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Statistics about use of sandbox vs Draft space, and about Afc

A couple of statistical questions about where Wiki Ed students develop their articles, and their release process:

1. Dev location: What number or percentage of students use a sandbox (theirs, anybody's) vs. Draft space for pre-release development?
2. Release method: What number or percentage of articles developed by students are submitted for Afc review, vs. released directly to main space (either by themselves or someone else like their instructor or WP expert)? If there is a third category, such as remaining stalled in their sandbox, please include that as well if possible.

This is to inform a question (diff) by Piotrus about the release of new articles by new editors which is a tiny part of a long VPP discussion unrelated to Wiki Ed about paid editing. Thanks for any light you can shed on this. Mathglot (talk) 00:43, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot From the paper me and Shani are working on and that will be presented on Wikimania next week (do stop by :>):

• Q15 Did the students work in drafts, directly on Wiki or using any other method?
• A (N-~200): user sandbox (65%), copied to mainspace from Word (17%), directly in mainspace (5%), draftspace (~2.5%), other/I don't know/they can do whatever (~10%)

PS. Do note that our study goes beyond Wiki Ed, and concerns all educators, not just those in US&Canada which is where Wiki Edu operates (although majority of our respondents come from US...).

_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:46, 1 August 2024 (UTC)

I'd love to hear feedback from folks involved with Wiki Ed about this, as my impression from occasional interactions is that the percentage using user sandboxes is very high (basically, every case I have encountered, but numbers are low), likely because their training modules instruct them to do so, and some of the exercises begin to create data there. Whether they are actually developing their prospective articles in the user sandbox or copying into it from an offline location, I don't know. More solid data about this would help. Mathglot (talk) 17:59, 3 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi Mathglot! It sounds like this is a question just about new articles written by students supported by Wiki Education? If so:

1. Dev location: I'd say nearly 100% use sandboxes to draft first. Some may start in Word or Google Docs but they all copy it over to their sandbox at some point and add citations using VE's cite tool. If they *don't* draft in sandboxes, they typically don't have enough edits to be autoconfirmed so they technically cannot create one in mainspace in English Wikipedia.
2. Release method: It's also close to 100% that go directly to mainspace. None of them go through AfC first (unless they somehow find it on their own -- we strip out the encouragement in their sandbox template to go through AfC, as our volume would overwhelm the AfC volunteers). Here are our training slides for creating new articles for students. For our process, our Dashboard creates a ticket each time a student creates a new article (this was one that broke this spring, causing us to not realize we weren't seeing all the new articles anymore for a few weeks; that's now fixed). Our Wiki Experts (Ian and Brianda) then take a look at the article; if it has problems, they'll move it back to the student's sandbox. Sometimes another Wikipedian will catch the article first and either move it to draft space or elsewhere, but that's not our typical process. At the end of the term, Ian and Brianda go through student work left in sandboxes and move anything that's ready for mainspace live; they leave half-formed drafts in sandboxes. If there's just minor cleanup needed, they'll also do that and then move it, but if the article draft would require substantive work we just leave it in the sandbox. I don't have a good sense of what percentage of the articles get left in sandboxes (many students start a topic and then abandon it to change to something else if they discover there aren't enough sources, for example, so will leave a few sentences behind on their old topic but will successfully add a different one).

I'd also add here: Overwhelmingly, our students edit existing articles. In the most recent term (Spring 2024), our students created 426 new articles but edited 5,660 existing articles. So only about 7.5% of articles we're supporting edits to are new articles. Hope this helps! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:27, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Mathglot

1. Dev location: In our case, 100% use sandboxes. Because the sandbox doesn't easily support collaborative editing and our students work in pairs on their articles, our programme also advises students to work collaboratively in cloud documents before moving it to the sandbox.
2. Release method: 100% go directly to main space. None go through AfC. Many do not know about Afc review, vs. released directly to main space. We do have an experienced wiki editor in our location that we consult when it comes to moving articles to main space. This editor was not available in our last semester but we will return to this process going forward as teachers are not equipped with time or knowledge for this side of Wikipedia. One issue we encounter is that students frequently struggle to locate the sandbox after logging in, and as a result, they draft on their User Pages. When in the sandbox, some mistakenly believe that by clicking the "Submit your draft for review", the assignment will be sent to their teachers not realising it initiates a review process within the Wikipedia community. This often leads to premature submissions, especially before we have conducted necessary steps like plagiarism checks through Turnitin. If there are alternative spaces within Wikipedia that could simplify the drafting process and reduce these misunderstandings, I am eager to learn about them.

G.J.ThomThom (talk) 23:52, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

G.J.ThomThom, thanks for this, it is helpful. I hope you get more feedback here from the regulars, but your comments spur some questions or comments:

• With respect to sandboxes: what is the difficulty you see in collaborating in a sandbox? As it is a named page on Wikipedia, I don't see why collaborating in a sandbox is any different from collaborating in, say, a published article? I'm not sure if there is any reason why students shouldn't collaborate at first offline in a cloud document, other than the fact that Wikipedia editors will not be able to mentor them there or correct any mistakes or misunderstandings of offline material. For that reason alone, if I had my druthers, I would urge all students to collaborate within the pages here (sandbox, or not) for better transparency, and so that experienced editors here can better help them.
• Release method: is the editor at your location there fortuitously, or is this something like the WP:Wikipedian in residence program?
• Locating the sandbox: again, I do not understand; can you describe the difficulty in locating it? The location of a student's user sandbox is linked from literally *every page* at Wikipedia. In my device and skin, it is top right between the links for 'Talk' and 'Preferences'. In mobile view, click the person icon top right, and it is the third item in the drop-down.
• Meaning of 'Submit your draft for review': I do understand, and do you think a simple change to the wording of the prompt to make it clear it is a Wikipedia submission and not a class submission would help? This might be amenable to a fix either through an enhancement to an existing template, or a wrapper template around the existing one which would alter the wording, but only for students, to clarify the target of the submission.
• Alternative spaces: I assume you already are using Draft space, but if not, that is the dedicated space for developing articles in relative peace and quiet, with full transparency and the possibility of collaboration from anyone.

Hope this helps. Mathglot (talk) 04:52, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

@Mathglot. Here are the answers to your questions:

What is the difficulty you see in collaborating in a sandbox?

Lack of real-time, synchronous editing capabilities. In cloud-based platforms, multiple users can edit simultaneously whether physicslly together or at a distance whereas you can only edit a wiki space, one at a time. We stage all the processes with the students. Using a cloud doc provides a space for the pre-writing stage: brainstorming ideas, outlining, planning roles and contributions, making decisions about a topic, compiling sources, using the annotation feature for communicating decisions on the document. Once they have built some content, they then move it to the sandbox to apply all the wiki features.

As for mentoring provided from outside experienced Wikipedia editors while their drafts are in the sandbox, I have not observed this in practice. The only actions we have encountered from outside editors is account cancellations due to misconceptions of sock puppetry when students inadvertently duplicate content across their accounts. We've tried to mitigate this by assigning one sandbox per pair of students for the draft itself and ensuring they clearly state their intentions on their User pages. Both students still need accounts to access each others sandbox since they're working in pairs. Arguably, the cloud doc comes in handy in preventing students violating Wikipedia protocols in the early stages.

Is the editor at your location there fortuitously, or is this something like the WP:Wikipedian in residence program?

Neither. The editor lives in our location and is a seasoned Wikipedian editor.

Can you describe the difficulty in locating the sandbox?

It's not a huge problem. The students are coming to Wikipedia spaces for the first time. We get them set up with opening their accounts etc. For new Wikipedia users, distinguishing between different user spaces like the User Page, Talk Page, and Sandbox can be confusing at first. I have discovered over time too that landing pages of new accounts have different components to accounts that have been going for a while (like mine). I have noticed that now, new accounts even have an assigned mentor to ask questions to and some links to help a newcomer get started. This is great! When was this feature added? When students return to their accounts after absence from it for a few days, some assume they have logged back into or have arrived in their sandbox when they enter their accounts. Or they assume the User page is the sandbox. The tabs for User Page and Talk Page are visible immediately on entering but yes you have to navigate to the drop down menu along the side to locate the account sandbox which is where they place the drafts. This is straightforward for me and you but not always for a newcomer. This issue is with a minority of students though. Most students understand it and we get there in the end.

Do you think a simple change to the wording of the prompt to make it clear it is a Wikipedia submission and not a class submission would help?

I forgot to mention how the word "publish" causes confusion too at first. Some new users think they are moving their work to main space by clicking this. I tell them to consider this button as a "save" button. As for a change in the wording of the 'Submit your draft for review' prompt, this would definitely help but only if it is considered a big problem for many and if we insist that the sandbox is where they draft. If they are better off drafting in another space to avoid the issues, then we can also guide this. But then this raises the question of how we pass the article to the main space without causing headaches for everyone. I feel the 'Submit your draft for review' is an important step we need to take which is not, as far as I can tell, in other drafting spaces. G.J.ThomThom (talk) 12:16, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Alternative spaces: I assume you already are using Draft space, but if not, that is the dedicated space for developing articles in relative peace and quiet, with full transparency and the possibility of collaboration from anyone.

I have not actively encouraged the use of the Draft space as you mentioned since we always target the sandbox. But some drafts do end up scattered across various spaces, which complicates the review and grading process. Ideally we would like to aim for a work flow that is standardised so that both students and teachers can follow and find the drafts etc. Is the Draft space a better space for students to draft in? What do you recommend is the best way to handle moving the drafts to main space? From where? G.J.ThomThom (talk) 13:53, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

IIT Varanasi

Hi, just making this board aware of the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#Student projects where we are seeing a pattern of scientific drafts from students of IIT Varanasi. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 11:02, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

@Lahariyaniyathi: Is this something CIS-A2K could help with? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:59, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

@Rodent21, Poseidonsaan, Harshita mandava, Im chirag18, CognifyEdits, Vinny0001, Mitanshu17, SaiRev, Sahilsingh0, Amitdhamm, Ishadh12, Dhananjay1142, Garry571, and Mk21134018: hello and welcome to Wikipedia! It looks like you've all created your Wikipedia accounts in the last few days and have tried to create your first articles but they have been declined by other Wikipedia editors who volunteer to review 'articles for creation'. You may be wondering why your articles were declined. It is largely because Wikipedia isn't a place to publish essays. Wikipedia articles have to be written in a particular way. It is also because it is unclear where the text in your drafts came from. Is it from your own research? Or copied from somewhere? You'll all need some help and advice if you want these essays to become Wikipedia articles. Are you all students at IIT (BHU) Varanasi? If so, do you have a tutor who has asked you to publish these articles? Are they a user here on Wikipedia? Can they reply to us here?

Some of the articles are:

• Draft:Dependence of Thermal and Hydrodynamic Boundary Layers on Prandtl Number
• Draft:Scale Analysis of Air and Water Interaction in Urban Drainage Systems
• Draft:Scale Analysis on Phase Change Process.
• User:Im chirag18/sandbox
• User:CognifyEdits/sandbox
• User:Vinny0001/sandbox
• Draft:Dependence of Boundary Layer on Rayleigh Number
• Draft:Scale analysis for Couette Flow and between one fixed and one moving plate
• User:Sahilsingh0/sandbox
• Draft:Scale Analysis of Viscous Rotational Flow
• Draft:Scale analysis of natural convection in tall enclosures
• Draft:Scale Analysis of External Natural Convection
• Draft:Scale Analysis of Flow Through a Woven Mesh
• User:Mk21134018/sandbox
• User:Aditya gupta456/sandbox
• User:Govindsahaya/sandbox
• And others

Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 19:22, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

These do actually contain some solid content. I don't think most of them are WP:OR. Most of them are not in the format of an encyclopedia article. The topics are not generally suitable for an encyclopedia article.

• the choice of topics does not show an awareness of WP:Notability guidelines. The topics look to have been chosen by the instructor, implicitly or explicitly, so this is fixable.
• the articles bear no relation to pre-existing content; they don't fill informational gaps between articles we already have
• the articles don't have the goals or form of an encyclopedia article; they are written to demonstrate knowledge to the instructor, not to teach a Wikipedia reader.
• the images uploaded to Commons are really useful contributions, but would be much more useful if they had a few tags
• more inline cites would make it clearer that they aren't original research

I'd suggest moving these drafts to Wikiversity, and providing the authors with a list of related articles to improve.

We have articles like Thermal boundary layer thickness and shape into which some of this could be integrated (and we have Boundary layer, but no thermal boundary layer). We don't have a broad-topic article on Urban drainage. We have Scale analysis (mathematics), a very important basic STEM topic (and frankly it could be a better introduction; it jumps immediately from the lede into quite complex meteorological equations that need a fair bit of background knowledge to be comprehensible). Generally, our fluid dynamics content needs a lot of work, but mostly on making basic topics comprehensible to the average layperson.

"Scale analysis in [X]" is unlikely to be a notable topic; it's like "Analysis of English rhetoric in [X]", where X is Jane Austen's works, the next US election, the construction of the Burj Khalifa, etc. Sure you could write about it, but it's not usually notable.

Please feel free to ping me if needed. HLHJ (talk) 03:40, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Teahouse discussion about students creating articles on medical topics

Alert: could some folks here please monitor and/or contribute at the discussion going on at WP:Teahouse#Medical article creation for students - Topic selection and audience level ?

First sentence there:

Hello, I'm an instructor guiding students in creating Wikipedia articles on medical topics. We use the list of requested articles for medicine as a starting point. I am now planning the semester 2 syllabus and would like to establish best practice around 2 areas: ...

(Cross-posted at WT:MEDRS.)

Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 15:37, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Mathglot

Thank you for directing me to this page. I've already found some of the conversations here to be useful and informative. I have a lot to learn! G.J.ThomThom (talk) 23:02, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Wiki Edu student repeatedly disrupting an article

• Wiki vaani (talk · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · block log)
• Conflict of interest (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

This student has repeatedly (1, 2, 3) edited Conflict of interest to remove large portions of the article (seemingly at random) and replace them with brief, poorly-written sentences (e.g., it occurs in personal intrest like family friends and intrest thast as a workplace to judge them). Are they being instructed to do this? jlwoodwa (talk) 16:13, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

@Jlwoodwa - Sorry this happened. Since it doesn't look like they're seeing talk page messages I'll get in touch with their instructor and ask them to intervene. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:17, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Best Practices for Teaching Students to Write Effective Lead Sections

Hello everyone,

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

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

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

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

Given this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Briefly:

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

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

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

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

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

Traditional ecological knowledge

Traditional ecological knowledge (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

After being alerted to problems with the above article on WP:FTN, I have gone through in the last day a fairly extensive overhaul of the article. The reason I am posting here is that the wikiblame analysis I did identified most of the problems in that article as being due to student-editors in classes adding poorly-considered content. Some of this was done a long time ago before some of the laudable constraints have been put in place, but this is by no means all of it. The problems I noticed included:

• Long quotes with text included that was unnecessary to the point of the quote
• Quotes being used where paraphrasing or summarizing would have been preferable
• Overly verbose prose reading a bit like students were aiming for a word limit instead of brevity, conciseness, or clarity
• Value-laden prose. Rather than reporting on an idea, text was written in the imperative register as though the article was recommending best practices or something.
• A lack of wikilinks and an overreliance on defining things in the text rather than just linking to the relevant page. This is probably due to students being used to having to write standalone papers instead of linkable articles.

In any case, I would love it if some of these principles could be emphasized to instructors so that they get their students to understand the kind of writing that works best here.

Some positive things to note:

• The students used excellent sources for the most part. I did not need to excise any of them in spite of the somewhat controversial nature of the subject
• The students seemed to understand article structure and sectioning.
• The students got the message that citations were absolutely vital for prose inclusion.

jps (talk) 15:46, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Josh. I've seen all the problems you've identified (and pulled my hair out trying to figure out how to stop students from doing this). All these things are in our training modules, but the challenge is always getting students to read and remember instructions (as I'm sure you know all too well). But TEK is the kind of article that can be especially challenging, especially when it comes to your 4th point.

I'm hoping we'll be able to make some more significant updates to our instructional materials next year, and it's good to have a reminder of these kinds of problems. I appreciate your feedback (and the praise for student work. I really appreciate that.) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:37, 24 October 2024 (UTC)

Part of the problem, I think, is that the motivation for a lot of the student editors seems like it is externalized to complete the predefined wikitasks set forth for them by their instructor. I know y'all do a good job insisting that assignments not be of the "you must contribute to an article" sort, but nevertheless, it seems some students are still acting out of that kind of performance metric. What I would love to see more of is students doing WP:wikignoming, copyediting, and text cleanup, but I understand that this is often not on the radar of learning outcomes that instructors want for their classes. Having students work on proposing single sentences (either slightly modified based on existing ones or simple new ones) that use new sources might be another way to forestall some of this. Hell, simply doing a "source verification" project would probably have been a worthwhile way to harness the labor. jps (talk) 13:23, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

A whole class writing promotional/resume-like articles

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

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

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

NAS 348 Global Climate Change promotional content

A few months back, I ran into an issue with this class adding promotional fluff to a bunch of articles about corporations and ended up reverting pretty much every edit the students ever made. Now they're back again with the exact same problem. @Ian (Wiki Ed), can you help get this under control so we can stop wasting student and Wikipedian time? I don't know how this class is allowed to come back over and over again (looks like it's run at least 6 times) without anyone having a handle on it. :Jay8g [V•T•E] 17:19, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for bringing this to our attention. I talked with the instructor in the spring about her class and how she might better navigate these issues. I'll reach out to her again. Helaine (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:49, 28 October 2024 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

Nearly 3-year-old editing problems discovered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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