as a tool for analysis, and future improvement. Can we measure student retention of class material? Subjectively, from Rosguill's report, it seems less than ideal. How does this group of students stack up against random other classes: is this typical, or is there something different going on there? Do we know the level of preparedness of the instructor for dealing with issues of this sort? For these aspects, would like to hear more from Sage, Helaine and others. Mathglot (talk) 23:02, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Alternatively I would just suggest that content creation is hard especially when that content creation is writing brand new articles. By way of example I have a fair amount of content creation experience I still spent about 3 hours (admittedly filled with quite a few wiki distractions) revising/extending three or so paragraphs of content today. I think WikiEd students are above average in their new article creation abilities if we compare them to the like group of editors who submit to AfC. However, that doesn't mean that they're actually at the level of competence we need. But solutions to that get tricky for me in a hurry because I don't think "more/better training from the WikiEd people" is far easier to suggest than it is to actually do. I think ultimately it's up to the community to find solutions and I don't know of any that don't get complicated for me fast (e.g. butting up against my belief in the third pillar. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:17, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Regardless of the general difficulties of content creation, it can't possibly be that hard to explain to people that the majority of sources in an article need to be independent of the article's subject. This course in particular has the compounded issue in that the World Bank publishes a lot of reports that look authoritative and reliable, so students who are unaware of the importance of independent sources see them, decide they're reliable, and call it a day. You can see documentation of exactly this thought process when you look at the peer reviews for the articles on their talk pages (not all of the articles have them, but many do).
There's a further issue which is the nature of the course material. It's one thing if Wiki Ed courses mass produce articles about subjects that are not quite notable but otherwise harmless. Here, we're mass producing what is essentially (with AGF: inadvertently) pro-World Bank propaganda. I think we should consider steering Wiki Ed courses away from potentially contentious, controversial, or otherwise difficult subject areas if we can't guarantee that they'll be able to properly instill Wikipedia's policies into their students' work.
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. While I don't think that this is the primary issue with the World Bank articles, there have been times when I've seen students put some heartbreakingly good work into subjects that just don't meet notability guidelines, and the format of school courses means that it can be very difficult for a student to change topics if they realize that there aren't enough sources available halfway through. If implemented well, this could head off the source independence issues that we see here, as students would be forced to include independent sources in this proposed first step. signed, Rosguill talk 23:31, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Rosguill I don't disagree with you on any of the particulars of why these World Bank articles were not the right fit for these student editors. But WikiEd already does attempt to steer away editors from potentially contentious, controversial, or otherwise difficult subject areas (as it does a few other areas like featured content). But that doesn't mean the instructors will listen to WikiEd. And we see, from this very noticeboard, the disruption that can be caused by classes who are not formally taking part in WikiEd (or its international WMF counterpart). The people who are the subject area experts for WikiEd are accomplished editors and so I start from a point of if it were easy to do WikiEd would have already done it. And I say from my own professional experience that even if you, as an instructor (not WikiEd), require students to to do things like source reviews and submit potential sources before starting any real research, students still might not listen or try to to find ways to do shortcuts (e.g. they collect great sources and then still end up only using 1 or 2 bad ones that you'e said not to use in the end). And if you think it's hard to get through to students it's even harder to get through to instructors who would really need to be the ones to implement your ideas about sources. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:44, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Rosguill I gave a talk about wiki at the World Bank a few years ago, and met a few of the dedicated Wikipedians who work there. The folks I spoke to were information-intensive people who were interested in finding more 3rd party, academically sound reliable sources both for use on Wiki and for use in their daily work at the Bank. My takeaway from these conversations was that there are many places in the world which don't have public domain government information to provide basic facts and data about populations and infrastructure, and that on some topics, the World Bank compilations may be all that's available. Oliveleaf4 (talk) 13:20, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Oliveleaf4, If the World Bank is the only source for a country's involvement for an article about the World Bank's involvement with a country, then we as Wikipedia cannot write an article about that subject. Their reports may still be useful for academic researchers or investigative journalists, but trying to base a Wikipedia article on a single source with a conflict of interest with the subject would be a violation of our policies against original research. signed, Rosguill talk 17:16, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Who cleans up? (No one.) How frustrating. What authority is required to move these into the sandboxes of the users that created them? Because every time I'm sampled them (a month ago and now), there is very close to nothing worth keeping, because every major axis is problematic. If I check a source, just a couple so far, I find misrepresentations and just now a plagiarized abstract from a source (Mexico). There are too many problems in too many articles that will never be checked and corrected. I am willing to help sandbox them, but the aura of "Education project" on articles such as these gives a sense of "untouchability" that has always been at odds with the Wikipedia ethos. I'm going to try sandboxing one now ... naw, they're all equally bad and I can't pick one. The writing alone is too poor for them to stay in article space. Outriggr (talk) 10:23, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
Hi all -- I'm the Chief Programs Officer for Wiki Education, so making sure student editors are adding quality content is ultimately my responsibility. My team has been working really hard over the last few weeks during the end of term rush of content being added (our student editors added 2.5 million words of content in three weeks!), so I'm trying to give people a bit of a breather now that we don't have (many) students editing, since it's winter break — meaning only about half my staff is working this week. I ask that you give us another couple of weeks to get everyone back from vacation, and let us do a debrief on the last term about what worked and what didn't, with everyone who's worked on this program present, before we answer bigger picture questions. So I promise I will get back to you about your very valid questions, but I'd like to do that after we've had a chance to talk internally as a team. That being said, if there are specific edits that are of a concern that you'd like us to look at, please feel free to continue flagging those! But for the bigger picture questions about the program at large, we'll get back to you by mid-January at the absolute latest. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:36, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The issue of steering students away from fraught topics has been a perennial one. There has come to be a pretty robust consensus that students should stay away from any topic where Discretionary Sanctions are in effect, and I have found the WikiEd people to be very helpful in that. This sounds like a case where the topic is POV-difficult, but not subject to DS. To some extent, I think there can be a misguided tendency for instructors to think that it's rewarding for students to work on "hot" topics related to current events, when the reality is that these are typically the worst ones for inexperienced editors to stick a toe into. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:45, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
That is true. However to the extent that student editors could be capable it would be students in what appears to be a 400 level class. Perhaps one piece of guidance that could be given (and maybe - per my remarks above - already is) would be rather than try and create 50 new articles, as this class has done, students in "hot" topics would be better off working collaboratively and creating 15-20 new articles. One of the great thing about Wikipedia, and something I know several successful instructors utilize, is that unlike the typical group project there's a great record of "who did what". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:54, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure that really ameliorates the controversial topic issue, and could introduce the problem of the students essentially meatpuppeting their own consensus of what the article should be. That having been said, the proposal of having more students per article could be an improvement for WikiEd projects that don't have POV concerns. signed, Rosguill talk 23:58, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

As someone who has been quite reluctant to make my views on the effects of student editing known from the day this noticeboard was founded, I would be particularly interested in hearing from LiAnna and colleagues (when they have time to regroup in the New Year) about what they see has been accomplished to address the continued threat to our medical articles by uninformed student editors that I raised eight years ago. What specific measures have been put in place over the last eight years to help avoid established editors having to be unpaid tutors engaged in extensive cleanup?

A specific measure I would like to see is a list of admins who are willing to remove all content created by courses that have demonstrated poor supervision or poor engagement with Wikipedia policy and principles. When poorly supervised students are making editing a chore, and it can be demonstrated that course supervisors have not engaged adequately, we should have a means in place to simply remove their work. I recently spent a good chunk of time correcting edits to Lewy body dementia made by a high-level UCSF course that was editing the wrong article. (Lewy body dementia is not dementia with Lewy bodies; I wrote both articles, and the students were adding content at LBD that pertained to DLB and was already covered. This demonstrates a glaring lack of supervision, and not only that, they altered the citation style while at it.) I should have reverted the lot, but because I took some years off, there were good edits interspersed.

Lianna and colleagues, what has this program done to help retain editors like me considering the damage students do to my watchlist? I am unsure that even high-level courses add value. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:04, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, I think that list of sysops could be a good one but it also feels like we would need community support to do that because while I would be happy to be on such a list (sysop work that is content focused? sign me up!) I think some firmer level of community support for what you're suggesting would be helpful otherwise what ends up being removed could be frustrating to the referring editor and sysop alike. But this does feel like the sort of concrete solution endorsed by the community I was talking about above. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:06, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I am surprised (no, actually, I am shocked) that there has not been a drive to get community consensus on how to deal with the seriously detrimental effects of student editing relative to editor retention and quality of content. An RFC on the topic might be in order. But we know who can't formulate a decent RFC among us :) It is astounding that eight years have passed since I resigned FAC to help address the effect of student editing in medical articles, but nothing has changed in this area.
PS, for anyone who happens to look at dementia with Lewy bodies, please understand I am not proud of the lead. I wrote the article intending to take it to Featured status and to encourage collaboration among medical editors, but I was forced to overcite the lead, which then made it a dreadful read with choppy prose, that would embarrass me at FAC. At any rate, at least it is an example of a complete medical article, even if the lead is awful.
SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:32, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
In the abstract, I would support something like this, up to and including a CSD similar to WP:X2 but probably less temporary (so probably like WP:G15 or something). A new CSD may be overkill, but WP:CIR should also apply to students and educators, and we need some way to ensure that. There's only so much WikiEd can do unilaterally, and I think the community can help by considering what we want the relationship between the encyclopedia and academic courses to be like in the future. — Wug·a·po·des​ 19:52, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
Yes. Someone should start a discussion somewhere to begin to gauge consensus for a new CSD, with an eye towards an eventual RFC. That someone should not be me :) :) Please ping me if it happens. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:01, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I created User:Wugapodes/WikiEd_Brainstorm to spin this discussion out and see if we can develop some kind of working document to present to the wider community. Anyone is welcome to contribute. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:51, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I guess I'll say this here, but it would be worthwhile keeping such discussions in sync with what is already at WP:ASSIGN (as well as at the WikiEd training materials). I think that there is already a reasonably good consensus that any editor (not limited to admins) should always feel free to revert student edits, just as one would revert unhelpful edits by anyone else. No editor here is a teaching assistant, and it's not our responsibility to go more gently on students than on any other users. As for deleting pages, I think it is very unlikely that the community would ever agree to making a new CSD category for this (but it's easy enough to use WP:PROD right after the end of the semester). --Tryptofish (talk) 00:43, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Long reply from Wiki Education

Hi all,

Thanks for your patience as we had a chance to regroup after the holidays! I'd like to give a bigger picture explanation of how we support classes that will likely answer most of the questions, then get into other answers.

Wiki Education is an independent nonprofit organization that supports higher education faculty in the U.S. and Canada. So as AugusteBlanqui notes on User:Wugapodes/WikiEd Brainstorm, there are a lot of other classes operating on the English Wikipedia since it's a global project. I will also say from my experience talking to a lot of university faculty, my guess is there are tens if not hundreds of "underground" courses operating during the term that either don't know Wiki Education exists or are outside our support region and thus may or may not have a lot of support, depending on the extensiveness of the education program in their region (you can see more about global education efforts at outreachwiki:Education). So while I am happy to take suggestions and talk through what we do with classes we support, please know this won't affect all of the students editing English Wikipedia.

Wiki Education has four staff working on our program where university students edit Wikipedia as a class assignment (our "Wikipedia Student Program"). Helaine (Wiki Ed) is our program manager; she works with faculty to ensure their assignment design is good for Wikipedia. Ian (Wiki Ed) is our Senior Wikipedia Expert; he supports some student editors and also manages our two other Wikipedia Experts, Shalor (Wiki Ed) and Elysia (Wiki Ed). Everyone who is teaching with Wikipedia through our program has a course page on our Dashboard software; course pages are automatically mirrored on Wikipedia in this category. The Dashboard software enables us to proactively monitor the work that's happening across all of our courses. It also provides extensive training modules for student editors and instructors. We do track whether students complete assigned training modules; in fall 2019, 67% of student editors completed all modules assigned to them, which is pretty standard. Many of the students who didn't complete the training also didn't actually edit in the article namespace.

 
Chart showing Wiki Education student editors vs other new editors.

One thing to keep in mind is Wiki Education supports around 400 courses each term (it was 388 courses in fall 2019). That's hundreds of instructors, and thousands of students (we supported 7,532 student editors in fall 2019). In fact, we bring 19% of all of English Wikipedia's new active editors — see the chart at right. We can't manually look at every edit every student is making, although we look at quite a lot of them. We've developed numerous internal processes to keep track of all of these courses, and the vast majority of classes don't encounter any issues during the term. We also use technology with the Dashboard to detect common situations that warrant a closer look. The Wikipedia Expert assigned to each class gets email notifications based on various student behaviors — nominated an article for DYK, edited an article under discretionary sanctions, has an article nominated for deletion, etc. This is a notice for the Wikipedia Expert to go see if there should be some action they need to take. They also respond to requests for help from individual student editors or faculty.

At the end of the term, we do a long course "closing" process, where we look into what the students in the course did on Wikipedia. Wikipedia Experts assess the quality of the overall class into one of four categories: "Excellent", "Good", "Fair", and "Hurts Wikipedia". For courses that get a "Hurts Wikipedia" rating, we discuss whether it's something that's fixable and if it is, we do a phone call with the instructor to go over what they would need to do differently to work with us again. If we think it's not fixable (e.g., the instructor insists that students add original research), then we ask them not to do a Wikipedia assignment again. Not all courses are suitable for Wikipedia assignments, and we do our best to head off problematic courses before they start. But if they do, we ensure we only encourage repeat courses from instructors whose students' work is not likely to harm Wikipedia. Our Wikipedia Experts making this judgment (Ian, Shalor, and Elysia) are all (in their volunteer capacity) experienced editors.

We've been doing this program for nearly 10 years at this point, and we've learned a lot along the way. Our support resources have evolved a lot over the years, and they continue to get better every term. One change we're rolling out for the spring is a new Progress Tracker for students on the Dashboard: This modularizes the steps to article writing, including specifically asking for a bibliography first. We hope this will help address some of the challenges in article selection and sourcing we've had in the past, by making it easy for students to see creating a bibliography as a preliminary step to take before starting sandbox work. New training modules, revised guidance, and extra support has been added each term, and we work hard to try to make this a good experience for both Wikipedia and student editors.

In terms of some of the specific suggestions here and on User:Wugapodes/WikiEd_Brainstorm:

  • I know it can seem like students create a lot of new articles when you have a problematic class like the UCSD one creating the World Bank articles with non-independent sources. But 90% of articles our students edit are existing ones: In fall 2019, our student editors created only 646 new articles and edited 6,380 existing articles. Many of those new articles are in under-covered subject areas; see, for example, classes working on African Archaeology articles, or biographies of women scientists.
  • Classes like the Colorado College one working on women scientists are why I think saying students can't work on BLPs is problematic — many of our student editors create excellent biographies, and we have a lot of experience steering student editors to create BLPs without issue. If you have seen BLP issues with our student editors, please flag them to us.
  • Some classes do great work where each student works on their own article, such as this one on Classical Greece. Others ask students do to group work, resulting in article contributions like this USC class's work on the Deepfake article. We find both individual and group work assignments can be successful.
  • As several of you noted, we do try to steer students away from controversial topics that we know won't go well, including some DS topics and GAs/FAs, but students don't always follow our requests. We discussed this internally as a team as part of our debrief last week. We noted that while we often send a note to an instructor and the instructor says "I'll talk to my student about it", we don't currently do any follow-up to see if the student understood and will change the behavior. So we're going to try some new internal processes for follow-up this spring to see if we can be better about closing the loop on actually getting a behavior change when we do offer feedback. We hope this will address that challenge this spring.
  • Regarding copyright, our Dashboard is using the same copyright detection software that User:EranBot does, iThenticate. Our Wikipedia Experts receive a notification any time the software thinks one of our student editors has copy-pasted something to Wikipedia. Our Experts do a check to ensure it's not a false-positive; if it is a copyvio, they remove the student editor's additions and leave a note for them. This obviously doesn't address issues of poor paraphrasing (we have a training that covers that too), but it does catch the most egregious examples of copying and pasting.
  • As Tryptofish said, any editor should feel free to revert unhelpful edits and leave notes about the why for students, or nominate unhelpful content forks for deletion, or delete a copyvio you see, just as you would for any other new editor. Student editors aren't in a different class than any other new editor. Their instructors grade on what the students did, even if it gets deleted, so don't feel like you need to treat them any differently than you would another new editor. That being said, one slight difference for courses we support is they have us, so if you are having a problem with one of our student editors, feel free to ping Ian, Shalor, or Elysia about it, and we can talk to the student and/or instructor.

If you have other questions or comments, please let me know.--LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:42, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. My primary concern at this time would be to ask about how exactly the class quality assessment is carried out, and whether this process can be made more transparent. If it was working effectively, we would not have had the issue that led me to start this discussion, as the output of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB (Fall18) was just as poor as Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB (Fall 2019) signed, Rosguill talk 17:48, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Hi Rosguill, that's a very fair criticism. 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. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:53, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Epistle to the Galatians

See the discussion at ANI Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboard/Incidents#Epistle to the Galatians: multiple redlink authors massively changing and adjusting. Jahaza (talk) 22:14, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I pinged the students. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:42, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Level 2 English course intending to edit Featured medical article

@Springerhe, Shalor (Wiki Ed), Whistler54, and Hdiaz002: regarding Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Butte College/English 2 (Spring 2020), Tourette syndrome and Alzheimer's disease.

Two medical Featured articles have been tagged by students from a level 2 English course. Alzheimer's disease is a tad bit outdated, but Tourette syndrome was just overhauled thoroughly for its March 3 main page appearance. In either case, students are discouraged from editing Featured articles, and it would be extremely unusual/difficult for English 2 students to add content that will be retained to a featured medical article.

My alternate suggestions for these students are:

  • There is an almost-brand-new biography out on Georges Gilles de la Tourette that can probably be obtained via the Butte College library and useful content can be added there. The book, as well as several sources that could be used for expanding that article, are listed in the sources there. (The Walusinski book can be obtained at Stanford, UC Davis or Berkeley.)
  • Caring for people with dementia is an article where some meaningful content can be added by an English student, since some of that would not necessarily need to conform with WP:MEDRS.

Will Shalor please make the necessary contacts and adjustments? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:11, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: Thanks for catching this, and thanks so much for the alternative suggestions. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 12:29, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

There is another at Featured article Huntington's disease, User:Kweeden, instructor User:Ffasching, course Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/DeSales University/Advanced Pathophysiology (Winter), Wiki Ed User:Elysia (Wiki Ed). While this is an advanced medical course, I hope the students are aware of WP:MEDRS and understand that high-level, recent, secondary reviews are needed for editing a Featured article. Some of the sources in the Mechanism section of the article now are dated, so it might be possible for a student to improve that article, but unless they use the most recent and best secondary reviews, their edits are unlikely to stick. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:12, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging, @SandyGeorgia:! We will follow up to ask the students to avoid working on Featured Articles. I'll also echo Ian's thanks for your expertise in suggesting alternatives, we'll pass those suggestions along. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:28, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
The challenge with editing FAs isn't just medical/technical, which I assume that this group could handle. The difficulty is that the goal of FA is more than factual content; it's also WP:Brilliant prose. It's difficult in a single subject-specific class to find both people who are really good with the facts and also people who are really good with the form. And, there's just not necessarily much room for improvement, so it might not be satisfying. On the other hand, if they tackled articles like Neurodegeneration, Nystagmus, Wakefulness, or even Huntingtin (the gene) (I'm assuming they are interested in neurology as a general area), then they might be able to make truly substantial improvements. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:22, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Script to detect unreliable sources

Main page: User:Headbomb/unreliable

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. The idea is that it takes something like

  • John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

I'm still expanding coverage and tweaking logic, but what's there already works very well. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:59, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

This looks really neat, thanks for sharing! I and several other Wiki Education staff have installed it. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:43, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Another writing course editing medical topics

Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Northeastern University/ENGW 3306 (Spring 2020)
@Elysia (Wiki Ed), Amyc29, Smwebster, Zefr, and Alexbrn:

Has this course been made aware of WP:MEDRS? Cannabidiol as a treatment for anxiety should not even be an article. Will Wiki Ed staff do all of the necessary deletions of inappropriate content resulting from this course? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:54, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

CBD for anxiety is an urban legend at present, with no MEDRS sources or regulatory agencies indicating such use. This article should be deleted. --Zefr (talk) 15:57, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
We also have this: Treatment of Hidradenitis suppurativa. Wiki Ed staff, please get this course content off of Wikipedia so that WPMED editors, already stretched thin, don't have to do this work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:59, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
See talk to deal with copyvio. I have pinged User:Diannaa. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:28, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
And this. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:00, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
This course is recently moving articles from sandbox to mainspace; could Wiki Ed staff please get an embargo on that? This course is not writing encyclopedic content and is not apparently aware of MEDRS. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:06, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Agree these article were problematic. And the upcoming ones look to be on some problem topics too, including A diet to success ... really? And I see Psychedelic therapy has lots of unreliable sourcing. Alexbrn (talk) 16:08, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia: Thanks for this. I will get in touch with the instructor, and get the problematic stuff out of mainspace (for starters). Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:36, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
Holy cow, medication tourism and we already had medical tourism; ton of work to salvage and merge anything worthwhile. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:43, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
I think whoever is responsible for this needs to be blocked, this is a total waste of time that causes immense damage to the Project. Alexbrn (talk) 18:59, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
And to editor morale. What a way to spend a day. Somewhere we started a discussion with Wugapodes and Barkeep49 about actions that admins can take in these instances. This is another in legions of instructions who have never written articles[1] trying to instruct students in writing on Wikipedia. They should not be let out of sandbox. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:05, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
User:Wugapodes/WikiEd Brainstorm — Wug·a·po·des​ 19:24, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, continuing discussion there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:29, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Considering the level of problems found in one day from this course, all of these might need to be checked ... all of them contain considerable medical content.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:23, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

While I absolutely appreciate the feedback here and am working with students to address these issues, I would ask that editors kindly assume good faith and recognize a few things: first, these are students who are earnest, yet new to editing Wikipedia. Though we spend a lot of time in class (and through their training modules via the Wiki Education course dashboard) in discussing the challenges of editing medical content--everything from maintaining NPOV, adhering to the standards of medical content on WP, and utilizing secondary sources rather than primary research sources--students are still learning and sometimes there are missteps. In addition, in the last 24 hours our institution has shifted to fully online course instruction for the remainder of the semester due to COVID-19 and students are moving off campus and trying to make sure they are up-to-date with assignments and that has led to some haste in moving content to mainspace. I would again respectfully ask for your patience as I address these issues with students directly before taking harsh actions and threatening to ban people who are fully operating in good faith. Thank you.Amyc29 (talk) 21:05, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
I'm not seeing any questioning of "good faith". This seems more a question of broken procedures. In particular it is imperative that some way is found to stop damaging content being spammed into mainspace, and somebody needs to take responsibility for that. Alexbrn (talk) 21:14, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Amyc29. In general, I'd like to ask for a bit of patience right now. There's a lot of confusion in higher education in the U.S. right now, as a large percentage (probably even a majority) of classes are very suddenly moving to online only this week in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many students are confused about schedules, due dates, and how to communicate with instructors now that they don't have face-to-face meetings; others are being very suddenly kicked out of dorm rooms and asked to move elsewhere with very little notice. Amidst this confusion, there may be more students moving content that hasn't been reviewed or approved into mainspace. If you see problematic content, please do flag it to the Wiki Expert assigned to the class — Ian (Wiki Ed), Elysia (Wiki Ed), or Shalor (Wiki Ed) — and they can move it back to sandboxes until we can sort it out with the professor, just as we did today. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:45, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

An understandably unfortunate situation ... thanks for making us aware. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:49, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
I would also add: a number of my students (especially some international students) do not have reliable internet at home and they are concerned about their ability to complete online assignments once they are required to leave campus this week. So again, I would reiterate the request for a bit of patience while I manage things. Amyc29 (talk) 02:13, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Possible instructor vandalism

I stumbled across this edit from a WP:SPA, wasn't sure where to report it or the best way to handle it. I suspect this was either a teacher making this edit to demonstrate the basis of his opinion of Wikipedia to students, or it was a student making fun of an educator with a positive view of Wikipedia. I'm leaning towards blocking the account and leaving instructions to appeal the block (I'd recommend requiring him to verify his identity through his @sarasotacountyschools.net email address if he wants to do that) and a link to WP:Student assignments on the user's talk page since, at this point, it is at best a vandalism-only account, and at worst WP:Impersonation. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages)Have a blessed day. 23:08, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

It's either disruptive editing (pure vandalism) or disruptive editing (WP:POINT). There's probably enough there for a WP:REALNAME block, but that isn't the purpose of this noticeboard. --AntiComposite (talk) 23:47, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

AKU VICTOR ADIGIZI

     ==={ }===

105.112.33.95 (talk · contribs)

  1. Why do you want to be a Wikipedia Ambassador?
  2. FOR EDITING
  3. In three sentences or less, summarize your involvement with Wikimedia projects.
    GIVING THE BETTER CONTENT OR TRYING (OPTIONAL)
  4. Please indicate a few articles to which you have made significant content contributions. (e.g. DYK, GA, FA, major revisions/expansions/copyedits).
    DYK
  5. How have you been involved with welcoming and helping new users on Wikipedia?
    NOT YET (OPTIONAL)
  6. What do you see as the most important ways we could welcome newcomers or help new users become active contributors?
    DYK (OPTIONAL)
  7. Have you had major conflicts with other editors? Blocks or bans? Involvement in arbitration? NO I DID NOT.
The ambassador program is no longer active, and you do not have the editing experience that would be required if it were. I expect that this request will be closed and removed very soon. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:35, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Online Ambassador application:EZRA SASTRY

  Not done this position no longer exists. — xaosflux Talk 17:19, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

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

Villian2000

Villian2000 (talk · contribs)

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

Villian2000 (talk) 17:18, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

Endorsements

(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)

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

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

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for December 2019 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 22:26, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for January 2020 is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for January 2020 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 22:29, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education's Monthly Report for February 2020 is available as a PDF, on-wiki, and on our blog

Wiki Education’s Monthly Report for February 2020 can be found on Commons, meta, and our blog. Please let me know if you have any questions. OzgeGundogdu (talk) 22:32, 1 April 2020 (UTC)

Is there a related class?

An IP editor on breast imaging will be completing an assignment. Just wondering if there is associated school or institute? [Special:Diff/779212066/948888185] Cheers --Tom (LT) (talk) 22:10, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

@Tom (LT): I believe it's User: Amircha in this class. I'm going to move the In the interest of privacy, since they revealed their real name and IP address, I should probably revdel the edit and copy the content to their sandbox. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:10, 6 April 2020 (UTC)
Sure. Thanks for your help. --Tom (LT) (talk) 07:52, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Original research in BLP

Hi,

A new editor just added content attributed to "personal communication" in Jerilynn Prior. Dr. Prior is a friend of mine IRL so I don't want to intervene directly. She has cc'd me on recent email exchanges with someone who said they are updating her Wikipedia bio as part of a class assignment, although I don't think this has been declared on-wiki. Everything is being done in good faith but the student needs to be informed about our sourcing policies. Would someone here like to follow up? Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 21:26, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

@Clayoquot: do you know which university the student is at? If they're in the U.S. or Canada, you can tell them to have their instructor visit teach.wikiedu.org. Then we can get the course registered, so all students will have access to training materials covering (for example) sourcing and WP:NOR. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:38, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I've passed that suggestion along to the student along with a heads-up about WP:NOR and WP:BLP. The class is at the University of Guelph. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 00:41, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
Thanks! We have supported courses at the University of Guelph in the past, but it looks like not since 2017, so we'd be happy to support this faculty if we can. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:30, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Twinkle is (mis)directing speedy deletion notices to content experts

If you are a content expert and you received a speedy deletion notification on your talk page (like this one) for an article you didn't create, and you have no idea why, it might have to do with an issue currently being discussed. In short, this can happen when an article created by one of your students in their sandbox, is moved to mainspace by you, and later nominated for speedy deletion by a Twinkle user. TWinkle considers this as *you* creating the article, even if the student added every word of the content. You're invited to follow the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Twinkle#Mistargeted CSD notice, and your feedback at that discussion is encouraged. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:36, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Feedback requested regarding use of PRIMARY sources in non-fiction synopses

Your feedback would be welcome at Talk:Pedagogy of the Oppressed regarding the addition of a synopsis of a non-fiction academic work to an article using WP:PRIMARY primary sources exclusively. See also the related policy-page discussion at WT:No original research. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:27, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Assignments About Doug Foley

I have just reviewed two submissions that appear to be notes about a project or projects involving Doug Foley, who appears to have been an American anthropologist who did field research in the United States. The students are User:Waffles2030 and User:Walkinonsunshine1234. They were submitted via Articles for Creation for review, but are not really article drafts. There isn't a real problem, but it would be useful to know who the instructor is and whether the instructor has coordinated appropriately. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:25, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon: I can't find enough in their edit history to connect them with any classes, but I left each of them a note asking their instructor to get in touch with us. Hopefully that will work. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:06, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

New pages curation tool sends messages to content experts instead of to student editor

The page curation process is currently sending messages to content experts, instead of to the student editor who created an article in their sandbox and moved it live. For an explanation and discussion, please see WT:NPP/R#Sending curation messages to the right student editor. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 20:56, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

COI editing

Please see this discussion at the Medicine WikiProject regarding edits by a course at UNC, sample at Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill/PSYC 500 (Spring 2020) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:37, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Edu assignment template still can't link to dashboard

  Resolved

Please see Template_talk:Educational_assignment#Can_we_add. Can someone take care of this? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:51, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

Long-standing problematic course

These courses, [2], in spite of running for multiple years, are still turning out work that should not be in mainspace until/unless there is better supervision and issues are addressed and the professor is better trained and engaged and more conversant in Wikipedia editing.[3] See discussion at WPMED. There is a Fall 2020 course planned at Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Florida International University/2020 Fall Narratives of Medicine Health and Healing (Fall 2020), which will hopefully be confined to draft space. An indication of how much of the content ends up deleted can be seen in the articles list at Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Florida International University/2020 Narratives of Medicine, Health and Healing (Spring 2020); most of the articles that did not need to be deleted are barely notable stubs, or had extensive cleanup needs and were nothing more than overly long plot summaries cited to sources unrelated to the topic., often with MEDRS issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 03:39, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

As an instructor myself, I can see both sides of the coin here. My first thought would be to ask the instructor if he has any plans to make the future submissions of his student more useful to the community (and requiring less cleanup). This is also compounded by the topic (medicine) which has higher-than-above quality standards, which is commendable but makes educational projects in this area more challenging. Has any attempt been made to engage the instructor (User:Castelamfr), explain to him why there are problems and if so, did they reply? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 07:21, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
Yes, Piotr, the issue here is profs far less conversant in Wikipedia than yourself having students edit in areas that engage biohealth information, where there are additional challenges and concerns. Another complication is that so much of the communication that occurs with profs is backchannel, so the rest of the community has little knowledge about what communication has occurred.
So yes, I have taken on that dialogue with the prof myself, which is likely to ruffle feathers, but it does not appear that staff has expressed the level of problems frankly, and the prof has extremely limited knowledge of Wikipedia, even after running six courses. You, apparently and unfortunately, are not the typical student editing prof ;(. I invite you to view this prof’s own article edits.
One can be patient with new profs who do not have even the most basic understanding of how to edit Wikipedia ... but after six courses, and biohealth topics, some level of proficiency should be on board. Have a look at the work deleted from Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Florida International University/Narratives of Medicine Health and Healing (Fall 2018), and the prof’s own 23 edits to two articles with ongoing lack of knowledge about how to engage talk, relative to the idea that the Spring 2020 problem is COVID-related.
I also see at least four Wiki Ed staff attempting to help the prof (Ian, Ryan, Shalor, Elysia), so something about this model needs repair, and a good start may be to assure profs understand Wikipedia themselves before allowing their students into health-related areas, BLPs, or mainspace editing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:23, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
I have really had some very bad experiences with not only student editing but also a feeling that I had only wasted even more of my time in trying to do something about it. For example, at our Breastfeeding article a student not only inserted information that was already well-covered in the article, the student appeared to barely be able to use the English language. See for example this addition:
After giving birth it is recommended that both mothers or fathers can have Skin to Skin with their newborn child. Skin to Skin is when a newborn baby is placed directly on top on their mother chest nakedly so that it give the baby a sense of security and comfort so that they can have a bonding moment with their mom. Skin to Skin help both mom and dad have more confidence and make them feel more relaxed as parents because they already have a sense of connection with their baby. Skin to Skin have many health benefits associated with it like lowering postpartum depression, relieve stress, stabilize baby's temperature, breathing rate, heart rate, and blood sugar.
After trying to work with this editor many times I finally gave up and SHOUTED for the first time in all of my years of editing WP: [4]. I tried on my own to find the instructor hoping that I could explain what it's like being on this end of student editing but was unable to be certain of just who the instructor might be. I did figure out that it seemed to be some sort of nursing class, perhaps LPNs or nursing assistants. The thing is, this student's instructor had to know from the class work that this student was doing that they did not know how to use the English language properly, and from my experience with them they must have not really understood much of my feedback as well. At any rate, I have no bad feelings towards this student and wish them well, but I do have to wonder about not only the qualifications of this instructor but about our own WP staff when this was, as far as I could tell, never fully given the concerns that IMO were needed. (A rather emotional rant-like speech here but this is what happens when one complains again and again and does not see much change going on. Or perhaps things have improved and I don't know it yet...) Gandydancer (talk) 14:04, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
Gandydancer, the course in your case is Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Medgar Evers College City University of New York/PSY 213 Social Psychology (Fall 2019) and the prof is user:PsychDocNY, who has never edited an article. [5]. This serious problem has much improved over the years with Wiki Ed staff intervention. At least we have someone to talk to now. But most of these profs do not have the experience of Piotr or User:Jbmurray ( whose work at the FA level spawned student editing), and we seem to need more emphasis on making sure profs themselves understand Wikipedia, and to prohibit them from moving student work into mainspace when it is in the health realm. Also, the problem with Psych courses is far worse than other medical— see two threads up. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:36, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
Yes, I think that I am being too harsh in my judgement. Thinking back it seems that the staff tried to do what they could and did communicate with me. The student's work was so pathetic that I just could not fault him/her. Mostly I was angry with the student's instructor and even with the college (did you note their graduation rate?). I felt that we needed to have a discussion with the instructor. But I guess that that was not very realistic on my part. Gandydancer (talk) 23:28, 26 June 2020 (UTC)

Update from Wiki Education

July 1 marked the start of our new fiscal year, and as always, we've published our annual plan for the year. Of particular note is that the COVID-19 pandemic's economic disruption has hit Wiki Education, meaning we sadly bid farewell to seven of our wonderful staff, including community members User:Ryan (Wiki Ed), User:Shalor (Wiki Ed), and User:Elysia (Wiki Ed). The work they have done for Wiki Education over the years has been incredible, and we will miss them.

What does this mean for our programs on English Wikipedia? We will continue to run our Student Program, where students edit Wikipedia as a class assignment, and our Scholars & Scientists Program, where we train subject matter experts to edit, just with fewer numbers than before. In particular, with our Student Program, we have announced a stricter application process to participate in the fall 2020 term. We will be accepting some courses per normal, and some under the condition that student work stays in sandboxes until our staff has a chance to review the student work, in an effort to avoid putting additional burden on the volunteer editing community. As always, if you see any problematic editing from student editors in our program (they'll have a Wiki Education banner on their user page that links to their course), please flag it here on the Education Noticeboard or ping User:Ian (Wiki Ed). Our intention with this plan is to balance providing good support to participants without causing some courses to teach without our support. We hope this will result in good quality content on Wikipedia with minimal disruption to volunteer efforts. If you have any further questions, please feel free to ask. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 01:29, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

LiAnna (Wiki Ed), I'm sad to see those Wiki Ed employees be let go. Shalor in their Wiki Ed role particular played an important in affirming my early work as a New Page Patroller. Bigger picture I hope that this does not result in an increase of unsupported classes making edits because that will be bad on multiple levels. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 01:42, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
Barkeep49, I couldn't agree more; I'm also incredibly sad to lose my colleagues. We're doing everything we can to ensure there won't be unsupported classes making edits even with our decreased capacity, as we also recognize the challenges that would bring. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:08, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
I am really sad to hear about the layoffs. Best wishes to everyone who's been part of the team. I've seen the great work you do. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 02:35, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed), Wiki Ed is a wonderful program run by wonderful people, and this is very sad news for our entire movement. I truly hope that we get this pandemic under control as quickly as is reasonably possible, and that your program is able to bounce back. Be well. Cullen328 Let's discuss it 03:16, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
I want to thank everyone I worked with, but in particular Shalor (Wiki Ed) and Elysia (Wiki Ed), who I've worked so closely with for the last two years, and who were just the best to work with. I will miss working with them more than I can put into words. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:33, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Real shame to hear about this, particularly as last year had some (and those are definitely just the ones I interacted with) supported courses with particularly good content come through Nosebagbear (talk) 08:13, 3 July 2020 (UTC)
    ++ Very sad, the education team has been very helpful and kind when it comes to copyright. Moneytrees🌴Talk🌲Help out at CCI! 03:21, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Oppose – That's my vote on this Efd. Oh wait, I don't get a vote? Plus it already happened? Darn; sigh... Will miss Shalor especially, also Ryan who I've worked with a little. Happy trails, everyone! Mathglot (talk) 10:27, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
    • What a shame. I know I've found Shalor very helpful. Doug Weller talk 11:48, 4 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't see what impact COVID could have had on your funding, unless you're positing that donations are down and the WMF isn't paying their fair share. It makes you think about the volunteers like me you chased off, years ago. Personnel is policy, after all. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:04, 5 July 2020 (UTC)
  • Best wishes for new beginnings, thanks Wiki Ed for what I would call the world's highest impact, lowest cost Wikipedia content development program anywhere in the world. With <1% of the Wikimedia Foundation's budget you encourage 100x the content contributions and volunteer recruitment as compared to the WMF, which has a difference scope and purpose. I appreciate the nearly 10-year focus of the education program on encouraging people at universities to contribute the best Wikipedia content they can, and I fully expect that the students with good memories of their participation to re-engage with Wikipedia years later after they settle down in their career and family lives.
Thanks to Ryan, Shalor, and Elysia, whom I expect to see around elsewhere in wiki. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:09, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

UCSF course lists 106 MED-related articles

Please see WT:MED#Heads up about new UCSF WikiEd course for details about this course, which may need extra eyeballs due to the more stringent requirements of WP:MEDRS. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:16, 14 July 2020 (UTC)

It is now up to 128, that is too many articles for novice editors to be taking on, and this should be restricted. In spite of WPMED coordinating watchlists, this is an abusive amount of supervision needed. Could you all at Wiki Ed perchance put your heads together to find a way to deal with this kind of prof editing profile before engaging 123 novice editors and 128 articles requiring WPMED supervision? As a reminder, Jbmurray, who caused the launch of student editing, was very active and knowledgeable. Perhaps User:Health policy could write an article? Of restrict the course to a couple dozen articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:55, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Grand Challenges of Engineering course work

Hi everyone. I just reverted a huge addition of student work to Sustainable energy, which in my opinion was undue weight. It also seems to be extremely POV. This was the work of three students, so I suspect something was not great about the instructions and guidance they received. Just letting you know in case you want to follow up. Take care, Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 19:06, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

@Clayoquot: I looked through the rest of their work, and didn't notice anything too serious. The instructor is new to the assignment, and should have a much better sense of the assignment going forward. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:47, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Perfect. Thanks Ian! Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 18:07, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Course typo

I get nervous about touching anything to do with Wiki Ed, but someone can't spell their own institution : Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Ililnois at Chicago/Mentoring and Editing (Fall) .... What's the procedure for a rename, I assume there's all sorts of dependencies which mean it's a bad idea to just move it? Le Deluge (talk) 15:45, 19 July 2020 (UTC)

Le Deluge, thanks for flagging this. The course doesn't start for another few weeks, and the person on our staff who can safely move it without breaking things is on vacation this week, but I'll ask him to fix the typo when he gets back. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:49, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed), thanks. Is there a better way to report this kind of thing? We catch quite a few of this kind of thing (well, usually it's people using abbreviations like SDSU or UConn) at Special:WantedCategories - my usual approach is to create the category as a daughter of the category with the "official" wiki name and assume that someone will get round to tidying them up at some point, but I'm happy to do something different. Le Deluge (talk) 16:56, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
Great question. Let me discuss that internally and I'll get back to you next week. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:39, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
We can rename courses on the Dashboard (which we usually don't do if a typo isn't noticed until links to it have already been sent out to students), and then the old location of the course page can just be redirected to the new one (which I did here). Adding a note here is probably the best way to report this kind of thing, as renaming on the Dashboard requires the intervention of either a Wiki Education staff member or the instructor.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:31, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Another one : Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/Univeristy_of_Puerto_Rico_at_Cayey/INGL_3103_Intermediate_English_(Fall_Semester_2020) (univeristy) Le Deluge (talk) 01:10, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Sock puppetry

Assuming a teacher instructs students to edit specific Wikipedia pages for a school assignment, then a CheckUser sees all the different student accounts simultaneously editing the same range of topics from the same IP range and blocks all the accounts right away. That wouldn't be good as each student only used one account! A CheckUser cannot just look at the usernames and know whether they are one person or many people, especially if a school never owned this IP range until recently! The assumptions a CheckUser can make may be totally different from reality! So, what would the best steps be for an instructor to make sure their students don't get mistakenly flagged for sock puppetry? 154.5.234.189 (talk) 00:22, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

As far as I know, it has never happened, as student editing is marked on talk pages typically. On the other hand, there have been MANY times when it should have happened, as students are furthering an instructor POV or COI. We need for this problem to be raised and addressed MORE frequently, not less. SandyGeorgia (Talk)
But right now, students' IPs are usually not the same IP address during the COVID-19 pandemic because they don't connect to one Wi-Fi network as their homes are usually not very close to the network physical location (maximum distance is based on network's strength). But after everyone goes back to school again, a problem like this has a much higher chance of occurring. Teachers might not know to read Wikipedia's policies because there's no automatic tour when a user first visits Wikipedia, and the vast amount of important pages to read on Wikipedia can put a high load on cognitive memory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 154.5.234.189 (talk) 00:28, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
It has never been a problem. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:04, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
  • As SandyGeorgia said, it's not been a problem for Wiki Ed as far as I can remember. The only times I've seen anything class related pop up was when there are classes who are editing and the instructor hasn't left any sort of note or indicator that they're part of a classroom assignment (ie, leaving a note on their user page, signing up with Wiki Ed, etc). It's not uncommon for those to pop up, but it's fairly rare for anything like that to go through checkuser. Typically when they're discovered the editor would post a note here to let Wiki Ed know that we needed to reach out to them. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 03:27, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia and ReaderofthePack: For the record, it does happen, if rarely. For example, two Chinese students from my course last year apparently got blocked following the Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Shivashang/Archive report (which I noticed by accident later and got them unblocked; most likely they were never aware of it as it happened after the course ended and as usual, they went inactive as soon as that happened anyway). I note they still remain blocked in Chinese Wikiepdia, and the editor who filed the report, User:SCP-2000, still hasn't apologized for the mistake (although User:PhilKnight who initially blocked them here did unblock them and apologized on their pages, following my explanation, which I do appreciate). So anyway, this can happen, if rarely, and I think there should be some way for CheckUsers to be able to see 'student flag' or similar more easily than it is now (particularly as the block, in this case, originated on Chinese Wikipedia, and while on English Wikipedia a CU which would look at their talk page (which did not happen in this case anyway...) would see some indication they are part of an educational project (in this case, but not all students have talk or user pages that make it obvious they are students, which is a related issue that needs addressing), I don't think this would be apparent from the Chinese Wikipedia pages/activity; further, given that Wikipedia is semi-illegal in China, they probably don't have any tradition of educational projects there, so Chinese CUs probably have even less reason to consider this rare scenario as we do, and they can't be really expected to check talk pages on English Wikipedia for the off chance the account is a student AND makes it clear on their talk pages). PS. Phil, maybe you can make a note of this issue at the CUs mailing list or such? It is rare but might as well figure out a solution to avoid this now. It happened at least once, it can happen again. The simplest solution I can think of would be a global student account flag tied to having an account registered on the edu dashboard (and to avoid abuse, this should be flagged only for accounts where there is a course password feature turned on, otherwise a smart sockmaster could start abusing this and mass registering their socks for courses...). --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:42, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Honestly, I am very sorry about that. I will try to ask admins in Chinese Wikipedia to unblock them if possible. I guess the admin did not read their talk page in English Wikipedia, and they didn't know they were students of the education project (IMO I don't think admins would read the talk page in other wiki, and this action is unreasonable and very rare). Furthermore, in Chinese Wikipedia, there are some of the educational projecst are running, such as the educational project organized by WMHK and educational projects organized by WMTW that have been running since 2012. And we don't have CUs in Chinese Wikipedia. Thank you. --SCP-2000 05:04, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Piotr, thanks for the example. SCP-2000 I don’t see a lot of fault with you. Why was Shivashang editing another user talk page, that btw is all in Chinese on the English Wikipedia? The only indication they were students is found by going to article talk. The editor interaction analyzer does not have them both editing the education page? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:57, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Student editor retention

The recent MED editing experience generated a lot of discussion on points specific and general. As this course draws to a close, WhatamIdoing posed this question to the MED editor team:

Have you considered invited your student(s) to continue editing in the future? Even a small edit here or there would be a good thing.

I agree that it would be a good thing; and WaId's question is an important one, that deserves a wider audience. This is a question about WP:RETENTION, in particular, the special case of student editor retention. Although the topic has been touched on several times before at ENB, I don't see a discussion devoted to it, and this seems as good a time as any. (I considered mentioning this in the section above, but it's really a separate topic, hence, two sections.) Anecdotally, I think there are a lot of opinions about this topic, and it's much larger than just MED, but since WaId asked it in the MED discussion just now, we might as well start there. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:03, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot, sorry I'm just seeing this now. Yes, we do encourage student editors to stick around. Most of them tell us they plan on doing so; very few actually do. Wiki Education instead focuses on retaining high-quality courses' instructors, so they continue to improve content in the subject area they teach term after term. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:31, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Wikipedia editors usually seem interested in retaining individual editors. The focus on retaining instructors might produce fewer difficulties over time, though. People who have been through the process a few times tend to come up with more suitable assignments.
I'd be happy to see a post-class outreach campaign, with a few simple tips such as Wugapodes suggested: "As you're reading, if you see something, remember that you can always revert vandalism, fix typos, add tags, add citations, update your user page, report problems to a noticeboard, etc." WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I don't believe there has been an academic study on student retention, it is on my to do list, but bottom line is that just like 99.9% of people are not interested in becoming Wikipedia editors, this is true for students. Free rider problem, lack of motivation, etc. It takes a very specific person to want to be here instead of engaging in a zillion other pastimes, and I doubt any study will say anything different, except doing it for twenty pages of academic technobabble boiling to the same conclusion.--Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:22, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education Monthly Report for June 2020 now available

We've published our June Monthly Report. You can read it as a PDF on Commons, on Meta, or on our blog. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:28, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

I've looked at this report and I have a couple of suggestions for course work. The coronavirus article (or perhaps both the world-wide and U.S. articles) needs a section on the substantial rise in abuse of both partners and children. It should also be noted that many of the incidents of child abuse are reported by children's teachers, so that is certainly another critical reason that children are suffering because they are unable to attend school. Also, our HIV and pregnancy article could use an abortion section as that is lacking, making the article appear to be a little biased, IMO. Perhaps there is a specific page where I should be posting these suggestions? Gandydancer (talk) 22:24, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
@Gandydancer: Thanks for the suggestions. We have another COVID class wrapping up in two weeks, and are planning to run another one starting next month, so hopefully we can find someone who'll be interested in adding information on child and partner abuse. Our class with the Society of Family Planning wraps up next week, but I will encourage them to work on that, especially to anyone who plans to stick around.
As far as a place to post suggestions - let me talk to my colleagues and see if we can come up with a good plan for that. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 13:50, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Assignment template update

Just announcing a minor update to the dashboard assignment template. This is a backwards-compatible upgrade to help deal with the annoying "is or was" verbiage. You can now control this phrase by using the new |ended= parameter, resulting in was, is currently, or is or was in the text. Examples: Talk:Cartography, Talk:Civilization, Talk:LGBT stereotypes. Note that this upgrade applies to template {{dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment}} only; see the doc for details. A cleverer upgrade might calculate the correct verb tense based on the |end_date= param, and I have a truly wonderful solution for that, but unfortunately the margin here is too small to contain it; so that is left as an exercise for the reader. After all, this is Wiki Education, n'est-ce pas? Adding Sage (Wiki Ed). Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:27, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Nice!--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:47, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
Mathglot, I've returned with a bigger ladder. Template talk:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment#Template-protected edit request on 24 August 2020 --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 18:59, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
AntiCompositeNumber, will you marry me? This is actually what I wanted to do (*been* wanting to do) for a long time, I just haven't had time for it. This is way better; now, no editor intervention is necessary for it to happen. (Thanks also for standardizing/improving the old test cases.) Sage (Wiki Ed), this needs at least thee exclamation points. Thanks so much to AntiCompositeNumber, and don't let him get away.
Btw, my limited time continues: Sage, can you (or someone) check the new test cases that ACN provided, and when you're happy with it, do the move into Template space? If not, let me know, and I'll get to it eventually. Btw, not sure if VE folks ever want to modify invocations of this template after addition to the TP of an article they're working on, but if they do, a Template data section in the doc would be needed. Thanks! Mathglot (talk)
Never mind, ACN added the TemplateData, too! Mathglot (talk) 19:48, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
Very nice! Test cases look good to me; I've updated the template to ACN's version.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:06, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Making de-orphaning a formal part of WikiEd courses

I've been looking through the Spring 2020 work at https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/ and I have to say I'm hugely impressed with the whole program. Tons of quality content created and updated, and many new editors contributing. One problem was obvious, though, but I think it has a simple fix. Far too many of the new articles created were total orphans, with no links from anywhere else and therefore very little impact.

If we could make de-orphaning a formal step in the WikiEd process, that students are assigned and that is incorporated into their grade, that would go a long way to fixing this. Great tools like http://edwardbetts.com/find_link/ and reources like WP:DE-ORPHAN already exist to make this relatively easy. Just my 2¢. Ganesha811 (talk) 13:09, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

@Ganesha811: Wiki Ed is an organization which can speak for itself, but I can reply a bit about the university experience.
In general, universities and professors will do nothing except exactly what they have in mind to do, which typically is to have students write Wikipedia articles.
There is a lot of power in the Wikipedia Education Program and it does produce lots of content, but controlling or directing all this school interest seems difficult without very labor intensive development. Options for making what you propose happen include (1) someone creating new training materials very targeted to classes or (2) someone doing customized outreach to classes to either recruit or convince them that this task is good for them or (3) invent a new way to encourage this.
I am at a university and I present Wikipedia at classes. My estimate is that 90% of university Wikipedia Education Program energy and labor is completely unrelated to Wikipedia; instead it is only library research, classmate to classmate conversation, and writing. That last 10% of effort is posting the content into Wikipedia, and it is all that I can manage to teach Wikipedia's citation tools, wikilinks, and account management. Students remember editing Wikipedia and think fondly of it, but in their first editing experience they learn ~20 things that experienced editors take for granted. They have fun, but for some in every class it is already almost too much.
I want a future with better training materials to make what you say possible. In my view the mostly likely developer for this is the Wikimedia Foundation for outreach into underserved demographics, and the second most likely developer is some individual at a university who can pilot the program at their school. Those groups are not here on this board and I would not know how to call their attention to your idea. What are your thoughts and wishes for this? Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:17, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
@Ganesha811: Thanks for the feedback! We do actually encourage student editors to de-orphan their articles, but as Bluerasberry notes, this isn't something central to the instructors' and students' view of the assignment, and thus is something that often gets overlooked. That being said, 90% of our student editors work on existing articles, so most of our students' work does get attention. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:45, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed), BlueRasberry, thanks for the explanations! That makes sense. :) Ganesha811 (talk) 18:29, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

MED editing experience and post-mortem

The Wiki Ed course at UCSF called "Foundations II" is drawing to a close in a week. So far, it has involved dozens of student editors making hundreds of edits to dozens of articles (originally > 100; reduced to 30 after intervention by Ian). The worthy editors at WP:WikiProject Medicine have done more than their share trying to keep up, and maintain the standards of WP:MEDRS at these articles. Issues arose (when do they not?) and you'll find a long discussion about it here; Ian is aware and has been monitoring and responding as needed.

I just thought that there was a need for a forum at the intersection of MED and the Wikipedia Education program, to encourage direct feedback from this excellent and experienced group of MED editors about their recent (or other) experiences with student editors, as well as to open it up to the larger Wiki Ed community, and also to provide an opportunity for the great group of folks here at Wiki Ed/ENB to offer what they've learned from years of experience with student editors to the MED team, so it might ease their burden next time around. This seems like the right venue for such a forum. So, MED editors, if you feel you have something you can share, please do. As always, the long-term goal is to improve the encyclopedia, and I believe that improving communication and transparency between the ENB and MED folks, is a step in that direction for one high-profile topic area at least. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:03, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

I think the issue is simple. MED has standards that are way above the rest of Wikipedia (which is generally a good thing). But new editors and that means students are barely able to meet our normal standards. You cannot expect educational assignments at undergrad level to produce content you'll be happy with without effectively having to mentor/clean up after dozens of newbies. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:19, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Appears that the student editors and student reviewers from the Foundations II project stopped editing ~ August 5, so my being invited to provide some oversight after that date had no impact. If the student course really ran to August 21 I would have expected more. It is not clear whether the instructor(s) checked the articles to see if there were edits or comments submitted after the students were 'done'. David notMD (talk) 08:50, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
@Piotrus:, I find the same problem wrt to new editors and topic areas under discretionary sanctions, also a stricter regime of standards, in a different way than MED is, but analogous in their increased difficulty for new editors. Mathglot (talk) 08:31, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
@Mathglot: Interesting analogy, but given that even in normal areas retention is very low, I am not sure if the new editors exposed to it really see much of a difference. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 09:11, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
  • As long as I do not have to deal with a cadaver, I am happy to offer a pithy post-mortem. ;^]   ¶   I wrote the following over on the WP:MED talk page and it seems apropos here too: The UCSF students who edited POLST significantly improved the article. They demonstrated an above average understanding of Wikipedia editing conventions and requirements. I learned a lot reading their additions to the article. All the best - Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 20:38, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
    Mark, that's great to hear; thanks! Mathglot (talk) 09:40, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Students editing controversial topics

I've got a two part question/observation about this.

The first part has to do with the wording of {{dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment}}. When the template is added to article talk pages and the |assignments= parameter is populated, it displays the following: "Assigned student editor(s): XXXX" (where XXXX is the name of the student editor). This seems to imply that the students are being assigned articles either by their course instructors or perhaps their Wiki-Ed course advisors. What I've noticed when coming across Wiki-Ed students asking questions at the Teahouse, etc., however, is that most students seem to be choosing their assignments themselves; they might have a general topic assigned to them by their course instructors, but they pick the articles they want to work on. Perhaps their choices are then approved by their course instructors or something? Maybe the template's wording is not such a big deal, but it seemed odd to me after responding to Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive 1076#Controversial topics since my response was directed more towards the student than the student's course instructor.

The second part has to do with students editing controversial subject matters in general. The student who asked the aforementioned Teahouse question seems to have chosen to work on Transcendental meditation on their own, but the template they added to Talk:Transcendental Meditation seems to imply they were assigned the article. If it's a case of the latter, then maybe it might also be a good idea to advise course instructors about the potential downside of assigning their students controversial articles to work on. It's possible that the course instructors are also new to Wikipedia editing (or at least new enough) and thus are not aware of things like WP:ACDS or other editing restriction placed on articles whose subject matter is considered to be controversial. They might not also realize the type of drama/heat/unpleasantness that editors can find themselves experiencing when trying to edit such articles. I'm not suggesting that students should be prohibited from selecting such articles, but only that they (and their instructors) might not realize what they're getting into before it's too late. Is there any specific guidance given to instructors/students about this kind of thing or is it pretty much handled on a case-by-case basis? -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:44, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

Besides the topic areas under ArbCom discretionary sanctions, there are also lists of controversial issues. In addition, some areas are harder for student editors, not because they are controversial, but because of other reasons such as more restrictive sourcing requirements, as is the case for example, with WP:MEDRS. Adding User:SandyGeorgia. Mathglot (talk) 11:20, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
Hi Marchjuly, thanks for your questions.
(1) Some instructors directly assign articles to students, some create a list of articles and let students choose from that list, and some ask students to find topics on their own. Now that you point it out, I can see how the word "Assigned" can be confusing on that template, so we'll remove it so it just says "Student editor(s):".
(2) Yes, we do encourage both instructors and students to avoid controversial topics. You can see our training modules on finding an article to work on here: for instructors; for students. They're very similar in content, just phrased differently for different audiences. That being said, not all instructors or students follow our advice. Our Dashboard software flags it to us if a student edits an article under discretionary sanctions, an FA/GA, or other controversial topics, and we try to intervene with the student and instructor as appropriate. One thing to note for this fall 2020 term: about 1/3 of our courses are working exclusively in sandboxes, so while the template might appear on a talk page of an article, the student may just be working on it in a sandbox; if we deem the contribution is a well-sourced, good addition, we'll merge it after the end of the term.
Let me know if you have other questions. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:26, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for the additional clarification LiAnna (Wiki Ed) and for looking at the "dashboard" template. I kinda figured that Wiki Ed was providing some guidance to students and their teachers about this kind of thing, but I guess some students may feel its more intersting to edit "controversial" topics than something obscure that nobody's likely going to really read. -- Marchjuly (talk) 00:29, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I wonder whether it might be more helpful to think about the attractive group of articles as "social problems" instead of "controversial" topics. Something like Anorexia nervosa isn't really a "controversial" topic, but I imagine that it would be an interesting topic for many editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
I only used the word "controversial" because it was the word chosen by the student who asked the question at the Teahouse. I think regardless of how they're labled, editing certain articles might be more challenging for stident to edit, particulalrly when the students are trying work within the specific constraints of a university course. Anorexia nervosa might not be "controversial", but it's likely covered subject by WP:MEDRS and WP:FRINGE, which means that editing it may require a more WP:CAUTIOUS approach. Articles covered by WP:ACDS or otherwise protected may prove difficult to edit for other reasons. FAs or GAs may have some WP:SHEPHERDs who are monitoring them to ensure that their status is maintained. I'm not suggesting that students should be banned from editing such articles; they have just as much right as anyone else to edit articles they find interesting. As long as they understand and accept that others aren't going to automatically let them do as they please just because they're students, they should be OK. Problems only happen when they don't and venture too far into WP:NOTHERE territory. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:16, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if WP:List of controversial issues is regularly maintained to remove articles that are no longer controversial. As for discretionary sanctions, climate change articles are under DS but I would encourage students to edit most of them except the FAs, GAs, and biographies of controversial people. Unlike some topic areas under DS, in the vast majority of climate change articles the need for updates far outweighs the risk of inexperienced editors messing something up. We made a list of Wikipedia:WikiProject Climate change/Small to medium tasks that would be suitable for students or anyone else. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 02:00, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Another thought: The way I assess whether an article has editor dynamics that I'd rather avoid is to watchlist the article for a couple of weeks. Wikipedians learn a lot from our watchlists about how to edit and how to interact with other editors. Perhaps the use of watchlists is a skillset that could be emphasized in more classes. Clayoquot (talk | contribs) 05:01, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Help with setting up educational project

I need some help in setting up a course as part of the Wiki Educational Program (non-US university). For the 6th year running, 1st year undergraduate students at LIUC in Italy will be working in groups to create new draft pages. The project is to provide a facilitated introduction to managing a digital publishing project using basic markup. Key learning includes: digital copyright and plagiarism; Web 2.0; adherence to platform policies; basic wiki markup; content management; online collaboration; linking strategies; project management. In the past we've created the draft articles using the Wikipedia new Article Wizard. This year I'd like to manage this better as part of the Wiki Educational Program. I've already set up the project at outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/LIUC_-_Universit%C3%A0_Cattaneo/Digital_Technologies. I'm confused as to what I need to do next, and what the students need to do. Specifically: - 'Programs' vrs 'Campaigns' confusion: what is the difference here? Do I need both? Are they the same thing? - what and how do my students log in to to create their drafts? Wikipedia, or outreachdashboards? In the past we have used the Article Creation wizard on Wikipedia. Does this remain the same for an educational project?

Many thanks for any help you can provide.

Andrew Walker, Visiting Professor, LIUC Limelightangel (talk) 10:21, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Limelightangel: Hi! Here's what I'd recommend:
  1. create a new campaign for this series of courses via the campaigns page, a replace the default Miscellanea campaign with your new one
  2. send out the enrollment link for your program so that your students can join it
  3. have your students use the same process you're comfortable with (the Articles Creation wizard) to create their drafts.
A 'program' is an individual course (or editathon, or some other event). A 'campaign' is a collection of programs, so that you can see cumulative statistics across a whole set of programs. Every program is part of one or more campaigns.--ragesoss (talk) 23:53, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
@Ragesoss: Many thanks for the quick response Limelightangel (talk) 10:50, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

The impact of Covid19 Pandemic in South African Provinces - A Tshwane University of Technology (South Africa) Project

This new education project under the leadership of ADQ BAB TUT2020 has appeared. There are many difficutlies with the project, not least of which is a flurry of incorrectly licenced picture appearing on Commons.

Please will an experienced project member liaisie with the tutor to seek to avoid tutor and student disappointment. Fiddle Faddle 07:55, 6 September 2020 (UTC)

@Islahaddow: Is there anyone in the South African community who could help with this project? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:02, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
Can I suggest reaching out to Peter Southwood, who is a very experienced editor and admin from South Africa? He is always helpful, and it may be that just having somebody to turn to who has some familiarity with the local issues as well as Wikipedia policies can go a long way to avoiding problems in the first place. --RexxS (talk) 19:30, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
How can I help? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 17:57, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
Only seen this now, apologies. Perhaps the folks at Wikimedia ZA could help, @Thuvack:, @Discott: @Bobbyshabangu:. If they don't respond, let me know how I can help further. Isla Haddow (talk) 20:36, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
I feel I would need to know more about this project before I can comment. Are there any tags, categories or a project page where I can learn more about this? Once we know more then it will be easier to find people to help. Thanks,--Discott (talk) 14:33, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, all! I only know what's linked here, was just trying to get some more attention to it. It looks like there's some discussion here: User talk:ADQ BAB TUT2020; @Timtrent: is there somewhere else there's a discussion? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:12, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed), I fear it was a huge mess. The alleged tutor appeared to abandon the students to the vagaries of Wikipedia, much to the detriment of every student contributor. Pretty much every file uploaded to Commons was missing permissions or sources or other critical details and was deleted. No surprise there because of lack of guidance from the 'tutor'.
The work was irredeemably poor and looked like a class project for early teenagers rather than a university project.
The tutor failed to engage with anyone, and I think all the students had a rotten time.
Several of us tried hard to point the tutor and participants in the right direction, but I recall no overall discussion. Fiddle Faddle 20:23, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
The sole place any real discussion happened is the alleged tutor's talk page, and it was us attempting to open a dialogue with them. Fiddle Faddle 20:25, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Education monthly reports

Just a quick note that Wiki Educaiton's July and August Monthly Reports are now available on Meta, and a blog post on our site discusses some changes to them. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:11, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Online Ambassador application: Razybella

Good-faith but pointless application for non-existent position.
Not done. @Razybella: you clearly didn't read the directions or edit notice. — xaosflux Talk 23:45, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

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

Razybella


Razybella (talk · contribs)

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

Razybella (talk) 06:58, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

Endorsements

(Two endorsements are needed for online ambassador approval.)

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

Collapsed to save vertical space. Arguably WP:NOTFORUM, but if not, this just doesn't belong here. Mathglot (talk) 07:39, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Help with student training badges

I've asked my students to complete the Training for Students modules to gain the completion badge in their User pages, as has worked in the past. However, they can't seem to get the badge. Has the process changed, or are we missing something? They are doing the WikiEd tutorials at Wikipedia:Training/For_students. Many thanks for any advice you can offer Limelightangel (talk) 12:04, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

User:Limelightangel: Hi! Those old training modules have been deprecated, and now point to the ones Wiki Education maintains on dashboard.wikiedu.org, which don't result in any userpage badges.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:11, 13 October 2020 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed): Many thanks for the response Limelightangel (talk) 20:00, 21 October 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at WP:THQ § Reversal of edits

  You are invited to join the discussion at -- WP:THQ § Reversal of edits. Marchjuly (talk) 07:15, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps there's a Wiki-Ed advisor around who can take a look at this. Maybe someone can guide them or at least point them to content specifically geared to class projects. They also seem to be interested in editing articles about medical related subjects, so perhaps there's some specific guidance some can give then regarding that. -- Marchjuly (talk) 07:18, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

Please help monitor LGBT-related article changes by this CSUC course

Hello. CSUC WikiEd course Introduction to LGBT Studies is ramping up with 60 students about to begin editing articles related to LGBT subjects, which can be a controversial topic, and which may be under ArbCom discretionary sanctions. This is too much to ask of one content expert, even if this were the only thing on their plate. We need volunteers to add a few articles to their watchlist to help keep this on track, and to help provide assistance to student editors as needed.

Can you help? Please see the course watchlist sign-up sheet at WT:LGBT#Heads up about new CSUC WikiEd course and check off a few boxes. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:11, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Mathglot: This is one of the courses we've asked to stay in sandboxes, so that Wiki Education can have plenty of time to review their final drafts and move them into mainspace as appropriate after the course ends. You can expect their mainspace edits to continue to be fairly minimal, although any help with looking over and providing feedback on their draft work and the few mainspace edits they make is of course welcome.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:47, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
@Sage (Wiki Ed):, thanks for your reply; that helps a lot. Do you think I should call off the volunteers (only me + 1 other so far) at the notice I put up at WT:LGBT, or refer volunteers to the student sandboxes, and their comments (if any) to User talk:StudentUser/sandbox pages and leave comments there perhaps? Mathglot (talk) 21:34, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
Looking to their sandboxes and leaving comments for them on their talk pages would be lovely, if you're up for it! :-) --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:20, 6 November 2020 (UTC)
I was going to volunteer, but it looks like the Wikipedia editing part of the course ends in a few days. Plus, even if that were not the case, monitoring 60 student editors' sandbox pages would be laborious. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/his/him] 02:27, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

Non-registered courses?

Do we have any specific instructions on what to do when we encounter someone claiming to teach a course that they have not registered with the Wikipedia Education Program? I tried looking through the documentation but couldn't find anything. signed, Rosguill talk 21:43, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Does WP:INSTRUCTORS have what you're looking for in the first para? Nikkimaria (talk) 21:51, 31 October 2020 (UTC)
Nikkimaria, I see that it says All class instructors should follow the instructions for setting up a class project, and work via the Dashboard system. However, this doesn't give me any guidance of what to do in the case of a self-proclaimed instructor that has declared their intent to not comply with our registration process. I suspect that this editor is likely trying to use this as cover for COI/UPE activity because their contributed content to date has been overly promotional, but as they have been inactive since stating their intent to not comply with our Education Program, I have held off on blocking. signed, Rosguill talk 22:59, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment

 Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the entry on the Templates for discussion page. --Trialpears (talk) 12:57, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

You're not doing fine, Oklahoma

The spelling in WP:Wiki_Ed/University_of_Oklahoam/HIST3443_The_Frontier_Before_1850_(Spring_2021) is not OK.....

I suspect WP:Wiki_Ed/HUSS/Architecture_of_the_Islamic_world_(2nd_semester_2020-2021) is within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The American University in Cairo but it's not at all clear, perhaps it's a school of fish?

And if we're being picky, WP:Wiki_Ed/Rutgers,_the_State_University_of_New_Jersey/Languages_in_Peril_(Spring) should be at Rutgers University as far as en.wiki is concerned, and WP:Wiki_Ed/CSU_Maritime_Academy/Information_Fluency_in_the_Digital_Age_(Spring_2021) should be at California State University Maritime Academy. Other courses that show up on Special:WantedCategories are WP:Wiki_Ed/University_of_California_Merced/Feminism,_Handmaids_and_Wild_Seeds_(Spring_2021) which sould have a comma per University of California, Merced (compare eg WP:Wiki_Ed/University_of_California,_Merced/Extinction_Events_and_Stewardship_(2021) ). Whereas WP:Wiki_Ed/California_State_University,_Channel_Islands/Ethics_for_a_Free_World_(Spring_2021) should be without a comma, per California State University Channel Islands. To be fair, sometimes we don't make it easy for instructors! Le Deluge (talk) 15:06, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

Improving this by adding canonical records for universities on Wiki Education Dashboard is something that is on the agenda to do at some point. It's currently a free text field, so both typos and name variants/abbreviations are pretty common. When we catch them, we try to fix the outright typos before a course starts, but when they slip through, we generally don't change them after that because doing so would break the enrollment links that get sent to students.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:18, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

The Wisconsin Idea

Can someone with experience working with faculty and students please stop by Talk:Wisconsin Idea? It looks like a sociology professor at Wisconsin has tasked his students to begin editing that article but I don't see any evidence that there has been preparation and groundwork to support the students (but I might just be missing it and perturbed by my initial interaction with the student who just showed up to edit the article). Thanks! ElKevbo (talk) 03:34, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Problematic article naming in class

In Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Sarah Lawrence College/Histories of Modern and Contemporary Art, 1955 - Present (Fall 2020), they seem to be titling article titles incorrectly, including pronouns, ethnicity, and birth/death dates in the title. Can someone contact them to fix this? power~enwiki (π, ν) 02:53, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

There's also Eva Hamlin Miller: she/her, American, 1911-1991, which duplicates existing article Eva Hamlin Miller. Normally, I would tag this as a A10 speedy deletion, but as this is a student assignment, it's better to resolve the bigger issue here. The problem is the redlinks in Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Sarah Lawrence College/Histories of Modern and Contemporary Art, 1955 - Present (Fall 2020) all include pronouns, nationality, years of birth and death in the links, so that's where the students will think the article should be created. Joseph2302 (talk) 11:55, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
Ian (Wiki Ed) Is this something you can help with, as you appear to be the WikiExpert assigned to that class? Joseph2302 (talk) 11:56, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
I did a spot check of the articles in the list on that page, and around half of them already have articles (using correct name). So we don't want duplicate articles being created in mainspace with incorrect names, as they'll likely just end up just being deleted as duplicates. Joseph2302 (talk) 12:14, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the ping, Joseph2302. I had noticed one of two of those oddly-named articles, but I didn't realise it was so widespread. I've sent the instructor a note asking them to remind their students to use standard naming and expand existing articles where they exist. I've also moved the article above back to the student's sandbox. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:53, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
No one seems to have told them about categories either. Johnbod (talk) 02:53, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Drafts on Plant Genera: Class Project ?

At Articles for Creation, I have just reviewed three drafts about plant genera. Each of the drafts has been worked on by multiple new editors, and at least one of the editors has worked on two different drafts in this group. All of this is behavior that suggests a class project, with multiple students working on the same article. There is one problem that I would like to discuss with the instructor, and that is that the students (if they are students) are submitting drafts on topics (genera) that already have articles. They appear to be copying the articles to draft space and editing them. They should be editing the articles directly, or discussing the articles on the article talk pages.

Does anyone know who the instructor is? Robert McClenon (talk) 23:54, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

No, but "copying the articles to draft space and editing them" seems to have become the usual, and so probably the recommended, way of proceeding for WikiEd classes. It causes various sorts of problems, & I doubt the community was consulted. Johnbod (talk) 12:04, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
The problem that it causes is that the edits do not get into article space. It doesn't work. Perhaps there should be a procedure for a review of the draft to determine whether it should replace the existing article. But there isn't. Either WikiEd should request that the community implement a procedure for review of replacement drafts, or WikiEd should do something consistent with the way the community works. Robert McClenon (talk) 00:55, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Yes, other problems (or the same set out more fully) are that: 1) there's usually only one edit adding to the article, which watchers may miss, and there's no chance to point out problems until the final version pops up; 2) Any edits made after the draft copy was made are missed; 3) very often they forget to bring bits like the categories back; 4) they often don't link to the sandbox, and history is lost, unless one knows where to look. Johnbod (talk) 02:50, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
I don't think this is a Wiki Education-supported course, since we direct students to not submit to AFC and student user pages have a link to their course page on it. If you do get information, feel free to send them to teach.wikiedu.org to register their course page.
In terms of our recommendations for dealing with sandboxes, our training says: "If you're editing an existing article, a sandbox is a great place to prepare your first updates by copying a small portion of the article that you want to change or expand. Do not try to overhaul an entire article from the sandbox." Obviously, not every student follows directions, though, so we try to catch them where we can. Generally, it's much better to move work that's not suitable for mainspace back to the students' sandboxes. That way they can fix them (or not) without feeling the need to push a button to submit to AFC. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:25, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
Howdy, LiAnna. The maintenance of this noticeboard is appreciated. Johnbod and Robert McClenon raise issues that are related to concerns resulting from my own editing. I am posting two questions, here, in line with this thread.
  1. You wrote "student user pages have a link to their course page". This user page may be an exception to that. Is the Georgetown Univ. course mentioned by that user not affiliated with the WikiEd program?
  2. You then wrote, regarding sandboxes, "we try to catch them where we can". Do WikiEd staff review student edits, or is that type of instructional supervision left entirely to the instructors? azwaldo (talk) 23:34, 28 January 2021 (UTC)
@Azwaldo: Re #1, that student participated in our program in 2014, before we'd built our Dashboard tool that adds the links to student's user pages. We used to ask students to but not very many actually did it, which is why our Dashboard now automatically adds it for them. :) Re #2, yes, Wiki Education staff does try to review a sampling of student edits; we don't read every single one but we do try to look at what students are doing. Instructors obviously also review as part of their supervisory work, and if they flag a problem to us we definitely take a look at those. Hope this helps! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:33, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Mick Fuller – Commissioner of the New South Wales Police Force

I actually started this page, and when I wandered by found a massive edit on 3 November 2020 by B2b7905 (talk · contribs), claiming to be doing it as part of a university assignment. Unfortunately they didn't do that great a job. They deleted the lede for example, though I've pasted it back in. They also left all this cruft behind.
• I've added a generic educational assignment template to the talk page and cleaned up the article. If anyone has any more information please let me know. Regards 220 of ßorg 18:39, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

@220 of Borg: This isn't a course we support (we're just in the U.S. and Canada) but the student's userpage says their tutor is Psmwm and to reach out to them with any concerns, so perhaps leave a talk page note for them? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:00, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
I didn't notice that info. :-( I'll do that. Regards, 220 of ßorg 19:04, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
@LiAnna (Wiki Ed): To say that this particular course is not one "we support" points to a distinction which may not be obvious; the difference between courses which are relevant in this noticeboard and courses which are not. Could this noticeboard's description ("Purpose of this page") be modified to clarify this distinction, possibly directing users with such questions/comments elsewhere? (Does Wikimedia Education even maintain such a forum?) azwaldo (talk) 19:49, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
@Azwaldo: My apologies for the confusion! This noticeboard is supposed to be for all educational projects, not just those supported by Wiki Education (my organization). But I've found generally that most educational program leaders aren't actually paying attention to it, so I try to chime in on most threads in an effort to help resolve issues. In my comment, I was trying to make distinction more between trying to be helpful in connecting people to someone who can help address the problem vs being able to address the problem myself. I'll try to be more clear in the future about what I mean. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:03, 10 February 2021 (UTC)

Copyvios caught after courses end

Is there much point in advising instructors that students have submitted copyvio articles after a course has ended? In this case it only ended on Dec 18, so it's not that old, but still. (Please ping, I'm not watchlisting). ♠PMC♠ (talk) 22:50, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

@Premeditated Chaos: Maybe? It depends on the professor. Can you let me know which article(s)? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:26, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
It was History of authoritarianism, which has now been stripped and revdel'd, and the remains userfied to User:Reeemmmaaaaa/History of Authoritarianism. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 20:46, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, we alerted the professor. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:23, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed): We just found an old copyvio at Montserrat oriole too—reportedly (per edit comments) related to a Loyola University course requirement back in 2019. It might be helpful to all concerned if professors were encouraged to connect with Wikiprojects related to the articles their students will be updating. We could help keep an eye open for potential issues, answer questions, provide mentoring or guidance, etc. We longtime editors often have to go around cleaning up after these brief class assignments; it would be great to know which articles might have problems rather than having to stumble across them among the 21,000 articles in our remit! ;) MeegsC (talk) 14:26, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
Hi MeegsC, thanks for the suggestion. With student editors in our program editing more than 6,000 articles each term, it's not super feasible for us to notify every WikiProject which specific articles will be edited; instead, our Dashboard software puts a banner on the talk page of each article students are planning to edit. For an example of it on another species article, see Talk:Agelenopsis pennsylvanica. In terms of the Montserrat oriole article, you don't see that banner because that class never registered with us; we've only supported one class at Loyola Chicago, and it was a sociology course the term after those edits. Unfortunately it's common to find student editors whose faculty don't use our support; this means student editors don't go through our plagiarism trainings and edits aren't automatically run through our plagiarism checker, which notifies our staff to do a revdel. If you do find unregistered student editors, encourage them to have their professor visit teach.wikiedu.org to register their course! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:52, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
LiAnna (Wiki Ed), I certainly wouldn't expect you or your department to do the notifying. But each professor should certainly be capable of doing so; they're only typically dealing with articles relating to a couple of projects. You have a great resource out here that you're not using. And that's a shame! MeegsC (talk) 19:43, 3 March 2021 (UTC)

Student edits to Transgender article

The topic of Student edits to the Transgender article from students in this CSU Fullerton course is being discussed at the WP:LGBT studies WikiProject in this discussion. Your feedback would be welcome. Mathglot (talk) 18:40, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Autism (again)

@Ian (Wiki Ed): we have two students at Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Ottawa/CMN2160 (Winter) listing autism, which is a featured article. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:21, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia - that class isn't supposed to be editing in mainspace, so it should be ok, but I'm going to email the instructor about this anyway. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:37, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
I'm surprised featured articles aren't extended confirmed-protected by default. They shouldn't be a playground for new editors, student or not. Mathglot (talk) 18:23, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
Probably because ECPing featured articles by default goes against the core idea that anyone should be able to edit Wikipedia articles. Featured articles aren't perfect and there's always room for improvement. It's rather condescending and bitey to immediately assume that new editors will have nothing of value to contribute to featured articles. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 23:10, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
Agree (in fact, autism is quite a mess, but not in ways that students are likely to know how to fix). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:15, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Instructor inviting students to create new articles

Hello, the instructor at CSU Channel Is. Intro to LGBT Studies is inviting her students to modify or create articles. Already, there are red links in the Assigned course column; some of these have invalid capitalization (non-sentence case), thus may already exist under another name. Ian, you're listed for this one, can you check with the instructor and make sure that Julia and her students understand the complexities of creating new articles, and before they create anything at all, of ensuring that an article doesn't already exist on the topic under some other name? It took me five seconds to find we already have Suicide among LGBT youth and Unisex public toilet, and I don't know what the point is of including red links to Drag Queens and Lgbtq parenting, when they clearly know the closely related names of the existing articles. Finally, some of the topics may be subject to Arbcom discretionary sanctions for gender-related topics, and may (read: "should") end up with a {{Ds/Alert}} notice on their page which looks a bit scary, especially if you're a new editor. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 23:35, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Sorry I missed this Mathglot. For most of the redlinks, it's just a feature of how the Dashboard deals with miscapitalisation when it creates the on-wiki mirror page. In most cases, the students intend to improve the existing articles. The only one I see that doesn't fit precisely into this structure is Transgender Public Restroom, but that could probably redirect to bathroom bill. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:44, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
Actually that might not be the best target. While that isn't a good article title, it might be a gap in our coverage (or maybe just in my search abilities!) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:47, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
Is there also not an appropriate target for Suicide Among LBGT Youth? Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:49, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
User:Ian (Wiki Ed), for the former, Unisex public toilet (already has 61 mentions of transgender, but not a dedicated section); and for the latter, Suicide among LGBT youth. Mathglot (talk) 19:13, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
Mathglot, Thanks! I'm not sure how I didn't find the latter... Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:26, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Good Article nominations by student editors

At WP:GAN we have a repeated issue where student editors will nominate an article for GAN at the end of the school term and then disappear before they're reviewed. This wastes the precious time of our reviewers since there is usually a long backlog of articles waiting to be reviewed (666 prior to the backlog drive this month). Is there any way that students can be advised not to make such nominations unless they stay around, which is great but rarely happens? (t · c) buidhe 20:16, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

  • For example, Talk:Moral blindness/GA1, nominated on 7 December, editor hasn't edited Wikipedia since 13 December, the review was picked up 26 March by a volunteer reviewer, which is a typical timeline for GANs but doesn't work for a student editor who doesn't stick around. (t · c) buidhe 20:22, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
    @Buidhe: We do inform instructors that they need to tell their students not to nominate anything for DYK or GA unless they plan to stick around (or check in on their noms). This class is one where student are usually very good about it. I will email the instructor and ask them to contact the student. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:58, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
    Thanks! I am glad that you have a process for it, otherwise I guess it would be worse. (t · c) buidhe 21:01, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
buidhe, would it be helpful to include something along the lines of "The review may take several months so please don't submit an article if you or another editor will not be available to respond to the review" as part of Step 1 (or maybe a new Step 0?) in the instructions? There is language that basically says the same thing in a few later steps but I wonder if it would be helpful to also highlight this earlier in the process. I know that this won't solve all of the issues as I am sure that some people don't fully read, understand, or care about the instructions but perhaps a sentence or two can head off some well-meaning but short-lived editors. ElKevbo (talk) 21:40, 30 March 2021 (UTC)
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