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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Biosthmors (talk | contribs) at 14:43, 23 September 2013 (→Linking wp:students: it is better than nothing, thanks). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Length of a page

Where's the "just let me read it" option? I read fast. I read the last Harry Potter book in about 3 hours, give or take a few minutes. Even with a really fast connection, when I look at the very first Welcome document, I spend more time waiting for the page to load than I do actually reading the pages. One page, for instance, basically just said, "Let's talk briefly about how this orientation works." That's it, because the page heading and the page content were virtually the same. I can see why so many students are ignoring these, they're a pain to get through and they're boring. We need a "just let me read the document already" option. We also need some optional "advanced" classes that go more into detail about how various parts of Wikipedia work, because the plan is for these students to want to stick around afterward, right? :) Here, I put together a quick Core guide, taking students all the way up to editing:

You'll notice that 1) it's short. 2) the five pillar section presents information in a pyramidal manner, with plenty of relevant in-line links so that you can easily gain more information about what you're learning, while you're learning it, 3) it uses already existing information (lesson 1, don't reinvent the wheel), 4) it's more colorful and engaging, 5) did I mention that it's short and loads all at once? This is basically what I already had people do before I adopted them, although I liked the video, so I kept that.

In addition, professors should make it clear to students that these classes are meant to create research papers, not essays. These aren't BS papers, you can't just pull information from the air then find a bunch of books on the subject and tack on a bibliography at the end. People will expect in-line citations. "But in-line citations aren't required on Wikipedia." Yes, but if we don't require them then we generally end up with crappy aricles, so we're requiring it of these students for this class, then after the class they can edit however they want. It shouldn't be us making these things clear, it should be spelled out in the syllabus for the class, that the students receive from their professor on the first day of class -- professors should be fully aware of and behind these statements. By the way, if you want to respond to these statements, you might want to start a new section called "Responses to Banaticus" or something, because Wikipedia ignores the "collapsed" class while in edit mode. Banaticus (talk) 23:04, 6 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Response to Banaticus

Thanks! I believe the idea behind the way the training is set up is that most people don't read like you you, and having the interactivity of clicking through each page, and the structure of just dealing with one small-to-medium bit of information per page, is a way to keep people engaged and help them retain more of the information. Faced with a wall of text, many people will feel overloaded and not process more than a little bit of it. That said, I'm going to be working on streamlining it, consolidating it to fewer slides, and removing some of the unnecessary handholding and the parts that students report in their feedback as not helpful or necessary.

Some people would probably learn better from an all-in-one tutorial page like the one you've come up with. One thing I'll do the along with the next major refactoring of the training course is to take all the content itself into separate pages (independent of the page structure and order) so that it could be (for example) transcluded into all one page, or one page per module, as an alternative format. If you want to work more on this kind of thing, maybe you could do an editing page as well, and then add a 'complete the tutorial and give feedback' button (like here) so that when people use it, we can find out what they liked and didn't like.

With my volunteer account, I've also started a shorter, more generic version for general newcomers, which I'm hoping we can do tests on as an option for users after they create their accounts, once the E3 team gets that far into testing changes to the account creation user experience. It'd be great (I think) to have other styles of tutorial/training to test as well, to see which is actually most effective at helping people get started. I'm not sure which approach would actually be better, but up until now, we haven't offered new users any kind of training/tutorial/help-you-get-started material at all after account creation.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 00:59, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Re the wall of text, that was why I put it in collapsible tables. Students have to click to expand each section, so they shouldn't feel like they're getting hit with a wall of text. However, the 5 principles is still lengthy, so I've just gone back and put each of the five sections into their own collapsed table. As it turns out, it's possible to put images in table headers, so it still looks "pretty". :) In my admittedly somewhat short experience with the Wikipedia adopt-a-user program, I start with something that basically says, "this is Wikipedia, here's what it's about, write me something a brief statement about each of the five pillars I've linked here". Adoptees then read and summarize the five pillars in a post and we jump right into more classes, like how to edit, etc.
Those 8 courses were courses that I rewrote after I took them from Addshore who took them from Tiptoety who took them from Hersfold. I don't know where Hersfold got them. I keep forgetting about rewriting the latter three, though, which is why it looks like there's nothing there at the moment. They were designed to be "courses"; material is presented, then there's an assignment at the end. Banaticus (talk) 06:37, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Completion Metrics

I recently started as a Campus Ambassador. I'm curious to know where we can find the records of course completion. I have a class and the professor asked if there's a way we can check student completion for the student-intended training. I recall seeing a script run when I completed the training for Ambassadors that recorded my completion. How can we get a look at those records? Chris troutman (talk) 05:13, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The users who completed the training including the last step are listed here: Wikipedia:Training/For students/Training feedback.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:06, 7 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Shared accounts

This absolutely must include a statement explaining that it is forbidden for groups of two or more students to share an account. I've had to block far too many productive accounts whose userpages state "We are a group of students going through our university's course on how to contribute to Wikipedia". I always leave a note stating that they're only blocked for account sharing, and that they're welcome to register accounts as individuals, but even so.

Forget about the intricate details of provenance and licensing. The clearest and most comprehensible reason is malfeasance and misbehavior. If one of the people sharing an account starts vandalizing, does the account go unblocked because the other people using it haven't done anything wrong? Or do the other people get blocked too, even though they haven't done anything wrong? To avoid this quandary, shared accounts are not permitted, point blank. DS (talk) 14:38, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I've not seen any shared accounts from classes that actually used the training, so I don't think adding info about that solves anything. The classes that are that far off of what they should be doing don't know about the training anyway. Just to be safe, I've added a note that each individual must have their own account, on the "creating an account" training page.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:49, 19 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Linking wp:students

My addition was reverted for being extraneous. (I linked wp:students/wp:student assignments in case that's what people were looking for with wp:student.) When I looked up the definition of the word extraneous, just for clarity, it said:

  1. Irrelevant or unrelated to the subject being dealt with.
  2. Of external origin.

I have to say I disagree on both of the two definitions. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 13:33, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And wp:students links to wp:student at the very top. It has for a while now, for what it's worth. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 13:35, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Biosthmors: The meaning I had in mind was basically the second one listed at Wiktionary: not essential [...]. Students will end up at that training page because they are trying to complete the training, and I've tried to minimize the number of links throughout the training to keep people from getting lost or wandering through too many rabbit holes. For newcomers, the received wisdom is that too many choices and too many links easily become overwhelming; a large part of the purpose of the trainings is to provide a very linear path to becoming familiar with Wikipedia. Especially at the top of the landing page, I don't think a link to that long and multi-purpose essay makes sense. (I think it's a really useful page, but not where we want students to start off). If it's simply intended as a redirection note for people who put in "WP:STUDENT" when they were looking for WP:ASSIGN, I don't think that's necessary.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. Thanks Sage. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:26, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
And Sage, one day I'll go through all the modules. One day! Maybe we could have four pages of templates so that each of the four training modules appear as one long page? This could ease analysis, feedback, and improvements. Does that presentation of the training modules exist somewhere? (Sorry I might have asked that one before.) If you ever get a down moment and you're bored and motivated, maybe you could create that. =) Perhaps I could make some edits for you somewhere. Like filing that bug... and maybe some others as well. Best. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:35, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Biosthmors: This page was compiled for a different purpose—importing the whole training to other wikis—and doesn't go through in quite the easy-to-browse way you have in mind, but it does have all the slides on one page (along with pages that are part of the training): Wikipedia:Training/Meta.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:43, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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