Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

Welcome to the education noticeboard
Purpose of this page Using this page This page is for discussion related to student assignments and the Wikipedia Education Program. Please feel free to post, whether you're from a class, a potential class, or if you're a Wikipedia editor. Topics for this board might include: Content issues created by real or potential student assignments Improving student assignment output quality per the RfC Questions about the trainings or any question from instructors or students Discussion of the Wiki Education Foundation or the Wikipedia Education Program. Students who have done great work and need {{The Excellent New Editor's Barnstar}} Of course, we should remain civil towards all participants and assume good faith. There are other pages more appropriate for dealing with certain specific issues: An issue requiring immediate administrator attention → Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents Vandalism by non-participating students from schools → administrator intervention against vandalism. Cut and paste moves/history merge → the cut and paste move repair holding pen. Students revealing sensitive personal information → requests for oversight. Please DO NOT make such requests here; reports here are visible to everyone. Course announcements from dashboard.wikiedu.org / outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org → /Wiki Ed course submissions Issues related to dashboard.wikedu.org / outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org → meta:Talk:Programs & Events Dashboard For a list of topics that students should avoid editing → Wikipedia:General sanctions#Active sanctions "Start a new discussion thread". Use an informative title: ==Informative title==. If a thread is related to an ongoing discussion, consider placing it under a level-3 heading within that existing discussion. You should generally notify any user who is the subject of a discussion. You may use {{ping}} to do so, or simply link their username when you post your comment. It is not required to contact students when their edits are only being discussed in the context of a class-wide problem. If no comments have been made within 30 days, your post and any responses will be automatically archived. Please sign all contributions, using four tilde characters "~~~~". If discussion is already ongoing elsewhere or if there is a more natural location for a discussion, please continue the discussion there, and put a short note with a link to the relevant location on this page. If you cannot edit this page because it is protected, please place your comments on this page and they will be addressed. Managing threads If you'd like to make sure a thread does not get archived automatically after 30 days, use {{Do not archive until}} at the top of the section. Use {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}} within a section to have it archived (more or less) immediately. A brief Archives page lists them with the years in which those now inactive discussions took place.
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Finance plan for the new nonprofit?

Are the Phase II and Phase III finance plans done? I believe the due date for both of them was November 15 and that the date for WMF to provide money for Phase II was December 1st. I am interested in seeing the plans. Thanks! --Pine^✉ 00:00, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

The deadlines have been extended and all the plans should now be in mid-December. I've not been involved in the finance planning so can't tell you much about that, but check back after the 16th and I'll point you at whatever is available at that time. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:37, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

OK thanks. --Pine^✉ 19:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Hey, Pine! The Working Group will not be putting together a detailed budget, after all, as this seems more appropriate for the new Board/Executive Director. That is how most organizations work, but we hadn't really considered that when going into this huge undertaking. The idea is that we will give recommendations (and the Initial Board is going to comprise members from the Working Group anyway) about scope of the organization, priorities for the beginning, etc., but the people who are actually running this new organization will get to distribute their own funds. As for seed funding, we will be writing a grant proposal to WMF for some money to help during the transition (with lawyers to incorporate/write bylaws, to hire an ED, and for any travel required to put together the new org structure), and I think our goal is to turn that proposal in by the end of December. Hope that helps answer some questions! JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 20:41, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Student papers in mainspace - is that really a good idea?

I recently stumbled across the idea behind this project - professors assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. I came across it when one of the resulting articles was nominated for deletion. I have a real problem with the whole concept. I raised my concerns here Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine#Brain-disabling psychiatric medical treatment, and several people have responded, including one who pointed me to this page. It seems to me that posting student term papers into Wikipedia mainspace violates several Wikipedia principles, including WP:ESSAY, WP:SYNTHESIS, and WP:OWN. (What happens to a student's work - and their grade - if someone comes along and does a major edit or rewrite, which is perfectly possible in mainspace?) A very good suggestion was made at that discussion, namely, that students should post their articles to WP:Articles for Creation instead of directly to mainspace. They would have much better control of their material there - they could "own" it - and only the articles which were really encyclopedic and about notable subjects would get promoted to mainspace. What do you all think of the AFC idea? --MelanieN (talk) 21:03, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Violating Wikipedia policies is not a good idea, and no one condones it. See Wikipedia:Education Working Group/RfC for more reading. Biosthmors (talk) 21:12, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

AFC always has a massive backlog - I don't think it would be a good idea to increase the workload there. Calliopejen1 (talk) 21:13, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Better to increase the workload in mainspace? --MelanieN (talk) 21:26, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

The ideal setup is that students draft content in their userspace, then consult an experienced Wikipedian (the ambassador for the course) before moving any content into articlespace. The edcuation program is trying to get more profs to adopt this method. The Interior (Talk) 21:39, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

There's a major difference between professors assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their course work and professors having students posting term papers in mainspace. Most classes participating in the education program or otherwise using Wikipedia-based assignments recognize the difference between a Wikipedia article and a term paper and instruct their students accordingly. (I'd like to say all classes do, but in an open ecosystem that ideal will never be reached.) Many professors that I have worked with in the program have not only recognized the difference between an encyclopedic article and a research paper, but have been excited about having their students participate on Wikipedia specifically because of that difference. One class I worked with last semester dedicated around five hours of in-class time specifically to how to write in an encyclopedic style and to covering Wikipedia's important cultural norms and policies. That's way more training of that nature than any normal new non-student editor would receive.

In much the same way that not all new non-student editors are able to successfully create high (or even acceptable) quality content, not all student assignments are successful. Sometimes individual students' articles are bad. Sometimes this is because individual students have failed to pay attention to the instruction they have received, and sometimes this is because the quality of their instruction was poor (or, in some circumstances, both.) If a student posts an article that violates our normal content policies in a major way, then it should be handled in pretty much the same way as if a non-student posted an article that violated our normal content policies. If the problems are fixable via normal editing processes, then they should be fixed via normal editing processes in the same fashion a problematic non-student contribution would be fixed. If the problems aren't fixable via normal editing processes (for instance, if the topic is non-notable or is an unsalvageable violation of WP:ESSAY) then the articles can go through our ordinary deletion processes, including WP:AFD, WP:SD, etc. If the same student has recurring competence issues, then they can be blocked or banned in the same way as any other editor. I would suggest approaching someone's ambassador before going through most of these steps, in the same way that I would suggest approaching the mentor of an editor who had one before going through most of these steps. In the linked thread, you ask how someone can be aware that they're dealing with a student and thus that they shouldn't 'bite or be uncivil' to them if their articles are simply posted in mainspace. Biting and civility are not student specific issues. You don't have to know that you're dealing with a student in order to be civil to them or to avoid biting them, that's just what you should do with everyone by default.

Most instructors are perfectly aware that the content their students submit to Wikipedia can be edited by people other than their students. (Again, I'd like to say all, but in an open ecosystem some will always slip through the cracks.) Generally, professors keep this in mind when coming up with their grading metrics. For a decent number of professors, interaction with the community is an actual *desired* result. Since it's pretty easy to track (either via direct diffs or via one of the tools designed to do so) the exact contributions any particular student has made, subsequent editing by other users does not represent a substantial obstacle to grading individual students. Even if a student's article goes to AfD it can very easily be userfied by any administrator, which would allow for the instructor to still see what exactly each of their students did.

I generally agree with The Interior that it is a best practice for undergraduate students with no prior Wikipedia experience creating a new article to do so in a sandbox, and to run the article by their ambassador before moving it live. There are some professors who have had significant success without the use of sandboxes (like Brian Carver,) but mostly when dealing with graduate students. Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:17, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

• I also disagree with the use of mainspace for these student essays. I had a recent experience of finding plagiarism in articles added by students belonging to the same course. I alerted the teacher, and he said that checking for plagiarism was not something he did. He suggested I handle it myself, and said he would give students who had posted copyvios an F. That left me in an awkward position. I don't want to be responsible for students failing (whether they deserve to or not), and checking for plagiarism is part of the teacher's job. To check all the articles would involve several days work spread over weeks, because I'd have to send off for the books via interlibrary loans, whereas the teacher has access to them in the university library.

  When 30 students are told to edit articles (not invited to volunteer), the teacher is essentially the editor of all 30 articles and ought to make sure that Wikipedia isn't harmed. Volunteers not connected to the university shouldn't have to sort out the problems. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:59, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

  I agree that the teacher should not assume that volunteers will do their work for them. Can you tell me the name of the course you're referring to? It would be useful to know which teachers have this attitude. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:05, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

• Hi Mike, it was an anthropology course at Mount Allison University, and the exchange with the teacher is here. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 18:25, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the links, SlimVirgin. That illustrates exactly the kind of thing I am concerned about. According to the assignments for that class, the article draft was created in the sandbox and was to be moved to mainspace in week 7. The students and professor expected - nay, demanded - that the draft remain in place in mainspace, unmolested by other Wikipedia editors, for the remaining 5 weeks of the class. During that time it was supposed to be peer-reviewed (by another student who knows nothing more about Wikipedia than the original student) but otherwise they wanted to WP:OWN it. When you tried to bring the article up to Wikipedia standards during that time, the professor reacted with indifference and the students with outrage.They made it clear that they didn't care about Wikipedia standards and expected you to "refrain from removing any more of this student's hard work" until the end of the semester. (The students even seem to be required to submit DYK and GA nominations for their articles - talk about burdening the system!) I think it is very inappropriate for the Education Program to use Wikipedia mainspace as the scratchpad for students while they complete their projects, and expect Wikipedia to leave inappropriate material posted in an international encyclopedia for a month or more until it suits their academic schedule to have it taken down. Sandbox or AFC would be the appropriate place for this kind of activity. --MelanieN (talk) 19:49, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

MelanieN, there might some confusion about the Education Program's role here. It doesn't encourage profs to do what these courses have done, and in no way does it promise profs/students a mainspace scratchpad for their work. What it does is try to influence educators using wikipedia to do so in the most beneficial, and least harmful, ways. I'm alarmed at this idea that student work should stay up just because it is student work. That's wrong, and professors who feel this way need to be strongly advised to stop treating wp as a publishing platform. It's good you've brought your concerns here. This is not how it is supposed to work. The Interior (Talk) 20:15, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I see there was an inconclusive discussion earlier about setting up a separate foundation for the Education Program. If that happens, might it give them a better place for this kind of activity? Certainly it would be great to recruit a new generation of bright young editors to the Wiki projects, but I'd like to see a better way to accomplish it. --MelanieN (talk) 20:23, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I think "might it give them a better place" would be better reworded "might it give Wikipedia better management". According to my understanding of where the WMF is going, it doesn't seem to want to make managing the education program a main priority. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Biosthmors (talk) 20:37, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Melanie: I don't actually see any place where this professor has complained about their students work being edited. Could you post a diff to where they said something like this? (I actually see them thanking someone on their talk page for reverting a copyright violation.) Obviously if this is what their expectation was, their expectation was wrong. Any professor who expects their students' work to go unedited has not listened to what anyone involved in the education program has told them. Professors who have this expectation should have this expectation corrected. No one should feel under any obligation to listen to a professor who wants to WP:OWN their students' articles any more than they would feel about any other editor who has WP:OWN problems.

Wikipedia has tons of problematic editors. Most of them are non-students, but some of them are bound to be students. Problematic editors in the education program can be dealt with just like problematic editors outside of the education program. Protocol for dealing with copyright violations should be the same, student or non-student. If you're uncomfortable dealing with problematic students, post here when you find 'em, and let one of us deal with it. I have absolutely no problem being responsible for a student receiving a failing grade if they have plagiarized - I've done so before, in non-Wikipedia contexts. All of these students know why they shouldn't plagiarize, and know what to expect if they get caught doing so. (I'll be looking over the students from the linked class myself as I have time, though unfortunately as I have pneumonia and am in finals, that'll be limited this week. Normally, I'd have a lot more time available to do so.)

Remember that these students are new editors, and the content they produce should be compared more closely with the content that is produced by new editors not in the education program than with experienced editors. Mistakes are inevitable, but I think the overall quality of content of new student editors is higher than the overall quality of content of new non-student editors, and I don't think that new student editors are problem editors at a higher rate than new editors are in general.

For those of you wondering why I think assignments like this are not only appropriate, but actively worth advocating, take a look at the list of articles on Brian Carver's user page to see one reason. All of those articles have been improved by students from one professor's classes - and they're all encyclopedic, and many are of high quality. Kevin Gorman (talk) 00:39, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The professor didn't complain about Wikipedia editing; in fact, he invited SlimVirgin to go ahead and deal with any copyvio issues she identified (while shrugging off any responsibility he might feel about students plagiarizing their papers via copy-and-paste).[1] It was another student (the "peer reviewer") who reverted SlimVirgin's edits and told her to leave the article alone.[2] --MelanieN (talk) 01:40, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Thanks for the clarifying diff. From what I can gather from what I've read about this so far, it definitely sounds like this was a poorly executed assignment. There have definitely been more of these than there should have been, especially in areas covered by WP:MEDRS. If no one else beats me to it, I'll approach the professor in a couple weeks asking them to modify their instructional design if they use a similar assignment again. There are definitely poorly executed assignments, and it's unfortunate and hopefully the number will reduce over time as more people use better and more refined instructional design. I still think that the benefits presented by the successes outweigh the failures though, and don't think that new student editors tend to perform any worse than new non-student editors, except maybe in terms of WP:OWN problems. I'll try to clear this classes contributions of any remaining copyvios in the near future. Plagiarism (especially close paraphrasing) is unfortunately a really big Wikipedia-wide problem, not at all limited to students (with the exception of the IEP.) In my experience, it tends to be less common among students, just because most professors do take academic integrity seriously. (I know of multiple failing grades awarded due to plagiarism in Wikipedia-based assignments, plus one student who may end up expelled - way more serious punishments than for the average Wikipedia editor.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:59, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Kevin, in the plagiarism cases you're referring to, was it the teachers or Wikipedians who found it? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:07, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I know of four cases offhand, across three classes. Two of the cases were caught by the professors involved. One of the cases I found and referred directly to the professor (I wasn't ambassadoring the course, but had previously talked to the professor for probably half an hour in person.) The last class was found by another Wikipedian, who sent it to me, and I forwarded it on to the professor. (I wasn't ambassadoring the course, but personally knew the professor well.)

As a student, instructor, and Wikipedian, intentional plagiarism is one of the few things that really sets me off. Things like close paraphrasing I can understand occasionally doing as a mistake, but shit like copying entire paragraphs makes me see red. If I become aware of any situation that involves a student at a US or Canadian university participating in a Wikipedia-based assignment who clearly commits intentional plagiarism, I will bring it to the attention of their professor. If their professor doesn't respond adequately, I will bring it to the attention of their departmenthead, and so on, until an appropriate response is received. And I guarantee that at any US or Canadian university, I will be able to provoke an appropriate response.

I understand why you would be hesitant to cause students to fail an assignment, and respect that. I'd feel that way too, if it involved something like them failing to follow WP:MEDRS. But plagiarism isn't something unique to Wikipedia, and any student in the US or Canada knows exactly what they're doing if they intentionally plagiarize. In the case of plagiarism, they're not innocent bystanders or anything of that nature. Kevin Gorman (talk) 03:14, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I wonder whether they do know. In the cases I've seen they attribute the sources in footnotes, but then copy the source material word for word. Perhaps they think that's enough. The teacher didn't seem interested. I alerted him on November 23 on his talk page, and left some advice on his course page about in-text attribution, [3] and got no response to either. I posted again on November 26 and this time emailed him to alert him to the post. He responded by suggesting I deal with the copyvios myself. [4] I replied with more details, and he didn't respond. Perhaps he is atypical, but I've seen so many similar complaints from Wikipedians that I hesitate to assume that his course is out of the norm. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:35, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

It is typical (I would say universal, but I hate generalizations) for first semester freshmen in college in the United States to receive an explanation of what plagiarism is, and how to avoid it. In most places, it's an explanation they will hear more than once, including in subsequent years. At my school, every syllabus we're ever handed makes mention of it. Every other university that I've dealt directly with (admittedly, only about half a dozen) does so similarly. A quick poll on my personal facebook has people from an additional dozen US and Canada based schools saying that they have all received similar explanations, and no one saying they're school doesn't cover it. I have a really hard time believing that any student at an accredited US/Canadian university truly fails to understand that plagiarism is not okay.

His response to you does leave a lot to be desired, but I think you do understate it a little bit. He does specifically say that any student who is found to be a plagiarist - either by himself, or through Wikipedia's reporting processes - will receive an F on their project. It would be preferable if he looked through his students work himself fully, or had one of his GSI's/TA's/graders do so (and I'd also prefer the punishment to be more significant than that.) You said on his talk page that you had found multiple copyright violations in his students work, but you didn't specify where. Are the copyright violations still in place? If so, please send them to me. I would prefer to aggressively pursue the matter with him, but if you'd like, I'll simply remove the copyright violations. (I'll also be doing checks on his students articles myself, but may miss something, and don't have instant access to most of the physical sources to check vs those.) The other issues you bring up (what you perceive as using Wikipedians to do his own work) aren't addressed by his reply, but he does at least specifically state that there will be consequences for plagiarism. (And I'm not saying that those aren't valid issues, just pointing out his reply isn't as bad as it could have been.)

As I mentioned earlier, even ignoring the copyright stuff, I'll be emailing this guy in the next few weeks and asking him to change his instructional design to a better system or discontinue his assignment. Kevin Gorman (talk) 03:51, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I’ve followed this discussion with interest because I wanted to learn more about how the problems came about. I think there are two concerns here that the new Education Program needs to work on. First, the editing behavior of the students wasn’t up to WP standards, but not unexpected of new editors. Two, the sub-standard behavior was associated (adversely) with the WP Education Program, because there was a Professor and 41 students involved. However, when one examines the history, two things become evident. One, the Professor, although a Wikipedian for about a year had really only made edits to the Canada Education Program courses page and his user page. Although the professor knows how to edit WP technically, there’s little evidence that the Professor understands article editing norms. Also, there is little evidence, if any that the Professor was formally recruited by the WMF into the Education Program, but rather self-enrolled by merely adding his course to the course page. It would be interesting to learn how the Professor became associated with the Education Program. Second, although there are Online Ambassadors identified, there is little evidence that there was any serious mentoring of the Professor by the ambassadors. Since there was no identified Campus Ambassador, one must assume the Professor got zero face-to-face mentoring by an experienced Wikipedian. It can be difficult for even experienced Wikipedians to mentor even one new editor successfully, let alone having an inexperienced editor (the professor) responsible for managing the edits of 41 other new, inexperience editors in the context of highly constrained classroom time.

I agree completely with those above who say students are editors and every Wikipedian was a new editor at one time. I think it is also important to understand that the Education Programs are Outreach programs designed to improve content in WP because of the enormous untapped academic and scholarly resources within the higher education community. Many believe, as I do, that this type of outreach is essential for the future growth of WP. As this case shows, I think we all should take care not to indict the Education Program for problems like this, when there is little evidence that the Education Program had anything to do with causing the problems. --Mike Cline (talk) 02:58, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Mike, there are some problems in principle with the way the education program has been handled. The universities are essentially freeloading if they're asking Wikipedians to do their work by checking student essays for plagiarism (or other quality issues), and anyone who ends up having to do it should really send the university in question a bill. The ethical issues are similar to those we face when dealing with paid editors, in that it's problematic to ask volunteers to clean up after people who are adding material on behalf of institutions or companies for personal gain.

We end up with a situation where the university benefits, the teacher benefits, the students benefit in theory (though I would question that in many cases), and the volunteers who are expected to fix up the edits don't benefit at all. So we either leave the edits in place and the damage remains, or we fix them and are made to feel overstretched and used. If editor retention is a major concern, that is a problem right there. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:06, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia as a whole does benefit though, even if individual volunteers don't. Individual volunteers on Wikipedia don't generally benefit from their volunteerism; they do it because it improves Wikipedia as a whole. The same arguments that have been made against the education program here could, for the most part, be used to argue that Wikipedia just shouldn't accept any new editors from any source whatsoever.

I do agree with you that there have been serious problems with certain aspects of the way in which the education program has been run so far. Some of them have been fixed, fixes are in progress for some of them, and some of them still haven't been addressed. The program has, unfortunately, placed excessive stress on certain groups of editors - especially the Indian Education Program - and that's something that's not sustainable. But, as a whole, I think that it's undeniable both that the program as a whole has improved Wikipedia's content, and that new editors brought in through this mechanism perform at least as well as those brought in through other ways. I do think that we should be more aggressive about preventing bad students (bad in the sense that they haven't received adequate instruction or haven't listened to it) from harming the encyclopedia - if I had an admin bit, I'd be going crazy on 24 hour blocks of disruptive students. (But sadly, I don't, and I doubt I would pass RfA.)

A lot of good work goes unhighlighted and unheralded. I'd encourage everyone here to take a look through some of the articles listed at User:Brianwc to see some of the higher quality content that the program has been producing. Kevin Gorman (talk) 03:25, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I think the jury is out as to whether Wikipedia has benefited. In all the cases I have looked at (admittedly very few), the articles were harmed, either by very poor editing, or by what appeared to be good editing but which on closer inspection included plagiarism or unattributed close paraphrasing. (And when you find it in one part of an article, you have to assume it's elsewhere in that article too, but that is time-consuming to determine, especially when the sources are not online.) How many student recruits have become regular Wikipedians? And how many regular Wikipedians are feeling discouraged because of the time they've had to spend dealing with these issues? When you factor in the poor editing and the bad feeling, and the almost certainly tiny number of students who stay to become editors, I think it's difficult to argue that Wikipedia is benefiting.

My view is that the program is a wonderful idea in principle. But we have to insist on high standards from the teachers and the students (it's in the students' interests that we insist on high standards from them). Those high standards just aren't in evidence, though I will look now at the articles on Brianwc's page. Standards apart, the program also has to address the ethical issue of volunteers doing this work for nothing. That just isn't fair when others are doing it for personal gain. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:47, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Two pages you might find useful are Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Spring 2012 burden analysis, which is an attempt to determine the burden placed on Wikipedia editors by a representative sample of students for a given semester, and Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Article quality/Results, which is an analysis of the quality of the work done by the students. These metrics aren't perfect, and I can give you a couple of criticisms of them if you are interested, but I believe they're worth looking at. I also think that there might be a selection bias with commentators on education program work, in that if a student makes a mess of an article, as some have done, then a Wikipedian watching that page is likely to go find out what is going on and comment negatively, whereas if a student does moderately good or better work, the edits are likely to be unnoticed, as are most decent edits. I think to evaluate the program the whole set of courses and students need to be looked on, or there is a risk of coming to conclusions on the basis of anecdotal evidence. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 03:56, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Heh, I editconflicted with you trying to post the same set of links. Thanks for working on the first one so much Mike, I hadn't encountered it before a few days ago and have found it very interesting. @Slim: I insist on high standards for professors that I personally work with, and am setting up an on the ground structure in my university that should eventually result in a very high number of classes participating, and hopefully, universally acceptable results. Looking at Mike's table, one of my gut feelings is confirmed: that problems are generally confined to specific courses, instead of spread throughout the program evenly. I disagree with the framing of the ethical issue you perceive, but I do understand where you're coming from. I'm working on a blog-post type thing that will be dealing in part with it, so I'll refrain from trying to address it briefly for now. Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:05, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Looking at the first link, it looks only at edits, and doesn't indicate how time spent on clean-up was determined. A person might make edits stretching over five minutes that took hours to prepare (looking up sources, for example). It also doesn't factor in time spent searching for copyvios, alerting the teachers, and posting in discussions like this one. The burden is not light, and it shouldn't be there at all.

The universities are paid to host these courses, the teachers are paid to teach them, the students are paid in the form of course credits, but then unpaid volunteers are expected to make editorial decisions about whether to retain the work, which can involve hours or days of clean-up, or to allow damage to a valuable public resource if the clean-up isn't performed. This is a similar ethical situation to a company polluting a river, but not paying for clean-up, or paying only in part while relying on volunteers to do a lot of the work. Kevin, I take your point that the poor editing may be limited to certain courses, but I hope they aren't allowed to take part again once that has been established. But whether the edits are good or bad, the ethical issue of the burden on volunteers remains. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:25, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

There's currently no mechanism through which we can prevent a class from editing Wikipedia. We could theoretically group-block them, but I don't think Wikipedia has ever blocked categorically a group of people who haven't done individual wrong - even the sanctions related to scientology or to the men's rights movement don't block whole groups of people in such a fashion. There's also the problem that we have no way of knowing when a class is even editing Wikipedia in the first place, if they don't use the course page setup. As an example of this, to my bewilderment, I found out this semester that a class at Berkeley had been using Wikipedia-based assignments for at least three semesters without any formal support, without using the course page setup, and without me (or any of the other people involved in education program stuff at Berkeley) having any idea that they had been doing so.

I have refused to support classes before if I thought their professors didn't have an adequate comprehension of what would be required for a successful assignment, and I've actively (and successfully) discouraged multiple professors from using Wikipedia based assignments, but unless we close public registration, we can't actually prevent a class from using a Wikipedia-based assignment. Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:34, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

They could surely be prevented from saying they're part of the education program, and from using its facilities. I thought everyone who was part of that program had to register their courses. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:39, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The education program, with the exception of the new course interface (and I'm not actually sure offhand if that's actually even launched yet) doesn't really have any 'facilities' to speak of. It offers reuseable handouts and some other resources, but we couldn't stop them from using them. It offers ambassador support, but pretty much all of the really bad classes don't use ambassador support and thus wouldn't be effected by that anyway. They could be prevented from saying "We're part of the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program," but I don't think that would be a very big deterrent to anyone who still wanted to participate. Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:43, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

(ec) SlimVirgin, I don't think I follow your argument -- can you clarify? You say the burden analysis looks only at edits, but the column headed "Response" describes the response that other Wikipedians made to that edit. For example, if the edit introduced poorly formatted text, the Response column might say "Clean up formatting issues". That column is intended to summarize the burden laid on the editing community from the students' work. It's true that I couldn't determine how much time was spent by other editors on reviewing the posts and then doing whatever they did, but I think in most cases it's not hard to tell what the burden was. Where there is copyvio, I agree it can take hours to find and fix, and the table doesn't quantify that, so if that's your point I agree (though not much copyvio was found -- I think only one student of the seventy-odd in the burden analysis was adding copyright material).

However, I think the comparison should be to new editors in general. We agree that if a course provides nothing but negative outcomes and burden for the volunteer community, that course is a net negative and shouldn't repeat (though as Kevin says the education program has no power over these classes -- it's just a support group); and that if a course provides good articles and no burden, then that course is a net positive. Where do you draw the line in between? I think that a few formatting errors and bare reference links would be a small price to pay for a worthwhile paragraph or article, for example.

I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn, but I think it's a discussion worth having. For the students in the assessments linked above, for example, I think two courses are clearly negative, and another three or four are dubious. The majority of the classes seem to be a net positive to Wikipedia, though; I'd say at least two thirds were net assets. The ones that aren't assets -- yes, we should be in contact with them and explain the problem to those professors, and discourage them from running classes until the problems are fixed. I don't see how we force them to stop, though, unless we block the students. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 05:03, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

@ Slimvirgin, this is an interesting and important discussion because of the implications related to the fundamental principles of WP. Let’s just say for sake of discussion that there was community consensus that everyday WP editors shouldn’t be burdened with correcting the missteps of students/professors who are using WP in the classroom. What could or might the community do about it? On one hand, the community could attribute the problem to Outreach Efforts and insist that WMF Outreach to groups such as Academia be halted. This wouldn’t eliminate the problem, but it certainly would remove any type of encouragement that would amplify more instances of the problem. Another possibility would be to sanction and prevent (through bans and blocks I guess) anyone associated with a student/professor classroom project from editing WP if that editing was for classwork credit. I don’t see how these sanctions could be preemptive, but they certainly could occur at the first instance the sanctioned class of editors started editing. A third possibility, which would have to be enforced with elements of the second, would be to clearly state in our WP principles that editing by students and use of Wikipedia in the classroom is discouraged and will be reverted when discovered. These might be plausible remedies, but highly unlikely because they are in fundamental conflict with the founding principles of WP, the Five Pillars, and WMF strategic goals. WMF Outreach programs became necessary because of downward trend in content quality, scope and editor retention. Without Outreach to new communities of potential editors and new content, WP will slowly wither. The 3rd pillar of the five is very clear that WP content can be edited and used by anyone without exception. Are we to say that’s true with the exception that academia can’t use WP as a tool in the classroom because of the burden. Wouldn’t it then be a slippery slope for anyone to start sanctioning other uses of WP if they thought those uses burdened the WP editing community. I don’t think Outreach efforts are going away, nor do I think that the community will tolerate anything that fundamentally violates our Five Pillars, so that leaves us with a dilemma. The dilemma being how do we accomplish Outreach into communities such as academia that will generate a net positive result for WP without compromising our basic principles? --Mike Cline (talk) 05:16, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

I find it troubling that SlimVirgin and MelanieN are raising the same issues that many medical editors have been raising here and everywhere for several years, and getting the same pat answers and faulty data analysis in response. (See Colin's data analysis, which differs from the WMF data analysis-- I have been told that WMF's analyses fail to look for or account for plagiarism at all.) Plagiarism and copyvio by students are still rampant, we have many instructors who have never edited Wikipedia and can't explain Wikipedia policies to their students anyway, we have classes editing articles without tagging article talk which would help us know which professor to contact, we have term-end crunch revert wars, we have established editors having to clean up multiple essays at the end of every term, we are not gaining new editors via outreach because the students are only here for a grade and rarely continue editing after the class ends, the students don't know correct sourcing or indeed most Wikipedia policies ... in other words, all still the same, and yet Slim and Melanie are getting the same pat answers we medical editors have been given for several years now. Student editing under profs who have no knowledge of Wikipedia forcing students to edit a project that they have no long-term commitment to is a problem and it's getting worse, not better. Why is the approach/response here unchanged and why is the problem downplayed in light of Slim's and Melanie's concerns? I was previously given to believe it's a big problem in the psych realm but there were less problems in other content areas: from the examples here, that doesn't seem to be the case. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:18, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing my wayward character that broke the header. I'm also troubled by the notion, oft-repeated here, that student editors should be handled no differently than other new editors. Other new editors are not here for a grade, are motivated to become better editors, will not disappear once their grade is in (often leaving questions unanswered about sourcing, plagiarism, etc), are not being given incomplete and faulty instruction in how to edit from professors who have never edited rather are more prone to seek accurate guidance from knowledgeable established editors, are not likely to have peers who will edit war for them, are not as likely to be part of large collaborations to reinforce each other's work, will be quickly dealt with if they plagiarize, and their faulty edits are not protected by WMF-staff-supported programs that seem to value recruiting new editors (which would have merit if it was working, it's not) over the goal of retaining established editors and making good use of their time and knowledge. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:41, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

@Mike, you don't seem to have been hearing what we are saying. In your list of (heavy-handed and obviously unsuitable) options for dealing with the problem, you left out the option I and others keep suggesting here: retain the student program, expand it, encourage it - but not in mainspace! Let them create and improve and "own" their class projects, but in AfC or sandbox or some newly created area. After the class is over (so that the ownership issue goes away and we can deal with the articles straightforwardly, without being given a guilt trip about some poor student's classwork), let the articles be reviewed by a regular Wikipedia editor and the good ones promoted to mainspace. Or promote them all to mainspace but take away the "student" tag, so that we can handle them as we would any other new article. What we have now is a situation where articles are being created that are in some kind of "untouchable" special category, and we are being told to keep hands-off until the end of the semester. That makes perfect sense from an academic standpoint, but it's an impossible situation in articlespace. --MelanieN (talk) 15:41, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Melanie, I don't think anyone here is suggesting that it's OK for student articles to be untouchable in any sense. That's unacceptable, and I think Mike Cline, Kevin, The Interior, and everyone else who's commented here would agree. I would think the Wikipedians who work with the Education Program completely agree with all the criticisms that have been made of the individual student edits that have been pointed out as having copyvio, or being badly written, or inappropriately claiming exemptions from cleanup -- why would we not agree? If you find anyone defending bad student work, please post links here and I and others will try to help fix the problem. As far as I can see, the question is what should be done about it. The EP is a group of editors who are trying to improve these interactions with students; it's very helpful to hear about problems because then we can go investigate and try to teach the prof and students how to do things better next time. Is there more you think we should be doing at this point? We'd like to stop the problems as much as anyone does; more so, probably, as we've invested time in trying to make these classes successful. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:49, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

True, no-one HERE is suggesting that student articles are off limits - that's not policy. But that IS the expectation of the students, as illustrated in at least one case above. And the students have a point: this is their work, they will be graded on it, they "worked hard" on it; how are they supposed to feel when some stranger comes along and starts removing parts of their paper, or nominating it for deletion? Of course they object - which just illustrates my point that student work-in-progress does not belong on an open-source wiki.
I think one possible approach would be to recognize that some professors are doing a much better job on this than others. There are examples of both in this very thread. Some professors are carefully training and supervising their students, and by all accounts the results are praiseworthy. Other professors are simply throwing the students at Wikipedia, with minimal training and no supervision, sloughing off the supervision onto student "peer reviewers" and regular Wikipedia editors. The chart above could help to identify the "problem professors"; so could individual instances when they come to light. How about telling the "problem professors" to keep their students' articles in sandboxes or some equivalent area, while leaving alone the professors that are doing a good job? And BTW I think it should NOT be a requirement of any class that the student articles all be nominated for DYK and GA; that's just ridiculous, and if actually done would create an enormous burden on already understaffed areas. --MelanieN (talk) 16:14, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

We might be converging on agreement here; I agree with almost everything you say. I'd just add that we can tell the problem professors what to do, but we have no power to enforce it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:25, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

We agree that some professors/classes might be causing problems. I have not heard your thoughts on the notion that student work-in-progress (good or bad) simply does not belong in the articlespace of an open-source wiki. --MelanieN (talk) 16:36, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Work in progress, by students or anyone else, doesn't belong in the article space of an open-source wiki. I can't imagine any experienced editor disagreeing with that either. I don't interpret this to mean that students should never edit mainspace, though; I think they need to only post material to mainspace that is good enough to post. Some classes (take a look at the Rice University ones in the lists above, for example) typically work in sandboxes till the work is good enough to go into mainspace, and then they move or copy it in. I think that's a fine approach. Some classes have been successful with editing articles directly, because the students have made good edits. I think that's OK too -- I wouldn't want to (and couldn't) forbid a class from taking that approach. If a class does that, and in fact the edits are bad, they should be reverted and the professor should get feedback -- and if that class received support from the EP, the EP should look to see if anything went wrong with the support provided. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:48, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)I, like Mike, agree with most of your previous post. DYK/GAN shouldn't be a requirement of an assignment; some professors are doing well, some poorly; professors who do poorly should be encouraged to use sandboxes. Although we have no current power to enforce it, if someone made a proposal, I would consider supporting some sort of specialized community sanctions whereby any class that has had X number of students commit out and out copyright infringement would have their contributions forcibly relegated to sandboxes. (I'd also probably support a suggestion that any class that edits on topic issues covered by WP:MEDRS that has had X number of students use woefully shitty sources have their contributions sandboxed, if necessary forcibly via community sanctions.)

I don't agree that student work categorically doesn't belong in articlespace. Much student work happens in article space without any problems associated with it. Students and professors cannot have the expectation that their work stands untouched, and if they have that expectation, it should be corrected. The faculty I have worked with in the past have always been 100% aware of the possibility of community interaction with their students or of other people actively changing their students' work, and most of them have viewed it as an active positive about using Wikipedia-based assignments. I see no incompatibility between student work and articlespace. If students are creating new articles then, like any other Wikipedia editor creating new articles, they shouldn't be moved in to articlespace until they are in 'good enough' shape. Kevin Gorman (talk) 16:58, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

keeping track of students

I can usually glean a useful sentence or three from entire student essays; if these largely unuseful essays were left in Sandbox, with a link to the sandbox posted on article talk at term-end, it would take me much less time to pick out the one or two useful sentences then it takes me to remove all of the blather and explain why on talk (explaining, that is, to students and professors who will never read the explanation or learn from it). But, a bigger problem is still that most often classes never tag article talk, so we have no way of contacting the professor even when plagiarism is found or the students have not been instructed in correct sourcing. The way I usually realize I'm being hit by student edits is when they all start appearing on my watchlist shortly before Thanksgiving, they never engage on talk, and they revert their faulty edits back in to the article time and again, desperate that their grade not be affected. Even then, I can't always locate the professor, or get the student to engage on talk. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:49, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Beginning next term, classes in the education program (and probably a few others as well, if we can catch them early) will use semi-automated course pages with the new extension (which is live now). That should make it easier to figure out which classes students are part of and who the instructor is, find which articles they and their classmates plan to edit, and head off class-wide problems early (and in worst-case scenarios, shut down classes that are hurting more than helping the project).--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:55, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Can there also be an effort to get them to tag article talk pages? That would allow me (at least) to better guide their efforts as they work, make sure they are using adequate (medical) sources, make sure their work stays on topic (they frequently write essays with content that wouldn't belong in the article even in the correct tone), and avoid me having to spend every Thanksgiving repairing articles. If the students are to learn something and have a good experience, getting some guidance along the way might help. When their first edits show up in article space the week before Thanksgiving, timing for helping guide them isn't optimal. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:35, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The idea with the extension is to make it so no special effort is needed to track which articles students are working on (since the ones with the significant problems are typically also the ones that don't get tagged because the people involved aren't as well-trained or connected with experienced editors as most). So I think most classes won't be using talk page banners at all. (Only the Canada ones are this term, for the most part, as the US ones moved to a more basic course page layout.) But a watchlist entry will appear whenever a student signs up to work on an article you are watching (and there is a log entry for the page showing when they added it and which class they are in, so if you miss it in your watchlist but later realize a student is making edits, it will be easy to track down the relevant details).--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

My apologies, but I didn't follow that at all. When a student signs up on a course page to edit a topic that I watchlist, how will my watchlist be triggered until/unless the student edits the article page, which typically doesn't happen until term-end? For that to happen would seem to involve some major new software. The topics I watchlist are hit massively by psych and neuroscience courses that I don't even know exist. Unless there is some software change, you seem to be saying I have to watchlist every course project. Confused, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:56, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

The short answer is: yes, new software! :-) There's a new extension which is (as of a few weeks ago) deployed and functional on en-wiki (although not in use by any classes yet, since it deployed too late to be useful this term). See Wikipedia:Course pages for the (in development) description of how it works. Basically, users with the enrollment code for the class can sign up on a course page as students, and then add articles they are working on with a form. That creates a log entry for the page, which will appear on your watchlist if you are watching the article. So there's no need to watch course pages; if a student signs up for an article on your watchlist through their course page, you'll see an entry in your watchlist (just like you would if someone protected the page or did something else that creates a log entry).--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 17:07, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

That's cool! Thanks for explaining. So, the next problem is and will be-- students frequently create new articles that shouldn't be articles (either AFD'd or text coulda/shoulda been added to an existing article). Since I won't have those watchlisted, I won't know about them until someone tries to link them back to an article I do watchlist. And, this won't help solve the significant number of courses that are now using us as unpaid TAs without ever registering a course page. The notion that MOST (posts to the contrary on this page notwithstanding) of the profs do not check for plagiarism, be it checking diffs or talk pages-- but expect us to go out and find the sources and do it, and Every Single Student article I have dealt with has plagiarism-- is one of the most irksome aspects. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:14, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Hopefully, we can add features to the extension over time that will make it easier to handle classes. Of course, for stealth assignments that have no course page, it's hard to do anything comprehensive, but at least we can point people to the extension once we discover them and say "if you want to do an assignment, you should use this". (Course pages are an absolute requirement for participating in the Education Program.)--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 17:24, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Is there a template for pointing profs to the extension? Or better yet, since most of the students I encounter never edit a course page, so I can't locate a prof anwyay, is there a template for querying an editor if they are part of a course and asking them what course, what prof, etc, and also pointing them to the extension? I have sometimes later located the prof because other editors happened to know it was student editing, and pinged my talk to let me know; if we had a template to bring these folks on board earlier, it would help. Maybe-- considering that the students rarely engage on talk anyway ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:33, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

There's not a template for either situation yet, but those both sound like good ideas.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 17:36, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Note that while these aren't geared toward exactly the purpose you had in mind, we have these: {{welcome teacher}} and {{welcome student}}. Maybe the best approach would be to edit those make them useful for situations where you're trying to figure out what the student or professor is up to. I'm not sure how widely they are used, but I know at least that User:Pharaoh of the Wizards uses them pretty regularly.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:13, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Two questions

First, as the point of the program seems to have been to find new editors, can someone say how many students have stayed on to become regular Wikipedians?

Also, I'm confused about the status of the program. It seems to have official status. An enormous amount of money has been spent on it, I believe it has its own namespace, its own templates, and Foundation employees dedicated to overseeing it, and it extends a protective mantle over its participants (which is one of the reasons the students can't be compared to regular new editors). Yet when I asked above whether poorly administered courses could be excluded in future, Kevin said no, anyone can set up a course and there is no way to stop them from registering as part of the program. So the question is: given that this program has some form of official recognition, why are the people overseeing not able to deny registration to institutions that perform under par? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:25, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't have numbers regarding editor retention, although I'm sure someone does. I would not call that one of the primary points of the program anyway though. (As a sidenote, I am an example of a student who stayed on to become a regular Wikipedian.)

I'm sure, as I said above, that we could prevent someone from saying "We're part of the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program." And now that the new education extension is launching for the next semester, they could be excluded from being able to use that. And they can be denied ambassadorial support. But outside of those three things, there is no existing mechanic to prevent a course from using a Wikipedia-based assignment. Most of the most problematic courses already don't have ambassadorial support (that's generally part of the reason why they're problematic.) And since the education extension is brand new, not being able to use it is not going to serve as a huge disincentive. And like I said I don't think that being unable to say "We're part of the Wikimedia Foundation's Global Education Program" is going to be very much of a disincentive, either.

Do you have a useful suggestion as to how poorly performing institutions could be handled? It's definitely a problem in need of an answer. Kevin Gorman (talk) 03:52, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not talking only about the new extension. The courses all use special templates that were created for them, they have access to ambassadors, they have Foundation staff who support them and who ask editors to review GA nominations for them. They could be excluded from access to any of that paraphernalia if not registered with the program. Allowing anyone to register seems to be giving the program a bad name, and it's not in the students' interests that they be allowed to add two paragraphs of poorly written (or plagiarized) material to an article they have no interest in, and call that an assignment. It's surely in everyone's interests that the Foundation (or the program or whoever is running this now) not facilitate that.

As for how to handle poorly performing institutions, I would suggest (a) asking everyone editing as part of the program to post their essays on user subpages as suggested above, and (if they want to) ask Wikipedians to move material to mainspace once the course is over; and (2) where there are persistent requests to move plagiarized material over, that teacher will be asked not to register any more courses with the program. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:23, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to split your points into bullets since the replies vary; I hope I captured everything from your post.

• Special templates: Are you referring to things like {{WAP assignment}}? If so, the only thing I can see that could be done for a poorly performing institution is to remove any template that had the imprimatur of the education program and replace it with a generic template indicating that the article is being edited by students; of course that could (and should be done). If you're also talking about the resources that were put into creating the templates, I don't know who built them, but I would be surprised if foundation staff have done much template building (unless it was someone like Sage Ross).
• access to ambassadors: Well, we can't stop ambassadors from helping anyone they want to help, but I agree that a poorly performing institution should not be listed as a possible course for ambassadors to help; there should be no facilitation by the EP.
• Foundation staff who support them: I can think of two or three ways to interpret this. Foundation staff do things like create brochures for classes to use -- see here for example. They provide training to campus ambassadors who are usually staff members or students at the institution in question. If an instructor at a poorly performing institution asked for support from the Foundation I would regard that as an opportunity to improve the situation. Someone with more knowledge of what the Foundation actually does with individual campuses should probably answer this, but I agree that no Foundation resources should go to uncooperative poorly performing institutions.
• ask editors to review GA nominations for them: I haven't seen this, and I don't think it should be happening for any student classes, let alone poorly performing ones. The professor I am working with this autumn instructs her students only to submit to GA if they are willing to commit to following up after the end of the semester, and working with the reviewer to complete the changes to the article. They don't ask for any acceleration of the review. I think that's the appropriate way to do it. If an ambassador wants to review a student's GA ahead of others listed, that's up to them, of course. You didn't mention DYK but I might as well add that I'm not in favour of students applying for DYK at all, and certainly not for course credit -- I think shepherding a successful DYK nomination requires more experience and time commitment on the part of the student than the students and professors typically realize.
• allowing anyone to register: I believe there's a statement all professors are asked to sign before they can participate, outlining expected norms of behaviour for them and their students. I can't locate it; perhaps someone else can post a link, assuming I'm right and it's still in use. If I'm right about this, then there is a filter on registration. I don't know if there's any enforcement at this point -- that is, if an institution fails to adhere to the students, are they denied registration next year? I agree that something along those lines is necessary.

I don't agree that all students should be asked to do all their work on user subpages. It's a good plan for new articles, and for students with less confidence (or ability), but many students do just fine with direct editing of articles. I agree that any class that does poorly should be asked to do work in sandboxes first. And I agree that persistent plagiarism is about the worst possible red flag we could see. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:55, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the detailed response. We seem to agree on a lot. I used the term "paraphernalia" because I'm not familiar with all the things that have been made available to the program. I see templates, portals, coordinators, Foundation staff, and ambassadors. I'm arguing that this support network should only be made available to universities that register courses formally with the program, that to register they have to agree to abide by certain rules (one of which would be to avoid damaging the encyclopaedia or increasing the workload of Wikipedians not involved with the program), and that if they violate the agreement they're not allowed to register courses again.

Here is Sage requesting GA reviews. [5] This is at a time when we already have GA backlogs and few reviewers. I don't think it should be up to ambassadors (as you wrote above) to decide whether to ask for GA reviews for students ahead of others; they should be asked not to do this for all the obvious reasons. Ditto with DYK. And I think teachers should be asked not to use student peer reviewers, because they seem only to tell each other how good their work is, when it really isn't.

I feel that what's missing here is looking at it from the students' point of view, and what's in their interests. It's in their interests to get a good education, which in the case of students who are struggling with writing and research skills means good teaching. It isn't in their interests to be left to get on with writing an article for Wikipedia, being allowed to add plagiarism and use websites as sources, being told by student peer reviewers that they've done a good job, or being taught how to write by anonymous volunteers on the Internet. So it's in everyone's interests here (Foundation, universities, students, Wikipedia and Wikipedians) that we work toward higher standards.

As for using sandboxes, I'll reply to that in a different thread. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:08, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Mike and SlimVirgin. In terms of retention as a goal of the program, from the Wikimedia Foundation perspective, turning students into Wikipedians has never been a focus of the these projects. It's been clear from early on that even most of the students who do solid work simply don't have that Wikipedian bug inside them, and the retention rate has been fairly low from the beginning. The goal instead has been mainly to improve content. To that end, we do consider retention of professors as a key goal: as they build up experience, become very familiar with Wikipedia's coverage in their area of expertise, and become invested in the community over the long term, that's when—through their students—we see the most improvement in Wikipedia article quality.

For GAs (and DYKs), we now explicitly recommend against making them any sort of requirement for students. Instead, we suggest them as possibilities for particular outstanding student work, with consultation with an experienced Wikipedian before nomination to make sure it's good enough to make a nomination worthwhile (for both the student and the community). This term, that ecology class did end up having GA nomination as part of the syllabus (whoops!), but since the student work was (to my eye) actually quite strong and they had some time left in their timeline, I figured why not make the best of it? From what I've seen, the reviews that did get done (which I don't think my post here had anything to do with) have led to nice further improvements in the articles, so they haven't been wasted effort.

For classes that want to be part of the US or Canada Education Program, professors go through screening and assignment design consultation (typically with Jami Mathewson of WMF and/or Regional Ambassadors who are familiar with best practices for Wikipedia assignments) before they are admitted. Of course, anyone can do something like this on their own, and we are trying to develop as robust a set of self-service support resources as we can. But in terms of active support, that's limited to Education Program participants. We have many cases where the Education Program declines to work with professors, or doesn't let them continue after a first term, if they aren't willing to follow the guidelines or modify their plans to fix problems.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:22, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for this info-- now I know where to focus my efforts (on the problematic professors). But, again, it's hard to identify them when the students rarely tag article talk and there is often no indication of what class, what prof, etc (although it eventually comes to light sometimes). We need a polite template for querying new editors who suddenly drop in a big sandbox edit and have no other interaction with the Project whether they are part of a class (we already discussed that). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:46, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

See above. We do have a basic welcome template for students. That could be edited to more specifically address common issues with new users who seem to be students but you can't tell what they are working on or who they are working with.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

education program focused admins?

How would y'all feel about the idea of education program specific admins? There is no technical mechanism to do this, so what I mean by it is pretty much someone going through RfA making a pledge to only use the toolset in situations specific to educational assignments - e.g., revdeling student copyright violations, histmerging moves mucked up by students, and issuing preventative blocks against education program editors, enforceable via revocation of the bit if significantly broken.

The reason this idea occurred to me is because I have encountered a number of situations related to the education program where being able to use an admin toolset would've been useful (and due to some on the ground stuff I'm in the process of setting up, I expect I will encounter many more in the future,) but don't think that I would currently pass an RfA as a standard candidate, and I also don't desire to use the admin toolset broadly anyway. I'm sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of education program who is in a similar situation.

I know there would be a risk of someone who made such a pledge going berserk, misusing their tools, and, say, banning a bunch of random people, but I think the standard for "we trust you not to go berserk, and trust you to clean up education program stuff" isn't as high a standard as "we trust you to appropriately use administrative tools in every area of Wikipedia." (This is a very tentative idea; I've not decided whether I like the idea myself or not yet, but wanted to see what other people thought. I'm not intending to do this myself for the foreseeable future, so this isn't intended as some sort of weird pre-RFA canvassing.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:23, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

There's no way of limiting how a person uses the tools, so I don't think this would fly. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:27, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Except for viewing deleted pages, all admin tools create log entries, don't they? So if someone went through an RfA saying "Arbcom or any crat should revoke my tools if I use them in non-edu related areas without undergoing a reconfirmation RfA first" and proceeded to break their word, taking their bit away would be pretty easy. And I do think the standard for "we trust you not to go on a tool-fueled rampage" is definitely a different one from "we trust you to exercise administrative powers across Wikipedia." To use myself as an example - I have a multi-year editing history, have interned for WMF, have done paid consulting work for WMF, and could demonstrate that I have the technical expertise necessary to use the tools successfully. I think I'd be voted down in a general RfA because I think there are enough people who wouldn't trust my judgment to, say, gauge consensus on AfD's - but I think that most of those people wouldn't be terribly worried about me going on an arbitrary banning spree, and would trust my judgment to use the toolbox to clean up edu program stuff. (Although to reiterate, I am not intending on actually doing this, just floating the idea in the ether - and I'm not sure it's a terribly good idea myself, either.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 04:40, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Taking a bit away is never easy, regardless of what the nominee claimed in the RFA. And the notion that we grant the bits for restricted reasons has been perennially shot down. No go here. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:51, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

You should quality for admin soon anyway. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflicted with Sandy and James on this) Two big problems with this, I think. First, RFA voters generally have always resoundingly rejected people who apply on the basis of "I have a special need for the tools in this one small area, I promise never to use them anywhere else, so could you guys overlook the fact that I'm otherwise not a passing candidate and give me the tools?" Second, there is no way for the community to hold a "special" admin to their promises, short of hoping Arbcom accepts a case and then waiting three months or so for them to cough up a remedy. Crats absolutely won't desysop on the basis of "Hey, if I violate my promise you can go ahead and take my bits", the community has no mechanism for lifting bits itself, and Arbcom's emergency-desysop procedures are for just that, emergencies, not garden-variety "admin misusing their tools" happenings, which they still expect to go through a normal, lengthy, case. This isn't to say, Kevin, that I (or Sandy, I would assume) think you'd go crazypants and start blocking everyone and deleting the main page, but the reason RFA has such a high bar is that the powers come in a lump and are extremely sticky, which means that the community generally wants admins to be able to do it all at least competently, if not well.

That all said, I do like the idea of dedicated EP "cleanup" personnel. It would take a lot of the burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' learning curves, if you had people waiting in the wings to mop up spots where the learning went wrong. I don't think this calls for specially-appointed admins, though, so much as perhaps recruiting ambassadors who are willing to monitor and clean up their classes' messes (it seems like this ought to already be part of the job description, but it doesn't seem to be), or perhaps non-ambassadors who volunteer to go through EP work in hazmat suits so the rest of the community doesn't have to. If someone does the rest of the work, it's not too hard to find an admin to actually mash buttons for something like a histmerge. It's the finding the pages involved, figuring out what goes where, figuring out how it was messed up, etc that takes the real time. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 15:57, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

It would take a lot of the burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' learning curves,... Don't you think a more accurate statement would be ... burden off the community, which strains under the weight of EP classes' all new editors' learning curves,.... Problematic student classes indeed concentrate things in a way that makes them more visible, but collectively I suspect there's just as much burden on the entire community associated with the learning curves of all new editors, its just not as visible or concentrated in one spot. Point being, I don't think there's any more or less burden associated with education related editors. New editors place a burden on the community, why because the community has norms that requires it to welcome new contributors and deal with them in positive and constructive ways. And we all know the learning curve can be high--we all experienced it in some way. --Mike Cline (talk) 16:26, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

@ Mike Cline, re "all new editors"; no. You don't seem to be digesting what many editors are saying here. A special class of new (and non-returning) editors has been created in this program. And the burden of attempting to educate someone who is only here for a grade and is unlikely to return is higher than the burden of educating a committed, engaged but struggling new editor. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:39, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @ Sandy, I think you are wrong in this sense. Indeed not all new editors have the same motivation, but I can say with certainty that the motivations of new editors cover a wide range of potentially burdensome problems. Many new people chose to edit to push geo-political, cultural, linguistic, economic, commercial, social, religious, etc, etc, positions all the time. Their motivations aren't to become a better editors, their motivation is to pust their agenda in WP. In the EP we have the opportunity to mentor student editors throughout educational career when we build sound ambassador programs on a campus. I even think that saying Motivated to edit to get a grade is wrong. We've been designing curriculum at MSU to use WP as a tool to achieve serious learning objectives in writing skills. The students get a good grade because met the learning objectives, not because they edited WP. In the long run we hope to tap into that motivation for a better grade and learning by using WP as a tool into higher quality content, scope and maybe new dedicated editors. If WP is indeed free and open for anyone to edit and use, we cannot exclude or apply different norms to any class of editor because of their motivation to edit. We just need to build processes and support structures (much like has been done with BLP) to ensure that whatever the motivation to contribute is, those contributions benefit the encyclopedia. --Mike Cline (talk) 17:02, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, we have those editors, and they are (relative to the students) easily handled by normal Wikipedia processes, noticeboards, blocking, etc. The average POV pusher is not in a protected class like these students are, and whatever time we spend educating the average disruptive user occasionally pays off when they turn into good users. In the case of students, they rarely return to editing, they are a protected class (by their peers reverting for them and by some participants on this board), and we get little return for the investment in helping them learn policy, since they rarely ever come back. We "cannot exlude or apply different norms to any class of editor"? We already do. We should be applying MEATPUPPETRY policies to class editing-- they edit in collaboration. We make an exception for normal polices for students, and this board generally supports it. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:09, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the answers, y'all. I don't follow RfA closely enough to have been aware that such things had previously been suggested and rejected. Kevin Gorman (talk) 16:45, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

a flash from the past

There were a bunch of articles (or sections added to articles) started for one psych class in Spring 2012, all on the Big Five:

• Hierarchical Structure of the Big Five

• Big Five personality traits

• Big Five personality traits and culture

• Change in the Big Five (in Change in personality over a lifetime)

• Five-factor model (in Dimensional models of personality disorders)

• Personality and life outcomes - about the Big Five.

Many of these (and others) were nominated for DYK at the same time. I think there was agreement then that professors should not require students nominate articles for DYK or GA. (I don't have the diffs as Educational Program discussions aren't collected in one area.)

Here is a sample Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Dimensional approach to personality disorders which demonstrates how exhausting the process was. As you can see, the article was kept but continues in a disreputable state (as do all the other articles mentioned above). No one has cleaned them up. I've stayed away from the EP courses since so I'm not familiar with the current situation.

Hopefully this kind of thing no longer happens. Best, MathewTownsend (talk) 19:50, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, these articles suck. They sucked the first time you posted them, and they suck now. Yes, no one has improved them. Wikipedia has four million articles. Most of them suck. Most of them sucked a year ago. Most of them will still suck a year from now. The fact that an article that sucked last spring still sucks says absolutely nothing about anything. Is there a purpose to this section? Kevin Gorman (talk) 00:13, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Is the point not that students editing as part of the education program should be asked not to use mainspace? They could post the articles on a user subpage, the teacher could evaluate them, and then – if the student wants his or her work to be moved to the encyclopaedia – the student can ask a Wikipedian to check it for policy compliance and move it if it does comply.

We already ask paid advocates to edit via this route, and there is a board where they can ask that their drafts be checked before being moved to the encyclopaedia. If the same approach were taken with education-program students it would solve a lot of the problems we're seeing. It would also mean the students weren't being forced to release their work, which is another ethical issue I haven't seen addressed. This way, they could ask that it be deleted from their userspace once the course had ended. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:38, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

yes SlimVirgin, that's the point. Seems like the Education Program could at least do no damage. If all those articles were in a sandbox or somewhere not in the main space, then perhaps the subject matter overlap would be noticed. And the program's articles that "suck" wouldn't be in the mainspace confusing readers. (Once they're in the mainspace it's almost impossible to get them ADFed.) MathewTownsend (talk) 17:40, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Someone should just go ahead and redirect those titles to whatever the main title is. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:29, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

There's more articles than I've listed e.g. Honesty-humility factor of the HEXACO model of personality (also has sections about the Big Five) and HEXACO model of personality structure. I haven't done a search for all the articles. (I know "Big Five" is linked to many articles.) But I think what Colin says above is important: "consider that often the added text is already present on Wikipedia in a better place in some other article." This seems to be one of the problems here. Overall the subject may be important but it's not integrated into existing wikipedia articles covering the same subject. Or many scattered aspects of a subject are broken up into separate articles. Students (and professors) need to be aware of what articles exist on wikipedia related to the subject before they start adding new ones, I think. MathewTownsend (talk) 20:22, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Concerns re: recent discussion on this board

Hi all, I'm one of the coordinators of the Canadian Education Program. Some of my colleagues and I are currently reviewing recent discussion on this board. While I appreciate the engagement, and the clear desire to improve the Education Program, there are concerns about the way some editors have gone about presenting their criticism. In particular (and this is not intended to be threatening) there are concerns that parts of this discussion have violated WP:CIVIL, WP:GOODFAITH, WP:BITE and perhaps (most concerning) WP:PERSONAL and WP:HARASS. I would appreciate if those involved could post links to the primary concerns, in particular:

• Evidence that an editor said that course material should not be altered during the semester,
• Evidence that copyright violations would not be addressed,
• Evidence of requirements that students nominate for DYK and GA,
• Any examples of students refusing to abide by policy after being properly notified.

I recognize that this is a discussion board, and that opportunity should be allowed for extensive comment; however, for this thread, if you wouldn't mind, please keep answers as brief as possible. Please refer to as many concrete examples as possible. Please also refrain from adding additional anecdotal criticism.

Thank you for your help with this.

Sincerely, Jaobar (talk) 16:30, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Jaobar, I don't see the things you are talking about. This discussion has been pretty civil, and I certainly don't see any example of personal attacks or harrassment (unless some of the people on the project take personally any criticism of the program). It was clearly stated that STUDENTS, not Wikipedians, have been saying that course material should not be altered during the semester. There is plenty of evidence about copyright violations, including at least one case where the professor refused to look into copyright violations or take them seriously;[6] even so, several people here have volunteered to follow up on the copyvio problem. Here is an example of a course which requires that students nominate their articles for DYK and GA: [7]. Another example requiring both DYK and GA: [8]. Other examples of DYK requirement: [9] [10]. --MelanieN (talk) 17:50, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

For what it's worth, this example that you point out actually shows the initial plan drawn up by a tutor who wasn't entirely familiar with some of enwiki's rules and norms; we had a chat, and the course set off in a slightly different direction. (No DYKs came out of it). So, I think "the system" worked that time, although much of the subsequent discussion on that course was unfortunately off-wiki. bobrayner (talk) 21:59, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Jaobar: I suspect that part of the reason you posted is related an email I sent to a colleague of yours a couple days ago. I've reviewed the email I sent, and although the tone of it was probably grumpier than was necessary (and it probably wasn't a good idea for me to write a grumpy email while on a lot of cough syrup/while with pneumonia, though that certainly doesn't excuse a grumpier than necessary tone) I don't think that it violates any of the policies you linked - and I stand by its contents. I'll be in private contact with you in the immediate future to explain further the particular situations that led me to send it. Kevin Gorman (talk) 21:20, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

--------

Greetings. As of this evening, I see little evidence to justify the previous discussion. Hopefully this will change by tomorrow.

For example, User:slimVirgin stated "I alerted the teacher, and he said that checking for plagiarism was not something he did. He suggested I handle it myself, and said he would give students who had posted copyvios an F." So far I see no evidence of this. Please point me to this conversation.

User:MelanieN, as far as I know, all individuals with profiles are considered editors, not just Wikipedians. Please point me to examples of students (editors) requesting that course material remain unaltered during the semester.

As far as copyright violations, I see one thread where concerns were raised, to which the professor responded. I also see claims of 4 alleged copyright violations. I am hoping that this potentially damaging set of discussion posts (damaging to the Education Program) has not been the result of an over-reaction. Please provide evidence. Jaobar (talk) 04:49, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Jaobar, SlimVirgin has already provided the diffs for what you're asking. Here, for example, she links directly to the conversations in question. MelanieN also provided diffs about the matter of students trying to keep content un-reverted in mainspace. I know there's been a whole lot of words spilled on this page recently and it's a lot to read, but if you're going to come from a place of "I demand you prove these things have been said", it helps to not fail to read where the proof has already been provided. No one is here to make personal attacks, to insult you and your colleagues, or anything else terrible and anti-wiki. They're here to discuss issues they've had with students and professors from the program, with an eye toward reaching solutions, and you're responding to that with an attitude of basically "You are all doing a horrible thing talking about this, and I expect you to cease and desist before I'm forced to do something you wouldn't like". A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 05:10, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I provided you with conclusive evidence of a student repeatedly infringing copyright via email earlier today, before your most recent post. As I said in my email, I'll be getting some other diffs to you that show such problems in the relatively near future. All of the other diffs that you have requested are already present on this page as far as I can tell. (Although I would certainly invite other people to provide additional evidence of student copyright infringement here, as requested.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 07:22, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I have just sent you an additional email containing conclusive evidence of another student in the same class we previously discussed committing outright plagiarism. Not even excessively close paraphrasing, but directly cutting and pasting large blocks of text without attribution from a source that is not freely licensed. I have pneumonia and am in finals myself, so my further emails to you will be slow, because I don't want to name and shame a student as a plagiarist without ensuring 100% that they are first. Information about other students will be forthcoming as I have time. Kevin Gorman (talk) 09:28, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

--------

Jaobar, I am happy to encounter an education program professor who has actually edited articles; having engaged Wikipedia, I'm sure you realize your demanding tone isn't helpful here-- a board where we are seeking solutions to a a problem that is deep and wide.

I have said it before, here and elsewhere, but I'll repeat this for your benefit. It is not my job to be an unpaid TA for a professor who has never edited any article, doesn't check or know how to check edit history, doesn't look at article talk, and wants me to blow the whistle on a student, causing the student to get an F for plagiarizing. Those professors-- who haven't given adequate instruction to their students and are using established Wikipedians as unpaid TAs-- shouldn't be unleashing their students' work on Wikipedia. If they are too lazy or unknowledgeable about how to check an article history to find my very clearly marked edit summaries indicating removing plagiarism, see talk or to follow the link to talk, it's not my job to notify them or to be fingerpointing at any specific examples here. If we were dealing with editors who would be sticking around, I would be dealing with the plagiarism as I would any other editor; since these students leave as soon as their course is done meaning there is no educational benefit in helping the student learn how to be a real Wikipedian, I have no reason to pursue the copyvio matters, other than removing the plagiarism as soon as I find it. I do not intend to be pointing out where I've found plagiarism; it is the professor's job when grading to look at edit history, where they can find clearly marked edit summaries. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:34, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi all, thank you for your comments. I will respond in greater detail soon. I will say quickly that my polite comments above are requests, not demands. As I'm sure you understand, my goal here is to help ensure that all parties involved come away benefitting from this process. So those offended by my tone (without trying to sound condescending here), please assume good faith. Jaobar (talk) 21:16, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

@Jaobar: What Fluff said, in spades. When you request evidence, and I and others show you the evidence you asked for, and you repeat "please point me to examples" and "so far I see no evidence of this" as if we hadn't replied - well, it's frustrating, and it doesn't promote good communication. But just for the record, let me "show you" one more time: Here's the professor telling SlimVirgin that he doesn't check for plagiarism, but if he finds a confirmed example he will give the student an F: [11] Here's a student reverting SlimVirgin's edits and telling her to leave the page alone: [12] I also provided two examples of courses requiring DYK and FAN (in one case the requirement was preliminary and was later withdrawn, according to bobrayner) and two examples of courses requiring DYK. I don't know what more I can do. --MelanieN (talk) 21:43, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

P.S. Perhaps YOU could provide US with diffs showing what you were talking about when you said that "parts of this discussion have violated WP:CIVIL, WP:GOODFAITH, WP:BITE and perhaps (most concerning) WP:PERSONAL and WP:HARASS". And if you don't care to or can't provide examples, perhaps you will agree to assume good faith on the part of those discussing here - as you expect everyone here to do toward you. --MelanieN (talk) 21:48, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Jonathan, the gist of the discussion is that plagiarism (copy-paste editing from sources cited in footnotes) was found in several articles being edited as part of a Canadian course, and the teacher has left it to Wikipedians to deal with it. [13] My view is that teachers should check for plagiarism themselves, for a number of reasons, including (a) it's part of the job, (b) unpaid volunteers shouldn't be burdened with the extra work, (c) where the sources are books, they're probably in the university library, whereas we might have to rely on inter-library loans (which apart from the hassle factor could take weeks to arrive), and (d) volunteers shouldn't be responsible for deciding, in effect, which students get an F. As one of the program coordinators, what's your view on this? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:08, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

User:SlimVirgin and User:MelanieN thank you for your responses. I have reviewed the comments in dispute (so far I have only found a few such comments, some from students who were still learning - something to keep in mind), and am in the process of discussing what has transpired with colleagues in the Education Program. I can tell you frankly that whatever your viewpoint on the issues being discussed, the results of this conversation have not had a positive effect at all, in fact, one could go so far as to say that this conversation has been destructive. So perhaps reconsidering strategy is in order. But that's just my opinion at this point. In terms of comments of concern, a close reading of some of the language, and the potential implications for those in a university setting may reveal the cause for concern. Here's one comment from User:Kevin Gorman that concerns me:

"As a student, instructor, and Wikipedian, intentional plagiarism is one of the few things that really sets me off. Things like close paraphrasing I can understand occasionally doing as a mistake, but shit like copying entire paragraphs makes me see red. If I become aware of any situation that involves a student at a US or Canadian university participating in a Wikipedia-based assignment who clearly commits intentional plagiarism, I will bring it to the attention of their professor. If their professor doesn't respond adequately, I will bring it to the attention of their departmenthead, and so on, until an appropriate response is received. And I guarantee that at any US or Canadian university, I will be able to provoke an appropriate response."

I am also requesting that you refrain from continued (and continued) criticism of the professor in question - i.e. User:SlimVirgin from the prof's talk page today "I think the issue is that it would help if you would be more pro-active about this, rather than leaving it to Wikipedians." The professor gets the point. Jaobar (talk) 17:19, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm relieved to know one professor gets the point (although I see nothing wrong with Slim's most politely worded request); I'm curious to know why you disagree with Kevin Gorman. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:27, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps Jaobar is concerned repeated posts could dissuade the professor from engaging in positive and ongoing discussions via email, etc. I think we might need another level of diligence to not to be perceived as WP:BITEy by professors. Academics have a culture of "fine, this journal doesn't like me I'll go publish in another", so we might have to be more delicate, since there is only one project with our reach. I heard from the professor I'm working with that they've perceived unwelcoming vibes from the project. So I want to be welcoming and have the maximum potential to influence the direction of the assignment to the benefit of Wikipedia. Biosthmors (talk) 17:44, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite seeing the problem with Kevin's comment. Absolutely it was blunt, and I understand why any student might be alarmed to see it, but plagiarism here for the purposes of a school assignment should carry the same penalty that plagiarism anywhere else for a school assignment does. Students should be aware that academic standards apply here as well as on paper.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, Jaobar, so please correct where I'm misreading you (because I assume I am), but to me right now it looks sort of like you're hoping to keep EP-related Wikipedia stuff a sort of "not the real world" sandbox where students/professors not adhering to the rules doesn't count. What some of the people here are trying to communicate is that to them - to many of us - it does count, and that while seeing someone appear out of the blue and dump a copyvio in an article is bad, it is in some ways worse to see someone appear because they were sent here and go on to dump a copyvio in an article. So to you it seems unnecessarily aggressive for people to go to students and professors and ask them to fix their mistakes and not commit more of them, because why are we persecuting these people who are donating their time and efforts to Wikipedia? To others, it seems like asking non-student editors to clean up and maintain students' work is an unnecessary drain on everyone else who's donating their time and efforts to Wikipedia.

There's probably a point to be made here about how to engage with students and professors in a non-offputting manner, but that point is weakened when the reason the offputting manner is being deployed is because the more understated manner doesn't seem to have worked. Wikipedia does have a reputation for being prickly to newcomers, and it's something we can stand to work on, but the people who feel pricked need to meet us halfway as far as at least attempting to fit in. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 18:14, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Having just had a conversation with Sage about this, I want to clarify what I mean when I say I don't see a problem with the comment, because there's actually a lot going on in Kevin's statement, some spots of which are more objectionable than others. So, my initial reading of Kevin's comment was that the gist was basically, "I intend to treat plagiarism from students on Wikipedia the same way I would treat it in the real world: report it so they are held accountable for their misconduct." I agree with this idea - as I said above, if students are doing academic work on Wikipedia, they should be aware that they are being held to the same standards of academic honesty here as elsewhere.

What I realized after talking it over with Sage, however, is that there's another level that can be read in Kevin's comment, basically saying, "I not only intend to report plagiarism from students on Wikipedia, but I intend to pursue the matter until I can be sure they are punished, no matter how high I have to go to accomplish that." I don't think that's an appropriate stance to take - the responsibility of someone who encounters student plagiarism is to report it to the professor, not to be Dirty Harry about making sure the student "pays" for it. If reporting the matter to a professor doesn't get the problem dealt with, in my opinion the problem has ceased to be with a student, and begun to be with the professor, because it is the responsibility of a professor who assigns extracurricular work (in the sense of "sending students to work on something that's a separate, non-school entity") to make sure that work is done in a manner that isn't damaging to the entity they're sending students to work on. If, for example, a veterinary professor was assigning students to volunteer at an animal shelter, it would fall to the professor to make sure that the students he sent weren't causing problems there. It's the student's responsibility if one of them decides go all PETA and release the dogs, but once the professor knows about that behavior, he would be responsible for making it clear to his class that that wasn't ok, and if he refuses to do that, the shelter would be correct to hold the professor, not just the students, responsible for future jailbreaks.

The other issue here is the idea of off-wiki consequences. Wikipedia usually frowns on "reporting" editors to real-world supervisors, teachers, etc. It can have an incredibly chilling effect to basically threaten someone's livelihood/future for something they did on a website. However, in the case of EP classes, I think it is reasonable in some cases to pursue off-wiki consequences for student misconduct. There need to be limits - certainly no calling up anyone's mom or internship or something - but if a student is editing on behalf of Class Y at University X, they are accountable to that class, and possibly to that university. If you're doing an assignment for Class Y here, and you perpetrate some serious academic dishonestly, like plagiarism, it is appropriate (in my mind) for your professor to be informed. It is not appropriate for a Wikipedian to try to take on the role of the professor and actually deal with the dishonesty by disciplinary means of some kind, like contacting a dean. But again, it's not appropriate for an editor to do this because it's the professor's job, not because students somehow shouldn't be held accountable for misconduct. We really, really need professors to be working with us on this. We, the community, can't end the EP, or fire a professor from the program, or even fire a student who doesn't get it. That means that when we report problems to the EP, or to a professor, we need them to be willing and able to address the issues, because they're the ones who can handle it. We can't; we can only clean up the messes that are left behind. In the future, in cases where a professor isn't taking responsibility for his students' conduct on Wikipedia, there needs to be a way to deal with that, because otherwise you end up with desperate Wikipedians trying any and all measures, some wise and some overkill, to do the professors' jobs and make the pain stop. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 20:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

To clarify, my comment was made before I was aware of any particular class with problems. It was not intended as a threat directed towards anyone in particular, and isn't (or at least the escalation bit) something that I ever anticipate having to pursue. I have in the past and will in the future report students' plagiarism to their professors. Every professor who I have approached has understood the issue, and has addressed the issues appropriately. I understand that some people have concerns about any sort of off-wiki consequences for on-wiki actions, but when Wikipedia is edited in the context of an academic assignment plagiarism should absolutely be taken every bit as seriously as it is for a 'real-world' academic assignment. If professors choose to fail, honor code, or otherwise punish students who have blatantly plagiarized, then I have no problem with it - students understand plagiarism, and if they choose to commit blatant plagiarism anyway, they deserve whatever punishment they get. If they choose not to do so, then as long as the professors take action to ensure that the plagiarism doesn't recur on Wikipedia, I have no problem with that either. (And I understand that due to the privacy policies at most schools, I'll never be made aware of whether or not a student is punished. I'm completely fine with that, and would be dismayed if I was made aware.)

When I suggested that I would have no problem escalating beyond the level of an individual professor, I did not anticipate ever having to do so. I still don't anticipate ever having to do so. I literally cannot imagine approaching a professor with conclusive evidence that one of their students has plagiarized work and not having them take some sort of action. However, if there is ever an education program class that has a massive issue with plagiarism and an unresponsive professor, then I will absolutely consider contacting other people at the participant university, including the professor's departmenthead, if (and only if) it appears that that is the best way to mitigate damage to Wikipedia and to the education program. I do not anticipate ever having to do this. If a situation arose where I did do this, I would bring the issue here for discussion first. I view this situation - which I never anticipate happening - as analogous to contacting the abuse department at an ISP or the network administrator at an K-12 school with evidence of abuse of their network (both of which are things that I have seen done on Wikipedia with regularity,) or analogous to publicly calling out paid editing shills (which is also something that happens regularly, and not infrequently results in negative international news coverage directed towards the shills.) And to reiterate: I cannot imagine this situation ever actually occurring.

The damage that will occur to the education program if the perception of Wikipedia's broader community continues to be that education program participants are unresponsive to the concerns of the broader community will be incalculable. I think the education program has the potential to be massively beneficial both for academia and for Wikipedia, and if its potential is limited because Wikipedia's broader community views it as a liability and places severe restrictions on it (such as sandbox-only editing, which has recently been suggested on this page,) I'll view it as a tragedy. One way to mitigate this perception is for education program participants to make clear that issues like blatant plagiarism are not acceptable, and will be dealt with strongly. If my words or this particular situation drive away one or more professors from the education program, that's unfortunate, and I would regret it. But professor recruitment is not an issue with the education program at present - any professor who drops out of the program can be replaced with two more next semester. At this stage in the program, it's infinitely more important that the education program is run as a tight - and well accepted - ship, then as a gigantic ship. Kevin Gorman (talk) 21:15, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

• I just became aware of this noticeboard, and I'm pleased that is exists, because I have been having many of the same concerns that some of the other editors here have been pointing out, about class projects where the students appear not to understand some important things, and where it can be frustrating to try to explain it to them. Let me add an observation about the question of to what extent we should regard student editors the same as other new editors. I agree with some comments that we should avoid WP:BITE, but I think there's another side of the coin. WP:OWN also applies, and so no class should ever expect that "their" page will be off-limits to the rest of the editing community. --Tryptofish (talk) 02:32, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• I'm bewildered about what's happening here. People are pointing out legitimate concerns, only to be met with an attitude from the teacher and coordinator that suggests they believe they ought not to be questioned. I asked Jonathan here whether teachers or Wikipedians should clean up student plagiarism, and received no response. Instead he told me off for my previous questions to Grant. Here is my exchange with Grant so people can judge for themselves (and this is the only contact I have ever had with him):

• Nov 23: I told him that I'd been reverted when removing inappropriate student edits, and had found plagiarism in another article on his course. No response, though he did edit elsewhere.
• Nov 23: I posted on the course talk page advising students about the importance of in-text attribution when quoting or closely paraphrasing. No response.
• Nov 26: I told him I'd found more plagiarism on his course. This time I emailed him to alert him to the post. He responded here advising me to deal with it myself, saying he does not check for plagiarism, and that he would give students an F if someone else pointed it out to him.
• Nov 26: I explained that I didn't want to name the students, and advised him to make sure they know about the importance of in-text attribution. No response.
• Dec 7: I alerted Grant to the discussion here. No response.
• Dec 10: I followed up a post from Kevin asking that he (Grant) be more proactive, and again suggesting he stress to his students the importance of in-text attribution. No response.

If the education program wants us to treat them like any other Wikipedians, they have to behave that way. That means sticking to the policies, acting promptly when plagiarism or other serious issues are pointed out, and interacting with other Wikipedians. There can't be a separate enclave with special privileges. Jonathan, I'd appreciate a response to my question. Do you believe that the teachers or Wikipedians should look for and clean up plagiarism in student articles? I'm not talking about that particular course now, but for any of the courses you coordinate. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:49, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

User:SlimVirgin, my intention was not to tell you off, my apologies if my comments came across that way. I was merely trying to alleviate some of the pressure being placed on the professor. In terms of your other question, do I believe that all editors should abide by Wikipedia policies (and students by academic policies), of course my answer is yes. I am a huge fan of Wikipedia and what it stands for (that's why I volunteer) and wish that I could find more time to edit and grow as a community member (perhaps someday). Do I think that teachers should be responsible for correcting all student mistakes moved to the mainspace? Not an easy answer. We are teaching the profs to have their students work in sandboxes and correct their work there before it is moved into the mainspace. Not every professor has time for that process. Furthermore, the EP is not directing professors how to run their classes, we are merely providing guidelines. Ideally the students would be doing the work, and we are doing our best to encourage this. The system will not be perfect, and Wikipedians will get stuck with some (in some instances too much) of the work. While I can understand the frustration, another part of me sees this as just part of the wiki process. But perhaps that's just me being idealistic. Anyhow, it's late, hope that response was decent enough for now. One thing I'll mention quickly, keep in mind that the Wikimedia Foundation's EP is no longer the only game in town. The Association for Psychological Science, the American Sociological Association, and soon the National Communication Association will all have their own independent education programs. This is great recruitment for Wikipedia. With lots of new profs joining the system, established Wikipedians are going to have to figure out a way to deal with the unique challenges associated with class Wikipedia projects. There will be frustrations with newbies, and those of us working closely with the profs will do our best to encourage them to continue their double-duty (keep this in mind, course content + Wikipedia training... who's calling profs lazy?). Constructive strategies need to be advanced, and strategies that are pushing people away, however well-intentioned (i.e. see above), should be reconsidered, in my opinion. Jaobar (talk) 07:11, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Any collaboration between academia and community is, by necessity, a two way street. Both parties need to feel like their needs are being respected and that their grievances are being listened to. Currently, a large number of Wikipedians feel like those involved in the academic side of the education program are not respecting their needs, or listening to their grievances. You are worried about the retention of people like professors who are being attracted in through these programs; a lot of people here are worried about the retention of long time Wikipedians who are having to shoulder large amounts of the burden these programs can generate. Some people are going to be pushed away from Wikipedia over this no matter what happens; almost all strategies that any of us are advancing will involve some number people being pushed away from Wikipedia. Some of my strategies and approaches may mean that we retain slightly fewer professors than we otherwise would've. Some of your strategies and approaches will mean that we retain fewer well-established Wikipedians than we otherwise would've. Everything is a balancing act. Right now, I'm a lot more concerned about strategies that drive away Wikipedians than drive away professors, because for one thing, it's a hell of a lot easier to recruit professors than talented Wikipedians. I would ask you to step back and reconsider a lot of what you have said in your public comments on this board. Kevin Gorman (talk) 07:43, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

A good point about wanting to maintain Wikipedians, though I'm still confused why 'mopping up' is perceived as a waste of time. Perhaps someone can explain to me why that is, I'm looking to learn. Jaobar (talk) 19:43, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Because if one sees errors, plagiarism, poor formatting, etc. in an article one cares about, and you think the person making the edits has harmed the article and doesn't even care about the same Wikipedian culture they are now an "invader" to your culture and value system and it can pain one. One can now feel like one has been punished to and compelled to do completely unnecessary and painful to look at grunt work. Biosthmors (talk) 19:51, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Requiring students to use sandboxes

There seems to be a lot of agreement above that students should use sandboxes. One of the brochures for the program (here) suggests that students move their work out of the sandbox as soon as possible, shortly after they start writing it. I'd like to propose that this advice be changed.

Even experienced Wikipedians often work in sandboxes, and if it's a contentious article we might ask for consensus before moving it in place. It would be a good idea to regard all student essays as contentious in the same way, and to ask that they wait for a Wikipedian to move it into the encyclopaedia. As well as protecting Wikipedia, this would have the added benefit of not requiring them to release their work, which is something we should definitely not be forcing on them. Wikipedia functions on the basis that we're all here as free actors, and that if we choose to edit, we know our work is being released. But the students are not free actors, and are not choosing this for themselves, so editing direct to mainspace is neither in their interests nor in Wikipedia's. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:24, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

With many of the professors who I have worked with (or am in the process of working with,) interaction with the community is one of the explicit goals of the assignment. They understand that Wikipedia is a community of practice, and they want their students to actively engage with it wherever possible. Classes I work with do generally require students to use sandboxes if they are creating new articles until they are in 'good enough' shape to go live (in the same way I personally start my new articles.) Students in classes I advise are generally given the option of sandboxing work or working directly in main space if the articles they are working on already exist. I am also utterly perplexed by your suggestion that all student assignments should be regarded as contentious. Proportionally, very few student assignments are contentious. Some certainly are, but the vast majority of student assignments go by without a problem.

I definitely support students frequently working in sandboxes until their work is of mainspace quality, and would definitely advise all professors to advise the use of sandboxes until that point. But I don't support a categorical requirement that students work only in sandboxes, and frankly, if one was implemented for the official education program I would stop participating in the official education program and yet keep doing the exact same educational outreach at Berkeley that I've been doing all along. (I would strongly consider supporting a forcible sandboxing requirement for classes that have proven problematic, but only for classes that have already proven problematic. Although now that I think about it, I guess I'd consider supporting one for articles covered by WP:MEDRS, too...)

Also - every professor I have ever worked with has said, before assigning a Wikipedia based assignment, "If you're uncomfortable releasing your work under a free license, come talk to me after class and we'll work something else out." I can't say that's a universal among program participants, but it's something that is a universal among classes I work with. I'm not sure what you mean by saying that "Wikipedia functions on the basis that we know our work is being released" in this context - surely, students are at least as likely to be aware that they are releasing their work under a free license as the average new editor is, even if their professors don't explicitly mention it, since they go through the same signup process and see the same disclaimers on average page that new non-student Wikipedians do.

I also object to the clear distinction you draw between students and Wikipedians. I've participated in several education program classes, and I do a hell of a lot of other editing besides. When I rewrote most of Universal v. Reimerdes as part of a classroom assignment, I had already been editing Wikipedia for the greater part of a year iirc, mostly in a non academic context. Would you say that I should have waited for a "real Wikipedian" to approve of my edits to that page before making them? Kevin Gorman (talk) 00:43, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Kevin, I think you're an exception in many ways. Most of the students I've looked are struggling with these assignments (I suspect out of boredom as much as anything else), and have little or no experience as Wikipedians, and nor do their teachers. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:53, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Before I weigh in on Slim's proposal below, I'll add some general here. We keep hearing that students are or should be no different than any other "newbie", but they are. Most new editors begin slowly, adding a piece here or there, and we can educate them as we go, before too much damage is done. In the case of students, they often work in sandbox and then WHAM, a few days before term-end, the article (with no prior notice in most cases) is hit with a huge edit that typically comes from a sandbox and contains typically plagiarism, copyvio, poor sourcing, poor grammar, off-topic content, poor layout, previous correctly cited and written text removed in favor of poorly cited poorly written text, the works. Trying to educate a student all at once on a mess like the typical-- knowing the student will be gone in a few days-- places an unnecessary burden on the established editor. Usually there is only a sentence or two salvageable, but one is "bitey" if one just reverts the whole darn mess. The established editor instead has to spend up to 12 hours checking, removing, explaining on talk -- all to end up with just a sentence or two of new text. The notion that students evolve like regular editors and should be treated the same as any other newbie misses these points. A sandbox proposal has to deal with the problem of being hit with a huge wall of poorly written poorly sourced plagiarized text all at once. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:05, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

{{ec}I would agree that I'm am unusual, as far as students go, but I'm not the only person who has been in a similar situation, and any proposal intended to cover everyone has to cover unusual cases, too.

Have you looked through some of the articles listed at User:Brianwc? (I keep mentioning him just because he runs one of the more successful classes I can think of off the top of my head.) Would you agree that most (or all) of the articles listed on that page are of appropriate quality to be in Wikipedia's main space? Almost all of those articles were written by students without any previous engagement with Wikipedia. Some of them were sandboxed and some weren't, but even those that were sandboxed were pretty much all moved live without the feedback of a 'real' Wikipedian. That's 147+ pretty high quality articles in an area of Wikipedia that previously was under-covered (american internet law) that were created by students without pre-approval by 'real' Wikipedians. As far as I know, no student in his class has ever run in to any significant problem with a terribly below par article, an article getting AfD'ed, plagiarism, or anything of that nature. And most of his students prefer the assignment to a traditional term paper - he runs anonymous surveys after each class that look in to this, among other things.

In many ways, I probably see the most successful results of the education program, and you probably see the least successful. I think that we should both keep in mind that our experiences are not representative of the program as a whole, and that the real average experience is probably something in between what I perceive and what you perceive. Certainly, some classes run in to massive numbers of problems, and some run perfectly. But it seems to me that it would make a lot of sense to focus any proposals on classes that are on the less successful end of the program, instead of making generalized proposals that would effect all classes equally.

I have some instructional design materials used for past Wikipedia assignments that I think you would find interesting to look at, and that I think might make you feel differently about (at least parts of) the education program. I have permission to share them, but not permission to release them under a free license as posting them publicly on Wikipedia would require. Would you like me to email you copies of them? Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:13, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Kevin, could you track down the figures for the number of education-program students who have become regular Wikipedians? You said they existed somewhere. I have no idea where to find them. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:01, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll ping someone at WMF about them. I'm pretty sure I've seen them before, but don't know where they are. But to point out again: that's also not the primary purpose of the GEP, from my viewpoint - and I'm pretty sure it's not a primary purpose of the GEP from their viewpoint, either. I'll ask someone from the education team to drop by here and explain the purpose of the GEP is from their viewpoint. (I'll also write up it's purpose from my viewpoint and from the viewpoint of the educators that I work with at some point in the next day or two, and post it here.) Kevin Gorman (talk) 02:23, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that would be appreciated. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 02:57, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I asked a similar question a few months ago, and was told unequivocally that editor retention is not the primary goal for the education program. I would be surprised if we are getting any significant amount of students staying on as productive editors; it's not zero percent, obviously, but I doubt it's anything like high enough to be worth it if that were the only goal. I'll let someone from the GEP answer for the WMF, but from my point of view the goals include adding quality material, particularly in underserved areas such as public policy, and increasing understanding of Wikipedia in the academic community. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:19, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I pinged Sage. He'll be stopping by this thread on Monday with some additional details. Kevin Gorman (talk) 06:30, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I've explained a bit in the "two questions" section above. I will try to find recent data on student retention (which is not a focus of the program) and professor retention (which is a goal).--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:28, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Proposal

Specifically, the proposal is that students editing as part of the education program be asked to write their material in sandboxes. If they're editing part of an existing article, they can copy and paste that article into the sandbox and work on it there. Teachers are asked to provide a grade based on the student's changes to the sandbox version. This would mean that plagiarism and poor quality work would be entirely for the teacher to deal with.

Once the course is over (or once the material has been graded), if the students want to, they can ask that their work be moved into mainspace by a Wikipedian – who would say no if any plagiarism or poor use of sources is found, without having to search to find it all – and at that point if the students want to pursue DYK, GA or FA, that would be fine. With the course over and the article in mainspace, they'd be working on it as regular Wikipedians. The process would provide a good transition for them, from students forced to be here, to Wikipedians choosing to stay.

If it's an existing article, they could ask on the article's talk page whether there are objections to moving in the new version and wait for someone there to do it. Or the education program could set up a board similar to the one we use for paid advocates, where students ask that their work be moved over. This would mean the students would not be forced to release their work, and could request its deletion from their userspace when the course ends. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 00:50, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd be in favor of this, per my post above explaining the problems with these huge edits from sandbox, with the caveat that they should STILL notify the article talk page in advance that they are working in sandbox. It is the burden of going through an entire, usually faulty, sandbox article that is overwhelming. If we knew in advance they were working in sandbox, we could guide them, it would be a better experience for everyone, and we may end up with more salvageable, correctly sourced and written text. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:03, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)For reasons I outlined above, if a requirement like this was put in place, I would stop participating in the 'formal' education program, and just do educational outreach on my own. For the classes that I personally work with, this would degrade the value proposition of the assignment for both the professors and students from their perspectives. I categorically oppose any requirement that treats student work differently from non-student work that applies to all educational assignments equally, although I would strongly support requirements (even much more strict requirements than this) that were applied only to classes that already had problems. Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:13, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

(ec with Kevin) The main change is that the students would be asked never to edit mainspace at all since I believe (campus ambassadors correct me if I'm wrong) that the advice given to professors new to the program is currently to use sandboxes initially.

SlimVirgin's proposal is consistent with the view that student edits to mainspace are on balance negative, in terms of both quality of articles and burden on editors. I am not convinced that this is true, but if it were true I would support this and would in fact have a hard time supporting the EP at all. I think this is the core issue, because if the edits are a net positive, we should work on ways to improve the positive and decrease the negative edits.

I think there is a risk of selection bias with critics of the EP who have encountered poor student work. Imagine someone whose only exposure to IP edits is vandal reversion; such an editor is more likely to support banning IP edits. Sandy in particular has medical and psychological articles on her watchlist and those appear to be areas in which students are doing very poorly. (Sandy, I'm not suggesting you haven't considered that point; I'm using you just as an example.) Someone whose only exposure to student edits was one of the more successful classes would be unlikely to come to this noticeboard to ask what could be done to restrict student editing.

Before we determine if a restriction such as SlimVirgin proposes is worth it, we have to try to decide (as we try with IP edits) whether the student edits are a net benefit to Wikipedia. Sandy and Colin have pointed out flaws in the analysis linked above: it's not easy to determine how much work is needed to revert an edit, so quantification of the burden is hard; and for medical articles and psychology articles, added text with a technical-looking reference may not be reverted because it's not recognized as a bad edit if no qualified people are watching the article. Pointing out that these mistakes in the analysis are possible doesn't allow us to fall back on anecdotal support for our positions, though. I would like us to really try to come to a consensus on whether the net of all student edits in a given semester is a positive or negative for Wikipedia. It seems to me that has to be the first step.

(Added after ec): I agree with Kevin that I would absolutely support this method, or stronger methods, for classes known to have problems. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:21, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Mike, I spent many hours tracking down the plagiarism for just a handful of articles on the course I mentioned above. It is extremely time-consuming. Some students are copy-pasting from websites, then going back later to tweak the writing a little so that if you do a Google search for the whole sentence it doesn't appear. And when it comes to books not previewable on Amazon or Google, you have to get them via inter-library loan. Very few Wikipedians would care enough to do this (and I hope anyone who has spent a lot of time on issues like this sends a bill to the university).

The work I did doesn't show up anywhere, and I suspect there's a huge amount of this going on. Bad edits appear on a Wikipedian's watchlist on an article they care about. They see it's education-program related, and therefore "protected." That means they're hesitant to revert outright, which is what would normally happen. And so they spend hours or days looking to see what can be salvaged, getting increasingly annoyed with the program and the Foundation. So what starts off as an outreach/editor retention program ends up discouraging the editors we already have. None of this is quantifiable. Necessarily, we have to rely on anecdotes. But there comes a point when anecdotes become data. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 01:46, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

@ Mike: just as the law class pointed out by Kevin is probably on the better end of the spectrum of student editing (see my post to Kevin on my talk [14] about the law articles he asked us to look at, above), Mike is right that what I encounter is probably on the worst end. Every Blooming Psych Class out there thinks that editing some obscure bizarre symptom of a tic disorder is sexy, but the reason those articles are stubs is because there is very little that can be said about klazomania, for example. Oh, gee-- compulsive shouting-- that sounds like a fun article! Then they find there are no good sources, so they load it up with junk. It looks better in the end than what was there, but what was there before was brief but accurate. This is happening across all psych articles, though-- I just happen to get the most bizarre because my watchlist is heavily weighted to Tourette syndrome. If the blooming profs would just ask, or get their students to tag article talk, we could point them to good sources in advance. See more on my talk, response to Kevin. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 02:04, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I had a look at your talk page and agree that something targeted at either classes with problems or MEDRS/PSYCH classes (or both) might be a reasonable approach. What that something is, I don't know, but I agree sandboxes are a good suggestion. Like Kevin, though, I'd like to let the successes keep going as they are. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 04:11, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I find myself agreeing with a lot of what SlimVirgin is saying, and experiencing lots of deja vu (as it appears does Sandy). However, I'm not keen on the totally-sandboxed approach. Part of the appeal of Wikipedia is instant publication to a huge audience. That's also the problem, though. I think it might also encourage students to entirely replace articles or sections rather than incorporate their changes into it (which often isn't a bad thing if the existing material is poor, but isn't the wiki way). It doesn't encourage the students to interact with other editors as they are isolated in their sandbox in userspace. Not that they do much interacting already, though. This means they aren't really working on a multi-user collaborative wiki, but merely writing a private article using some weird wikilinked markup language.

I don't think there are sufficient Wikipedians to act as gatekeepers for the publication step, nor would many of them have the resources (access to sources), time or inclination to do the role. Certainly in psych the ratio of students to wikipedians is very high, and if they cite some Canadian student textbook as their source then the chances anyone else has access to the source is essentially zero. I think most Wikipedians with standards would be unhappy about unleashing unpolished student prose on the world, and so would feel obliged to copyedit, wikilink and double-check the sources and possibly more. It would be quite a time-consuming task and one most Wikipedians would rather do on subjects they wrote themselves, or when working with a real Wikipedian who is requesting peer-review and actually intends to stick around for a while. In fact, it would be like a Wikipedian turning up at Peer Review with something they'd written, and instead of being guided into how they could improve the article and steered towards a better approach, they would then bugger off and expect the reviewer to finish the job for them.

We need to come back to the fundamental purpose of Wikipedia: to be an encyclopaedia, and the fundamental design of Wikipedia: a collaborative wiki. Wikipedia is not homework. The education program, if it is to serve WP's purpose, needs to align student edits and teaching supervision with that purpose and design. It seems clear to me the idea that volunteer Wikipedians would engage with the students in some synergistic way is busted. At the extreme, we have had classes who expect Wikipedian's to "mark" the work and thought that edit-retention would be a groovy way to judge whether a student had done good work, without the prof lifting a finger. I hope that's gone now. But I don't see evidence that supervisors are swiftly checking for plagiarism, nor that they would even know how to revert an article if they found some. It isn't trivial sometimes if left for a while and subsequent edits have taken place. If it is the case that Mike's team's analysis of student work/burden didn't check for plagiarism or MEDRS sourcing then I continue to think the jury is out on whether this programme is delivering any benefit to WP. One assumption I see repeated is that if the student added something that wasn't revertible then it must have improved the article. But sometimes all the student added was noise.

I don't really see how the student edit system can work unless the teacher and other supervisors are also Wikipedians. They need to be swiftly checking for plagiarism, for quality sourcing, for appropriateness of text. They need to know what makes a good article and what makes one suck. They need to have some personal appreciation for how to develop the existing wiki text into a better work. They need to know how to collaborate with other Wikipedians. Unless that happens, we've got the weird situation where the teachers are asking the students to do something they are personally incapable of doing, never mind doing to a higher standard so as to be able to judge. -- Colin°^Talk 09:32, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to correct one misapprehension. Colin is right that the quality and burden assessments have limitations, but I think it's not accurate to say that if a student edit is not reverted it's assumed to be positive. The quality assessment was a static assessment of the state of the article after the student's last edit. The content added by the student was evaluated to the extent that it was part of the article. If the student edits were poorly written or irrelevant the article would be expected to score lower. Assessors weren't required to check for plagiarism; when I assessed I occasionally did check, but usually did not (I never found any). I doubt if any assessors were MEDRS knowledgeable, so edits that violated MEDRS may have been scored as positive. For the burden assessment, every word of every student edit was looked at to see if it was beneficial as well as to see if it was reverted. I know little about MEDRS so I asked at WP:MED about some edits I thought might be in scope and got opinions on how to score those edits. However, there was no checking for plagiarism.

I think the limitations of the assessments are (a) they won't detect any plagiarism that might exist; (b) for complex cases they can't tell how much effort other editors put in to clean up student work; (c) they have difficulty with specialized topics such as medicine and psychology where an average editor can't easily assess the value of an edit. Of these, (a) is potentially the worst, since it is undetected, and I think we should try to estimate how widespread a problem it is. I've been thinking about SlimVirgin's comments on her experiences with finding and correcting plagiarism, and I think it would be worth checking a larger range of student edits, from the same sample set used in the burden and quality analysis, to see how much plagiarism was added there. If that analysis finds a significant amount of plagiarism or close paraphrasing I agree we have an issue that we have to fix. I'll try to set aside some time over the next couple of weeks to do a little of this analysis and will report back here. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:11, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

To truly check, you have to go back to the first edit where the text was added, which might be back in sandbox somewhere. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:25, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Mike, sorry my comment about the "not revertible == improvement" wasn't meant to be a comment on your team's quality analysis but was unfortunately positioned in my paragraph that it would look that way. I still think there was a tendency to equate more text = more comprehensive which isn't necessarily so. Wrt MEDRS, there's nothing special about that guideline so am puzzled if some of the problems medical wikipedian's see aren't widely repeated. I tend to think of MEDRS as mostly the application of WP:WEIGHT to a domain. Of all the kooky ideas people come up with wrt a subject, which ones deserve mentioning in this article? PubMed is wonderful but it means that folk have access to the primary literature and basic research in medicine from which essentially any conclusion or POV can be supported. Add to that the fact that academic writing (which the students are learning, and very often are told to practice on WP) cites the primary literature and frowns on citing the secondary literature (because it indicates the research wasn't thorough and the student writing and thoughts would not then be original). Add further that the undergraduate students are essentially ignorant of their subject. Mix together and you get a machine that generates superficially worthwhile text that when inserted improves its score. Then consider that often the added text is already present on Wikipedia in a better place in some other article. We end up with a higher score when in fact the reader is worse off. Colin°^Talk 19:49, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: Colin's second paragraph, a case in point: this Canadian psych class that ended in April. Most of the students were working in sandboxes; most of the sandboxes are still there, but haven't been touched by anyone. Will anyone ever mainspace those pages? I won't, because a) I don't know the topic, so can't easily figure out what material should be added to mainspace, and b) most of the sources are offline, and where I can access them they'd be incredibly time-consuming to check. I recently mainspaced another student article on a topic I'm at least somewhat familiar with and with online sources, but it still took a lot of time to spotcheck and clean up, and even now it's not a very good article. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:57, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Remember too that the person inserting the text takes responsibility for it meeting our policy requirements. That's a heck of a burden that I certainly wouldn't want to pick up unless these students were laying golden eggs. Colin°^Talk 19:54, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I think you have it exactly right. It's ridiculous to have teachers asking students to do something they're incapable of doing themselves. Everything else flows from that, and until someone gets a handle on this the psychology articles will continue on their downward spiral towards ultimate crapiness. Malleus Fatuorum 20:29, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

• In response to Kevin's and Colin's concerns, we could modify the proposal so that the students themselves move their articles over, if they want to, when the course has ended. This would mean:

• no live publishing during the course;
• students start new articles in userspace, and if editing an existing article copy and paste it over;
• teachers assess the changes made to the sandbox;
• when the course is over (or when the article has been graded), the students can decide what to do with it; they can request deletion or if they believe it's policy compliant can move it into mainspace;
• students moving material over when a course has ended are doing so as regular Wikipedians, not as part of the education program; they alone are responsible for their edits at that point, and we treat those edits as we would any other.

SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:02, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Assessment of sources in articles edited by students in spring 2012 semester

I've started a student source assessment page. I've included instructions for how to add assessments, and done a few to make it clear what the approach is. I plan to work on this as I have time but would appreciate any feedback on the format and approach, and would also appreciate any help -- this is going to take me weeks if I do it on my own.

I'm including an analysis of all the sources in the given articles, regardless of who added each source. This is to avoid a subsequent debate along the lines of "well, the students only copied text from 2% of sources, and I bet that's better than the existing ratio". I'm only going to be checking sources available online, but I think this will constitute a large fraction of the work done. If anyone is able to check any of the offline sources, of course that would be very helpful.

So far I have found two errors, one by a student and one by an experienced Wikipedian. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:41, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Doing your source analysis on the existing text and existing sources will be an impossibly difficult task IMO. Also bear in mind for many subjects (e.g., psych) the "existing text" is heavily contaminated by previous student exercises. Limiting your sources to those only available freely online is a fatal flaw and likely to greatly underestimate the extend of the problem. The very fact that the students pick hard academic subjects, edit stubs nobody is watchlisting, and use paywalled or offline sources means that the copyvio issue is not being picked up by volunteer editors -- we need to shift what huge burden back to the educators. The question is whether these invited editors are improving Wikipedia and/or how we can ensure they do. I don't think that comparing student changes with existing material is helpful, or comparing students with newbies. A lot of Wikipedia is crap. We don't want more of the same crap. We want them to make Wikipedia better.

I'd be happy to help look at student additions + sources for medical subjects for a small sample of articles, provided my wikifriends can get me the sources. I'd also want to include in any new analysis whether the "new material" was really new and whether a new article was justified and encyclopaedic. Colin°^Talk 14:16, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm limiting my own analysis to resources available online, but if others have access to offline sources it would of course be better to look at those too. Thanks for the offer of help -- I will go through the list and suggest a couple of articles on your talk page.

I've been thinking all day about your comment that it's not helpful to compare students with the usual kind of new editors, and I'm going to disagree. (Sandy (somewhere else on this page) was right to say that there are important differences -- I agree with her basic point.) Consider the debate that re-emerges peridodically about IP editors -- should we forbid IP editing? Vandalism is far more often by IPs than by registered editors, but IPs as a group do more harm than good. We continue to allow IP editing because the community believes (a) it's important to uphold "anyone can edit", and (b) despite clear evidence of damage, IPs do more harm than good. I am concerned that if we are finally able to agree on some quantification of both the quality that students provide and the burden they inflict on the community, we will then disagree about whether the benefit is worth the price. I think the more data we have about how students compare with most editors, the better position we will be in to decide how best to engage with them. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:01, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Students are not the same as any other new editor because: (a) they are forced to be here, unlike anyone else; (b) they are forced to release their work, unlike anyone else; (c) the only interest they have in their article topic often lies in the course credit, rather than in the topic itself; (d) they have little or no interest in Wikipedia, and any nurturing of them as new editors is likely to be time ill spent; (e) they have been made to feel part of a privileged group that does not need to follow policy/best practice. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:32, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

"Our data shows that students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent" and other nonsense

Sorry the following text is so long. The two formal student analyses are given so much weight by the Education Program that I think it is worth investigating them seriously. I hope you can bear with me.

I've been investigating the impressive soundbite: "Our data shows that students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent." which is listed at the Common misconceptions about the Wikipedia Education Program as a fact rather than a misconception. But it is the latter. The figure comes from the Public Policy Initiative assessment. Their results are shown here: Student Contributions to Wikipedia. They summarise this as

• Over the course of the project a total of 140 articles were randomly selected from the WikiProject United States Public Policy Course tab and assessed. 84 were pre-existing and 56 were new.
• There was 64% increase in all articles, the average score went up 5.8 points (9.0 before, 14.8 after)
• There was a 50% increase in pre-existing articles. The average score went up 4.8 points (9.7 before, 14.5 after)
• New articles had an average score of 15.4 which translates to an average B rating in the Wikipedia scale.

The exercise was repeated for Spring 2012 United States and Canada students(results here) with a different set of student work. They summarise this as

• On average, existing articles improved by 2.94 points—from 11.26 to 14.20—while for new articles students averaged a score of 13.55.
• In rough practical terms, the average class started from either nonexistent articles or (typically) weak Start-class articles, and ended up with C-class articles or strong Start-class articles.
• Altogether (new and existing articles combined), on average students improved articles by about 6.5 points, which is 0.7 points more than the average improvements made by students in the Public Policy Initiative.

Scoring

The articles were assessed on a point scale here that looked at Comprehensiveness (1-10), Sourcing (0-6), Neutrality (0-3), Readability (0-3), Formatting (0-2) and Illustrations (0-2). The total score can range from 1-26.

These scores are essentially subjective though there is guidance on what sort of score would be expected for each metric category. However, there is a tendency to bump up the score for any perceived shift in an area. Adding a point for Comprehensiveness when actually the increase in topic covering was negligible or even unchanged (just more noise). The score for Sourcing might improve because the added text was sourced but overall the article was still in a poor shape and its sourcing score should have remained. Adding one image to an unillustrated article could shift the score from 0 to 1 when in fact it should still have scored 0 on the scale. This natural bias to want to indicate the change on a crude scale can only be avoided by having the pre and post articles reviewed by different people. And since there is a big variation in scores by the reviewers, one would need a very large number of reviewers to average the results.

The articles are reviewed by non-subject experts. It is very difficult for a non-expert to judge the comprehensiveness, sourcing and neutrality of a topic. This is highlighted by some of the scoring for medical articles.

Since the scores are looking at different aspects of an article, adding them all together produces quite an arbitrary quality score. A different score could arise by a different weighting of the various scores or by including other metrics. For example, neutrality is a score point but not generally an issue with many of these articles. Far more likely an issue is WP:WEIGHT (which is part of NPOV) which concerns the balance of the article wrt topic issues. Are we writing too much about one aspect and not enough about others? The assessment didn't look at plagiarism which is a huge problem and very hard to analyse with out good access to the sources and a lot of time. The assessment didn't look at Wikipedia's comprehensiveness on the topic outside of the one article.

Looking at the raw data for Spring 2012 United States and Canada students one can see a large variation student improvement scores depending on what they start with. It is very easy to score a high delta when working on a stub or start class article but much harder for C or B class articles. None of the students worked on GA, A or FA class articles. The average point improvement ranged from 4 down to 0.5 depending on what class you begin with.

Results

For existing articles, the PPI assessment found a 4.8 point improvement and US&Canada found a 2.94 point improvement. However, all I think one can honestly retrieve from this is that both are above 0. If many students had picked C or B class articles to begin with, then the improvement would probably be less than 1 point on average. If they had all expanded stubs and starts, the improvement might be 50% higher. If the scoring system had been stricter or differently weighted or included other factors, the numbers would shift again.

For new articles, it makes absolutely no sense to compare total scores. Of the 26 points, half (sourcing, neutrality, readability, formatting) make no sense for a non-existent article. The other points (comprehensiveness, illustrations) could be rated at 0 for non-existent articles though this rather assumes the information wasn't on Wikipedia anywhere before the article was created. Which in fact is a big problem for new student articles and article expansion, and something the assessment didn't look at. Therefore the statements that there was a 5.8 point and 6.5 point improvement in all articles seen by these two assessments is nonsense. The former figure is behind the "students improve Wikipedia articles an average of 64 percent" which is a mathematically naive calculation totally at the mercy of the mix of new and existing articles in the dataset: the percentage improvement tends towards infinity as you remove existing articles from the dataset.

I agree that "percent improvement" doesn't make much sense with this assessment. I'll remove it from that "common misconceptions" page. (Even beyond the mix of new and existing articles, quality isn't measured linearly by that scale; the early points are easy, while moving a few points up at the high end may actually be a much bigger contributions. From my perspective, the assessments are mainly useful for a) figuring out whether or not articles improved, and b) getting a rough, high level view of how much student work improves articles. The calculated numbers (average improvement and so on) aren't straightforward to interpret, but the shifting histograms for existing articles (and considered separately, the final quality histogram for new articles, to show the quality distribution of the new articles students write) tell the story pretty clearly.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:49, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Conclusion

These analyses have essentially concluded that students wrote stuff about a topic. When expanding missing or short articles, they could write unreadable, inaccurate, unsourced text and still improve their score. When expanding long articles, they could have written "Jason is gay" and not changed the score. Their text could be completely plagiarised and still improve the score. Their "new material" could already be present on Wikipedia and still improve the score.

I think the Education Program should be asked to remove their "improved 64 percent" statement as mathematical nonsense, and the other numbers should be treated with scepticism. Further analysis of the student edits is required:

• Was the text copy/paste or otherwise plagiarised.
• Was the "new material" actually new for Wikipedia.
• Is this new article actually encyclopaedic or just a student essay.

I am concerned that the student work appears most effective when the create new articles or expand stubs. Sooner or later, the psych undergrads are going on run out of ways of entitling their essay on the Big 5 or colour perception as a "new article". The effect is a fragmentation and duplication of information on Wikipedia. The emphasis on a self-contained piece of writing goes against the hyperlinked collective work that makes Wikipedia strong. That the students also fail to interact with other editors or join projects exacerbates the silo effect. Add to this the problems MathewTownsend notes above when trying to AfD these unneeded duplicate articles. For an example of these issues see Talk:Myoclonic epilepsy#Big problems with this article where student edits would have been scored very highly on the above assessments but in fact had extensive copyvios, duplicated existing better material or were completely off-topic. Colin°^Talk 13:48, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Contribution analysis aside, it's pretty clear from experience that it's much easier for newcomers to make tangible, unambiguous improvements in areas where Wikipedia has poor or non-existent coverage. It's important, of course, for the topic to actually be poorly covered rather than covered well under a different title or a section of a broader article; to that end, the training and guidance material for both students and professors emphasizes the importance of exploring Wikipedia's related coverage beforehand to make sure students are duplicating what's already been covered, and this is part of what many Wikipedia Ambassadors do, helping the class figure out where their efforts can fit into the project. (That's also one reason why professor retention is a key goal; as a professor becomes more and more familiar with the coverage in the area their students will work on, he or she can better guide students to areas where Wikipedia really does need expanded coverage.) However, there is something of a benefit even when students somehow find a new place to add material on a well-covered topic: it points out the difficulty of finding that coverage, and lets us improve our redirects and internal linking. (Not that this makes it worth all the effort, but if students aren't finding what they wanted to write about, some readers are probably also failing to find it when they go searching.)--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Hm. I don't know. We could beat ourselves up about poor search results or redirects but I suspect students just aren't looking. Take the Myoclonic epilepsy example. Previously the article was a stub like this. Now myoclonic epilepsy is just a category in a hierarchical system of organising epilepsy disorders, not a disorder one actually gets diagnosed with. So there's not a huge amount to say about it. The students repeated existing work on myoclonus, progressive myoclonus epilepsies and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. The first two are wikilinked from the existing tiny article, so there's not much excuse for not spotting them. The latter was completely irrelevant to the topic and has its own article -- not hard to find either. Wrt to plagiarism in that example, the student thought that by citing the source that was sufficient to get away with just copying the material. So clearly the three students working on that article weren't really prepared to work on it. Is that a problem with that class or just those students? I certainly don't think we can blame ourselves for it or that it points out flaws in the existing material and linking. Colin°^Talk 16:24, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that students should not be encouraged to write new entries without the requisite knowledge (which should also be known by their professors). I wonder how often a professor gives an insightful comment at a student-article AfD, by the way? One good thing. ASMR/Autonomous sensory meridian response was getting hits despite not existing.[15][16] Now thanks to a student's interest (and my help) we have a (probably) OK article that has been getting over 700 hits daily for the past three days. Biosthmors (talk) 16:35, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

(ec) True enough. I've seen a fair number of cases where the process of removing duplicate work led to improvements in findability, and others like you describe where students (apparently) simply didn't look. If you notice classes where this is common, leave a message here so someone can reach out to the professor.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

There's a missing step here; one thing is whether the existing content is limited, another is whether sources exist to write about a given topic. If the profs would encourage students to reach out-- not only in choosing a topic, but in asking which sources can be used to expand a topic-- it would save everyone a lot of time. I'm constantly frustrated that in some cases, good sources exist, the students often have university library access, but they generate off-topic content from whatever sources they come across. I could have pointed them in advance to good sources. I eeked an article out of student work at klazomania (an obscure topic about which basically nothing is written) by allowing selective use of primary sources. That article looks like a good student result: it's not. What it actually is is dozens of hours of my time spent cleaning up an article on such an obscure topic that only one sentence in one review exists and that barely warranted more than a definition; I could have better spent my time elsewhere, and the students could have better spent their time expanding something useful (to our readers) from high quality sources. Except for the hits it gets because I point to it as an example, it will never get more than 20 hits per day. One way forward in this dilemma is to get (at least in the med realm) the profs to understand MEDRS, and get them to include as one of their first steps in the assignment for students to list the sources they plan to use on article talk, and do that relative to WP:MEDMOS (suggested article organization). For example, I plan to use X source to write about Diagnosis of condition Y. That will allow us to head off a lot of wasted time at the pass. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:49, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I think there are cases where a professor, or students, would benefit greatly from asking for feedback on article selection, or sources, ahead of time. Certainly in the case you mention you could have saved everyone some time. I don't think this is something we can build in to course syllabi, though, because there won't always be a knowledgeable and available Wikipedia editor to respond. In fact, I see this problem with a lot of suggested solutions to issues that have arisen with student-editing; we can't assume ambassadors (or other editors) will do anything in particular, because they're volunteer labour. Ambassador performance has been enormously variable -- ask the professors. They can be a great asset (and often are), but any process that relies on Wikipedians interacting with classes in a certain way is going to be unreliable. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:43, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I think ambassadors should attempt to help professors refine sylabi. I mean, isn't that what they signed up for, to increase communication and the benefit to both parties (academia and Wikipedia)? If they're not willing to do that, then remove them from being an ambassador for incompetence? Biosthmors (talk) 00:48, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

All I'm trying to say is that it's not scalable to build a process on Wikipedia out of compulsory tasks performed by volunteers. We can't commit to a professor that Joe Editor will show up, because Joe is a volunteer. Ambassadors can be (and almost always are) very helpful in many ways, not just refining syllabi -- but the class on the other side of the computer screen is a real class, with real students getting real grades, and I don't want to design a process that harms those students when ambassadors drop out, as some always do. Ambassadors should be part of the solution but they can't be critical to it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:11, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree. I'm just saying if an ambassador is unwilling to communicate with a professor, then they are no longer acting as an ambassador, and they should be removed from whatever list of ambassadors they are on. Ambassadors should be "fired" if they are not performing up to a basic level of performance. No? Biosthmors (talk) 01:42, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's definitely the case. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 07:21, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Mike, it doesn't have to be an ambassador necessarily, but I think there does need to be an experienced Wikipedian involved at some point early in the process, if we're assuming that the students will have a viable and mainspace-able product. To give you an example, last semester I reviewed some student proposals for articles they wanted to work on. The prof had already agreed the articles involved needed work and that sources were available - everything you'd expect a responsible prof to do - but I vetoed two right away. Why? One involved articles in the race & intelligence area, the other articles around abortion. As a Wikipedian, I knew throwing students in discretionary-sanctions areas was likely to end in disaster, but a non-Wikipedian prof would be hard-pressed to figure it out in time to avoid issues. I thought that was part of why point 2 of the Participation Requirements was imposed? Nikkimaria (talk) 04:49, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Well enjoy neuroscience and race, an article from "my class" this semester! (I hope it's good. Grimace.) Biosthmors (talk) 06:51, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Nikkimaria, I agree that's why point 2 is there, and perhaps I overstated the case. You're right that advising the professor to avoid abortion articles is the sort of thing a Wikipedian will know instantly, and that's a good reason for getting an ambassador involve. What I am really arguing against is any situation where at some point in the class, it becomes necessary for the ambassador, or some other Wikipedian, to complete some tasks in order for the course to be a success -- e.g. review GAs, review articles, submit or support DYKs. Professors who develop direct relationships with Wikipedians, as some have done, can ask for favours as any other Wikipedian would, but I don't want a situation where the professor turns to the EP and says, for example, "You promised someone would do a peer review on all twenty-five of my students' articles by the end of the semester". Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 07:21, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Biosthmors (talk) 07:28, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

WikiProject Medicine

Can we get a notification at WikiProject Medicine (and here) on the classes that will be starting for Spring 2013 and will (or are likely to) fall under the scope of that project? Productive communication with those professors now, before the assignments are ossified, could have tremendous payouts in reduced headaches for next semester. Best. Biosthmors (talk) 19:30, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Chapel Hill and Federal Writers Project

FYI: there is a discussion about new articles created as part of a classroom project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There are a number of recent pages about participants in the Federal Writers' Project which appear to be outside the scope of WP. I've offered to contact the instructor and if needed transwiki import the pages to Wikiversity. It may also be desirable to contact the instructor about any potential future projects to insure that new content is within our guidelines and to offer assistance. --mikeu ^talk 20:37, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Good articles

We recently got flooded with biology related Good article nominations, most of which seemed reasonable I will admit. I was just wondering if we can expect anymore anytime soon. We are already overburdened with nominations from regular editors and like many other projects lack reviewers so wont be able to handle multiple courses at once, especially if reviews are expected in a couple of weeks. I recall a discussion some time ago (not sure where) about a pre-screening process for student articles that they should go through before nomination. I have done a very superficial review of some of the recent articles that have been submitted and left a few tags. I am thinking that if the tags are not addressed in a timely fashion (say a week) it can safely be assumed that the nominators won't respond to a review so the articles can be quickfailed. Would there be any objections to this approach? AIRcorn (talk) 23:02, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I think that's more than fair. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:35, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Would it not make sense to ask that students not nominate articles for DYK and GA? Wikipedians are already stretched, and these articles can be highly problematic – much more so than articles from ordinary new editors, in part because the students don't intend to hang around, and in the vast majority of cases seem not to care about Wikipedia (and that's fine; there's no reason that they should). I saw one article recently nominated for GA that contains plagiarism. But finding it is time-consuming, so there's a higher-than-usual risk here of articles containing it being awarded GA status. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:16, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that neither should be required, but I was considering proposing DYKs or GA status as an extra credit possibility for extra motivated student editors in "my class" starting Fall 2013, assuming I'm still active. Biosthmors (talk) 03:29, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi Biosthmors, I think you should definitely not award extra credits for that. Doing so means students are motivated to nominate work that they may know is substandard (e.g. copied from elsewhere), and it also means that that credit depends entirely on overstretched volunteer labour. (I am speaking in general here; I know nothing about your particular courses.)

Please don't take this post the wrong way; teachers and coodinators are clearly feeling they are being criticized too much to judge by some of the responses above. But I really think this whole business of relying on volunteers needs to be considered from an ethical perspective. If you're depending on volunteers who have stepped forward to volunteer for the program, that's fine, but relying on ordinary Wikipedians who haven't made that explicit commitment strikes me as very problematic.

I think we also ought to evaluate whether the program is educating the students in their chosen topics (and not just teaching them how to edit Wikipedia). SlimVirgin ^(talk) 03:56, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it is a good idea at all to have credit or marks relying on a GA assessment. The process is highly variable in terms of reviewer quality and timeliness of reviews. It is not really fair on the reviewers to pressure them with contributing to a students grade either (I recall a situation where a reviewer was told that if the article didn't pass the student would fail). AIRcorn (talk) 04:09, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Ah, yes, I remember that one, too. I believe the student told the GA reviewer that s/he would fail the course without the GA. Lovely position for the GA reviewer to be in. It was all at the very last minute, too (problematic considering the GAN backlog). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:13, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

If a similar issue recurs and you don't feel comfortable dealing with it, please bring it to my attention personally. People actively involved in the program have definitely been discouraging the use of GA's as grading points, and if any professors are still doing so, I'd like to reach out to them personally and try to explain the problems involved in doing so. If a situation arises where an article nominated for GA is obviously unacceptable but the student says their grade depends on it, after reaching out to their professor with an adequate explanation, I would also be okay reaching out to the student, explaining why their article won't pass, encouraging them to discuss the matter with their professor or grade appeals process people, and then, ultimately, failing the GA. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:54, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I won't make it a class-wide announcement then. By the way... create WP:Assignments for student editors? Let's document this wisdom in an essay? Biosthmors (talk) 06:43, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Ethical issues

There are a number of ethical issues involved here, and I wonder whether the ethics committees of the universities have been consulted. Some of my concerns are:

• forcing students to write their essays in public, and expose themselves at a vulnerable age to public criticism;
• forcing them to write in mainspace and release their work, which means they can never detach themselves from it (if they have plagiarized extensively, this could have consequences for them later on, and their real names are known to classmates and teachers);
• relying on overstretched and often reluctant volunteer labour;
• requiring Wikipedians to name individual students when discussing poor edits or plagiarism, with teachers saying they can't fix the articles without individual examples;
• teaching students how to edit Wikipedia, rather than about their chosen topic, and perhaps not teaching them about WP thoroughly so that they inevitably make mistakes;
• not paying sufficient attention to the differences between learning scholarly writing and learning how to edit WP; they are very different activities, especially in the humanities, where student essays are supposed to teach people how to develop an argument;
• relying on Wikipedians to award GA status and thus an extra course credit, with students complaining that without it they will fail.

To what extent, if any, were the ethical issues discussed with outside bodies when the program was set up? If those discussions didn't take place, does that need to be rectified by (for example, and this is just a suggestion) inviting comment from the universities? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:58, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Slim. Please understand that I'm replying not only in an entirely personal capacity here, but can absolutely only speak for the classes I've been directly involved in myself - in other words, even more narrowly than I normally can. Because I think a lot of these points you bring up deserve specific discussion, I'm going to sign each of my responses, so that anyone can start a more narrow conversation about any particular point I say, rather than having to thread their questions/answers/comments at the end. I've written this without proofing much, but I'm hoping it contains some useful insights, both for you and other people. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• To deal with your first point: the fact that student work is open to public criticism has been something that has brought up in numerous discussions I've had with professors. It's generally been brought up as a good thing, not as a bad one. To many professors, one of the most exciting things about Wikipedia-based assignments is that it allows their students to interact with a community of practice, and to receive criticism and praise from outside observers. Much of academia outside of undergraduate education is focused around communities of practice, and a lot of professors think it's important to begin to develop the ability to deal with this sort of interaction in undergraduates. This hasn't been cleared by a formal ethical committee or anything of that nature, but multiple respected departmentheads and instructional design people have seen no issues with it. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• To deal with your second point: all professors who I have worked with, and all professors who I have talked about working with, have agreed that it's important to give students the ultimate choice about whether or not they'd like to release their work under a free license (which is a necessity when contributing to Wikipedia.) One of the first things said in every class I've helped out with directly or witnessed has been "Come up to us after class if you're uncomfortable releasing your work freely, and we'll come up with an alternative assignment for you." A couple students have taken advantage of this offer, but not many. Most students (and again, I mean most students in classes I have worked with or observed) are actively excited about the idea that their projects, instead of being discarded at the end of the semester, can be openly released and potentially benefit society in a significant way. I would agree 100% that it would be an absolute best practice to give uncomfortable students a way to opt for a different assignment. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• The advice in one of the handouts is that they should go live soon after they start writing, but I wonder whether they're giving informed consent to that. For example, are they told that they lose all control over it once it's in mainspace, that their nicknames might lead to real names, and that if they add a lot of plagiarism, it has the potential to mark them in public as dishonest? I suppose I doubt that a fully informed student would reject the option of having their work deleted after the course, which they could request if they stick to a sandbox. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:13, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• Your third and fourth points are both complicated, and I don't think I can give them an answer here that would do them justice. I think your fourth point, especially, is a point that needs more discussion to occur. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

  I'll chip in on the third point, "relying on overstretched and often reluctant volunteer labour". I don't think there should be any such reliance. Courses should be designed so that the outcomes are positive even if there is no interaction by the community at all. I think interaction is desirable, and it should be positive when it happens, but the professors should not assume it's going to happen. That includes expecting GA and DYK nominations to be reviewed, for example. Ambassador volunteer effort is a little different in that it is explicitly committed to the course, but not every course ends up with an active ambassador. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 07:14, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• Your fifth point is interesting, and is one that is frequently brought up in my discussions with professors. Classes I have facilitated or discussed facilitating have kind of fallen in to two realms: half of them want to ensure that the Wikipedia component of their assignment doesn't actively distract from the main topics of their courses, and want to (and do) take steps to ensure that their classes remain about their original subjects, instead of turning in to Wikipedia 101. The other half of classes - and this kind of ties in with your sixth point - have actually seen learning about Wikipedia as an important part of the subjects of their course. College definitely exists to teach students about their fields of study, but many professors also believe that one purpose of college is to teach students life skills that cannot be directly linked to any one class, such as how to understand and interact with new media sources such as Wikipedia. Professors who hold this view point tend to view "learning how to use Wikipedia" as an active and important goal of their Wikipedia-based assignments. (Many professors also feel that by teaching their students how to contribute to Wikipedia, their students will be able to be more discriminating consumers of Wikipedia in the future, better able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the future (and view this as an important thing.)Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• I think my last bullet actually addressed a lot of your sixth point to, so I'll just skip on to your seventh. In every class I have facilitated, or discussed facilitating, this has come up. Any successful professor participating in the program must necessarily understand the difference between scholarly and encyclopedic writing. Many professors believe that teaching students how to write well must extend to non-scholarly forms of writing, and believe that teaching students how to write in an encyclopedic fashion is an important benefit. Although nothing has come to fruition yet, I'm in active discussion with a group of people who teach reading and composition courses at my school about trying to integrate Wikipedia-based assignments in to their curricula, specifically because they realize that encyclopedic writing is very different from scholarly writing, and think that they would be doing students a disservice if they did not teach them how to approach both sorts of writing. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

  (Kevin, did you misnumber these?) Just a note to concur with Kevin; the five or ten educators I've communicated with about this have all been very clear, and very positive, about the fact that encyclopedic writing is not what students usually are asked to do. In fact this was the core reasoning behind a suggestion I've heard from a couple of academics that on-campus knowledge about editing Wikipedia should reside in writing centres, which I gather exist at a lot of US universities, rather than within specific academic disciplines. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 07:14, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• The point of a student essay is to show that you have learned about a topic within your field – which involves reading its secondary literature – that you can produce a good piece of expository writing, and (in the humanities) that you can advance a position. That involves making your way through the set reading list, then structuring a reply to an essay question the teacher sets to test your knowledge of that source material, a reply with a beginning, middle and end, and one that accurately addresses the question.

  It's difficult to see how students are taught those skills by being told they can choose their own topic (vaguely within field X) and their own sources, which are often websites, then adding a few paragraphs to articles that already exist. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:24, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

  I think we have to allow the teachers the leeway to make a pedagogical decision here. If they understand what kind of writing Wikipedia requires (and so far I've not encountered any teachers that did not understand this) it's their decision as to whether that's an appropriate way for their students to learn the material. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:27, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• Your last point, I agree, is an issue. No course should require students to nominate their articles for GA status, and any course that does so should be actively discouraged from doing so. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

• Everyone here seems to agree on that point, so where can we make clear to the teachers and coordinators – not only that they not require it, but preferably that they don't encourage it either? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 16:24, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing these issues up, and I hope my answers shed some light on your questions. One thing that is worth keeping in mind is that, ultimately, professors and universities are responsible for their decisions regarding assignment design and similar issues. I definitely think we should establish a clear set of best practices, but many of the points you brought up should be (and frequently are) thought about and discussed by the faculty involved in these assignments before they commence, and some of them may be more in their realm to decide than ours. Kevin Gorman (talk) 05:50, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Regarding your second point (and to some extent your first), I got the ethical willies when I discovered that students in at least one class are REQUIRED to edit under their real names. See User talk:Biosthmors/Intro Neuro#AFC or not?.[17] Is that appropriate?[18] --MelanieN (talk) 17:08, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

No, that's definitely not appropriate. Not only is no one on WP required to use a real name, people are actively discouraged. That would particularly apply to young people. Do you know who the professor is? SlimVirgin ^(talk) 17:19, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

User:Biosthmors is the ambassador, it would be best to work through them. Biosthmors defended the practice.[19] --MelanieN (talk) 17:33, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)@Slimvirgin - First I would challenge your characterization that this is a list of ethical issues, but rather is a list of pedagogical issues that every instructor must deal with. These discussions are difficult in a way because the WMF is indeed transferring management of the US/CAN EP to an independent entity. The planning for that entity is still on-going, but it involves a diverse group of seasoned Wikipedians and academics. But out of that planning has come the realization that the use of WP in the classroom as a teaching tool is here to stay for one reason: the movement within academia for Information Fluency is strong and WP is a tool perfectly suited to advance it. The new EP recognizes that and captures that in this statement within its strategy: Enterprise Purpose. I personally believe the early years of the EP haven't even scratched the surface when it comes to using WP as a tool in the classroom. As we move forward with the new EP, we have to find and employ the most effective pedagogy using WP to help professors, librarians and other academics achieve their learning objectives without overburdening WP itself. --Mike Cline (talk) 17:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I despair when I read glowing language like this discussing the program goals, so out of touch with what so many established editors are experiencing, particularly when these kinds of posts end with one minor recognition of the serious "overburdening" of established Wikipedian editors. If these programs are going to grow, the few medical editors we have trying to deal with bad medical information are more likely to give up, as I did for almost nine months. I want to add meaningful content, not be an unpaid TA to some professor who doesn't know Wikipedia and expects me to do his/her teaching job and clean up after students. If any of those students stayed on as valuable editors, perhaps being an unpaid TA would be more enjoyable. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:24, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree it is often a tremendous burden to those who care about article quality, which I do. I want to reduce it. WP:Education noticeboard#WikiProject Medicine anyone with knowledge? Biosthmors (talk) 18:16, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

@ SandyGeorgia – My post above nor this comment isn’t intended to be personal, but personalizing comments is sometimes necessary to achieve any sense of understanding. First, the comment above was intended to challenge Ethics vs Pedagogy and you didn’t address that. What you did however in both your lead and edit summary is clearly express frustration. I think I recognize and appreciate where the frustration comes from—I despair when I read glowing language like this discussing the program goals, so out of touch with what so many established editors are experiencing, particularly when these kinds of posts end with one minor recognition of the serious "overburdening" of established Wikipedian editors.. So I would ask, on a personal level: What specifically would ease your despair, ease your frustration? Over the next few months, my fellow MSU Campus Ambassadors and I will be working with two MSU professors to plan the use of WP in their courses for the Spring term. What should I be doing with these professors that I haven’t already done in previous terms to ease your despair since I am so out of touch with the issues facing the EP? As for glowing language and program goals, I am all about solutions. Recognizing problems is the easy part, it is the solutioning that is challenging. So help me support next terms MSU Wikipedia related classes without overburdening the Wikipedia community by telling me how to ease your despair.--Mike Cline (talk) 18:25, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I think (hope) I've expressed on this page already many ideas I have for ways to improve the sense of despair I have, and I'm editing Bio's page (Wikipedia:Assignments for student editors) now, with what I hope are suggestions that will help. I guess the lingering despair is that no matter how much we "squawk", when the next term-end approaches, we find more of same. And there is more than we (medical editors) can keep up with, and it is keeping us from more meaningful work. I'm afraid that the page that Bio just started, and that I'm editing, will end up being another unread handout. My greatest despair is not about the students; it's about the professors. If the students were appropriately guided by their profs, mentoring them to well written articles could be such a joy-- the kind of work I used to enjoy above all on Wikipeida. So, I guess my bottom line answer to you is, how are you going to get the profs to read or care about "the rest of us" out here and the effort we are putting in to giving feedback for improvement? I guess if you could get one thing across to profs, it would be ask them to engage established Wikipedians before choosing topics, sources, etc, so that less of our time would be wasted. And while I appreciate and respect your comments about personalizing discussions, I feel compelled to add that seeing Joabar's attitude on this page really added to the despair :( :( SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:33, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Speaking for myself, Mike, I think what maybe hasn't been coming across to the professors adequately (and therefore not to the students either) is that we're not their...well, "support staff" is the best term I can think of. That is, we are providing them a venue to do work, and we're happy to accept and polish up their work, but we're not here to finish their work if they're too inexperienced, behind on their assignments, irresponsible, or whatever to do it themselves. Community energy is a finite resource, and they should be mindful that they (or any other person/group/project) aren't entitled to a share of that bigger than anyone else - perhaps even a smaller share, since the whole point of an organized program is that it should be able to support itself, cleanup- and supervision-wise. That, I think, is main source of the community fatigue/despair about the EP; we (non-EP-associated editors) see ourselves as being put upon by these neverending tides of classes plunking down half-done (in the best cases) or unacceptable (in the worst) work, with what appears to be little regard for the fact that by doing so, they are diverting resources away from everything else that needs to get done. This is absolutely not to say that the message should be "Pfft, the community ain't gonna help you" or "you and your newbies aren't welcome here", but the message does need to get through to them that if they want to make use of the community when its help is needed, they need to not exhaust the community by asking it to do tasks they should be doing for themselves. And like Sandy, I think the burden of that falls on the professors. They are the ones sending often-unprepared students to us, and they are the ones who sometimes seem to think we're here to do their grading and analysis for or alongside them, so they need to be the ones holding their students' hands when hand-holding is needed. A fluffernutter is a sandwich! (talk) 18:45, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Please share your wisdom at a new essay

Instead of having all these thoughts shared and then lost to an archive, please share them at WP:Assignments for student editors (WP:AFSE or WP:A4SE). Best. Biosthmors (talk) 16:42, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Also Wikipedia:Recruiting those in academia (WP:RECRUIT or WP:RECRUITING). Biosthmors (talk) 19:22, 11 December 2012 (UTC)