Wikipedia talk:Education noticeboard

Great to see this page coming into existence

Will help us manage the classes who are editing. --Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:02, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Sidenote on the appropriate use of stats

This is symptomatic of the way we see the laypress, PR, and unreviewed primary sources used to promote inaccurate information in Wikipedia articles:

Let's stick to the facts. Article quality improves by 64%, participants add three times as much quality content as regular new users ... Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 14:30, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Frank, I hope you have the analytical background to understand the flaws in this data, and why you shouldn't use them to assert fact. Further, how meaningful is it even if participants were adding quality content, considering the time this project is draining from established and knowledgeable editors, who could be adding even more and better content, if they weren't having to deal with the faulty editing? Once the term ends, and there is a good deal of time between when students are graded and when I summarize the issues I've seen so that students aren't affected by my criticism, I'd be happy to summarize the issues I've seen over the last year, and how much time it has costed me. I'd much rather be spending my time on important unfinished or poor medical/psych topics that I've tackled of late-- PANDAS, cognitive behavioral therapy, endometriosis-- articles that actually matter to individuals' health-- then dealing with faulty student editing on obscure little viewed unimportant articles like klazomania, echopraxia, and autism spectrum disorders in the media. In the type of faulty data analysis you all are hyping, have you considered lost editor time, and that an article like klazomania only resulted because it's on my watchlist, and when the students mucked it up, I was obliged to fix it, even though no one ever reads or cares about that article? How exactly is the WMF measuring "quality" and "quantity"? Never mind, I've long had a good sense of who and what they value, and medical FAs ain't it. It would be wonderful if, whatever you come up with to deal with the issues that surfaced this term, they will have more to deal with adding well sourced valuable content, not articles that push one professor's POV towards the new version of DSM-5. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:37, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Sandy, the page is for handling incidents that require rapid feedback and attention, not for general observations. That's why I've moved your comment to this talk page. --Frank Schulenburg (Wikimedia Foundation) (talk) 16:43, 21 April 2012 (UTC)