Wikipedia talk:Training/For students

WT:T/FS

Length of a page

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

Banaticus' Core Course

First, you should know about:

The Five Pillars of Wikipedia (click "show" to show the content)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
It incorporates elements of general and specialized encyclopedias, almanacs, and gazetteers. Wikipedia is not a soapbox, an advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web directory. It is not a dictionary, a newspaper, or a collection of source documents; that kind of content should be contributed instead to the Wikimedia sister projects.

Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.
We strive for articles that document and explain the major points of view in a balanced and impartial manner. We avoid advocacy and we characterize information and issues rather than debate them. In some areas there may be just one well-recognized point of view; in other areas we describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context, and not presenting any point of view as "the truth" or "the best view". All articles must strive for verifiable accuracy: unreferenced material may be removed, so please provide references. Editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions do not belong here. That means citing verifiable, authoritative sources, especially on controversial topics and when the subject is a living person.

Wikipedia is free content that anyone can edit, use, modify, and distribute.
Respect copyright laws, and do not plagiarize sources. Non-free content is allowed under fair use, but strive to find free alternatives to any media or content that you wish to add to Wikipedia. Since all your contributions are freely licensed to the public, no editor owns any article; all of your contributions can and will be mercilessly edited and redistributed.

Editors should interact with each other in a respectful and civil manner.
Respect and be polite to your fellow Wikipedians, even when you disagree. Apply Wikipedia etiquette, and avoid personal attacks. Find consensus, avoid edit wars, and remember that there are 6,908,148 articles on the English Wikipedia to work on and discuss. Act in good faith, and never disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. Be open and welcoming, and assume good faith on the part of others. When conflict arises, discuss details on the talk page, and follow dispute resolution.

Wikipedia does not have firm rules.
Rules in Wikipedia are not carved in stone, as their wording and interpretation are likely to change over time. The principles and spirit of Wikipedia's rules matter more than their literal wording, and sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making an exception to a rule. Be bold (but not reckless) in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes. Prior versions of pages are saved, so any mistakes can be corrected.

You might want to watch this (after clicking "show", click the bottom bar of the video then click the "play" button):

Verifiability and Neutral Point of View
File:Verifiability and Neutral point of view (Common Craft)-600px-en.ogv

And one more important thing:

Copyright
Remember, your university's honor code probably says that they can expel you for plagiarizing another person's copyrighted material. You're a college student. You're expected to be old enough to know how to write a paper without willy-nilly copying what someone else already said, even just a few paragraphs (unless you quote it or otherwise make it clear that you're saying what someone else said). If you have trouble with that, please ask. Ask your professor, ask your campus and/or online ambassador, ask your student resource and tutorial center on campus, we're all here to help you.

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

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

Response to Banaticus

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

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

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

Re the wall of text, that was why I put it in collapsible tables. Students have to click to expand each section, so they shouldn't feel like they're getting hit with a wall of text. However, the 5 principles is still lengthy, so I've just gone back and put each of the five sections into their own collapsed table. As it turns out, it's possible to put images in table headers, so it still looks "pretty". :) In my admittedly somewhat short experience with the Wikipedia adopt-a-user program, I start with something that basically says, "this is Wikipedia, here's what it's about, write me something a brief statement about each of the five pillars I've linked here". Adoptees then read and summarize the five pillars in a post and we jump right into more classes, like how to edit, etc.

Required
Optional

Those 8 courses were courses that I rewrote after I took them from Addshore who took them from Tiptoety who took them from Hersfold. I don't know where Hersfold got them. I keep forgetting about rewriting the latter three, though, which is why it looks like there's nothing there at the moment. They were designed to be "courses"; material is presented, then there's an assignment at the end. Banaticus (talk) 06:37, 7 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Completion Metrics

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

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

Shared accounts

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

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

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

Linking wp:students

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

Irrelevant or unrelated to the subject being dealt with.

Of external origin.

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

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

@Biosthmors: The meaning I had in mind was basically the second one listed at Wiktionary: not essential [...]. Students will end up at that training page because they are trying to complete the training, and I've tried to minimize the number of links throughout the training to keep people from getting lost or wandering through too many rabbit holes. For newcomers, the received wisdom is that too many choices and too many links easily become overwhelming; a large part of the purpose of the trainings is to provide a very linear path to becoming familiar with Wikipedia. Especially at the top of the landing page, I don't think a link to that long and multi-purpose essay makes sense. (I think it's a really useful page, but not where we want students to start off). If it's simply intended as a redirection note for people who put in "WP:STUDENT" when they were looking for WP:ASSIGN, I don't think that's necessary.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. Thanks Sage. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:26, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And Sage, one day I'll go through all the modules. One day! Maybe we could have four pages of templates so that each of the four training modules appear as one long page? This could ease analysis, feedback, and improvements. Does that presentation of the training modules exist somewhere? (Sorry I might have asked that one before.) If you ever get a down moment and you're bored and motivated, maybe you could create that. =) Perhaps I could make some edits for you somewhere. Like filing that bug... and maybe some others as well. Best. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:35, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

@Biosthmors: This page was compiled for a different purpose—importing the whole training to other wikis—and doesn't go through in quite the easy-to-browse way you have in mind, but it does have all the slides on one page (along with pages that are part of the training): Wikipedia:Training/Meta.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:41, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) pls notify me (i.e. {{U}}) while signing a reply, thx 14:43, 23 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sisterprojects

I think it would be a good idea to add some information about Wikimedia sisterprojects. When I first contributed to Wikipedia, my content was deleted because it wasn't 'Encyclopedie Waardig' (Encyclopedia Worthy?). Then I discoverd the wikiversity where adding content is not restricted by a lot of rules. I think a lot of people will like the sisterprojects more than Wikipedia Timboliu (talk) 21:46, 1 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We will help you if you have the idea to do it right my dear Umminjibir (talk) 01:53, 24 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Change in videos?

This page is not easy to edit so I thought that I would post here first before making changes.

I prefer other videos to the ones currently shared at the bottom. Two videos use "ragtag" and "Wikipedians are weird" branding for the Wikimedia community, which I feel is contrary to the image that Wikipedians outside of the Wikimedia Foundation and software development have wanted. I want an image of Wikipedia which is inclusive of all kinds of people and promotes identification with the mainstream, because Wikipedia is mainstream. Outsider branding such as presented in those videos contributes to lack of diversity in the Wikimedia community.

We have some videos thoughtfully created in the context of communications professionalism. Other candidates for videos which we might include any of the videos at en:User:VGrigas (WMF), including these:

In my opinion, the videos currently on the page are noticeably more casual than the rest of this training module. Using more trimmed videos with a message would be an improvement. Blue Rasberry (talk) 17:09, 9 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Outdated information re: Visual Editor

Hi. I use this tutorial for my editing students, but the info on the Visual Editor under Basics of Editing is outdated, as the VE is no longer in beta. It appears this section is transcluded from another, but I do not know enough about this process to find the original. I am happy to update it if someone can point me in the right direction. Marti2cs (talk) 13:49, 15 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Articles without any sources

I see there are now links from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:All_articles_lacking_sources to filter by topic.

So I wonder whether that could be added to the training about finding an article to improve? For example I clicked the physics link and was amazed that there are hundreds of physics articles without any cites at all Chidgk1 (talk) 15:07, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yours is a good idea but I fear it won't be adopted. The WEF and its representatives have made individual articles their key metric and hence the vast public often see individual articles as a matter of ownership. From the many in-person events I've done, new editors seem to prefer starting from scratch with their own narrative rather than adding sources to an extant article, which is a shame. Chris Troutman (talk) 18:00, 30 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1 That's weird Maxwell Ahuahey (talk) 02:52, 9 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

How to plublish

The only way to get what you deserve to learn more for the bright future PHEMELO NCHE (talk) 15:36, 15 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]