User talk:Doc James/Recommendations

Some thoughts

I agree with the notion of coming up with a set of easily defined recommendations for the WMF. My thoughts on your nine:

1. Yes. A prof needs to be engaged on Wikipedia, and ideally to have been on Wikipedia him or herself for some time. I find it unsurprising that one recent rather spectacular failure should have involved an editor who had previously only edited the article about himself, and who essentially didn't edit during the semester, except at the very end to berate other Wikipedia editors for their unfriendliness. And yet much of the problems in that class came directly from the professor's set up (particularly the articles he chose for students to write).
2. Maybe. This, I think, depends on the course set-up. It would be interesting to see courses in which students were asked to (say) contribute to review processes or AfD discussions before they edited. But I'm not sure how that would work out, don't think it should be mandated, and of course it's not the way in which most editors begin on Wikipedia.
3. Yes. Absolutely.
4. Only relevant to some courses.
5. Yes. And more: they need to be taught *how* to paraphrase. More still: ultimately, a Wikipedia assignment can help students learn how to work with sources: how to evaluate them, and how and when to cite them. But I've learned that students need to be coached through this process. Note that as this should in part be the *aim* of using Wikipedia in a course, it can't necessarily be expected that students won't make mistakes at the beginning. But professors (and Campus or Wikipedia Ambassadors) need to be alert and on the ball from the outset.
6. Maybe. It depends on what you mean. I don't lay great stress on formatting, as I don't want students to be bogged down in Wiki-specific coding. Normally I go around and tidy things up. So long as all the relevant information is present, I'm not too bothered about the details of formatting. But again, professors (and Ambassadors) need to be alert and on the ball.
7. Yes. Absolutely. This is a sine qua non. If a professor isn't willing to be available and active on Wikipedia, then the WMF should refuse to offer him or her any resources.
8. Yes.
9. Maybe. I'm hesitant to suggest that the WMF tells professors how to teach their courses. Better to suggest this as a matter of "best practice."

HTH. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 04:39, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Another problem is that they need to tag talk pages as part of an educational project, so other editors can understand why these uninformed edits start happening, and where to take complaints and issues. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:53, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Oh yes, absolutely. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 18:09, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

Some thoughts

I read the list overleaf and my first thought was "geez, that would have eliminated about 99% of all of our current editors, since very very few of us were competent in any of these areas when we first edited." I think we're missing an important part of the balance here. First off, if we expect new users (whether students in a course, or someone completely random) to enter at this level of competence, we're not going to get new users. This level of competence isn't usually seen until weeks or even months into a wiki-career. It's why most new users start off as wikignomes or as recent changes patrollers — or try to edit topics only to be chased away for "doing it wrong".

At the same time, I really do agree that if professors are going to use Wikipedia editing as a learning tool, they need to have a sufficient level of competence to at least recognise the errors of their students - and absent additional resources such as campus or online ambassadors, the participating class size should not be larger than the professor can monitor with respect to reviewing the wiki-editing. As well, most wikiprojects are much less active than, for example, Wikiproject Medicine; in fact, some are essentially moribund. Unless there are sufficient editors involved in the wikiproject who are also interested in helping to educate and develop new users, linking students up to them may not be terribly helpful. I do appreciate the need for medical articles to ascribe to WP:MEDRS, but would suggest a more general statement pointing to the need to understand WP:RS generally; the majority of students are not working on medical articles, and the field of medical scholarship is quite different from the scholarship in other fields.

There's a clear need for rather drastic improvement to process by which we're inducting students (in particular) and other new users into the project. We, as an entire community, need to help them to understand the need for referencing their statements. (Simplifying the manner in which references are added would help a lot here, because I can think of at least five different referencing formats - and using the "wrong" one on an established article tends to result in reverts for formatting rather than content reasons, which is a net negative for the article, the new user and the experienced user.) We need to help them understand the use of the talk page - and we need to reinforce to experienced users to actually have discussions there, not just in edit summaries. We need to help users learn how to use wiki-markup, which is probably the most difficult thing to teach about editing here. I do really like the idea of adding a template to the article talk page to flag those articles involved in educational projects; I hope that might encourage experienced users to be a little more kind. It would be an excellent idea for the WMF educational projects group to develop a "user manual" and "cheat sheet" as well as an in-class, hands-on orientation session for classes that will be participating. I'll note that the few times I'm in a position to greet a new user, I've consistently used the "welcome" template that includes cheat sheets, and I still refer to those pages from time to time.

Sometimes we forget that one of the fundamental objectives of the Wikimedia family of projects is to educate. That doesn't just mean providing educational resources like Wikipedia or Wikisource; it means educating people on how to participate in these projects. When most of us were new users, we made mistakes, and someone usually took the time to help us, to explain our error and how to avoid it in the future. This used to be done with actual words (i.e., without templates), and it made a big difference. I think we need to look within ourselves to solve some of these issues. Between templates, reverts instead of improvements, and frequently surly experienced users, we're doing a terrible job of drawing in new users and enculturating them to the Wikipedia way. Risker (talk) 06:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

One of the difficulties is that none of the users of this class replied to any of the talk page comments as noted here. If a class of students is only going to make a single edit and never return why would we be leaving long hand written comments... The first edit to my talk page involved a number of templates and I stuck around [1]. I am not sure this is the issue.

What we are talking here is educating editors before they begin so that their initial experience is more positive and thus they will more likely stay.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:07, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Risker, I think the recommendations are a response to a particularly flawed assignment (analysed here). The only recommendation I have for that kind of assignment is don't do it. As you note, it takes quite some time to get up to speed on WP. An assignment that has a bonus-point value to the student of just a few hours is going to have to be very limited in its expectations and highly geared towards causing minimal damage should the student not invest the effort into doing a good job. And I fully agree that the teachers need to be on WP as full editors with experience before running any courses. I mean, it is like expecting your students to write an article for an English newspaper when you only speak French and your experience of journalism is limited to reading the weekend paper.

If the newbies are at a beginner level in both their WP experience and their knowledge of the subject they are writing about, then they shouldn't be expected to add quality content to difficult articles on WP. There are perhaps other tasks such students could do: some involving editing but also some just involving an analysis of WP content vs policy requirements and accuracy.

You note that many projects are less active that medicine. Even medicine isn't that active. We were fortunate that only 10% of the 1700 students actually made content contributions. It still took three editors many many hours to review those contributions (and ultimately most of the contributions were removed). If that assignment had actually been "successful" then we'd have been overwhelmed and many psychology articles would remain damaged.

I don't agree with tagging article talk pages where there isn't a significant and prolonged writing exercise going on.

Wrt being surly towards newbies. It is up to the course organisers to ensure they set an assigment that is likely to be well received by the community and be enthusastically performed by the students. They also have to take into account their own and the community's resources to manage the assigment. In this flawed assigment, we had students who came, wrote and left. It is impossible to engage, tutor and encourage the newbies in such a situation. I believe there's a serious risk that flawed assigments will discourage students from editing Wikipedia. You say that many newbies do minor edits (such as punctuation fixes) when testing their feet. Well why isn't that the first class exercise? The important distinction is that you started editing WP on a purely voluntary basis and to the degree you felt comfortable with. Perhaps the reason why only 10% of the students in this assigment actually edited was because many didn't feel comfortable editing at that level. The second important distinction is that crap student coursework ends up in a drawer. On any course, there will be students of all abilities. On WP, the crap students edit just as much as the good students. We need to have some framework for handling this aspect and make sure mopping up the mess isn't a task that falls onto a few volunteers.

I am concerned that much that has been written about student editing equates them with newbies. As I noted above, there's totally different motivation driving their edits. The idea that a prof could recruit 1700 newbies to make content edits to psychology articles without support is greeted with open arms rather than horror. We need to stop equating our newbie experience (which is totally biased, because we're still here), or the experience of volunteer newbies, with student newbies. They are a different kind of editor population. And I suspect, many student editor accounts will end up being throwaway ones -- if the person does choose to remain on WP they will get their own account so the prof and their classmates don't know all about their obsession with Hugh Laurie, Dr Who or their taste in music. Colin°^Talk 10:25, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Risker, I agree with many of the comments above -- thinking of students as newbies is only partially correct. The ambassador program generally means they get handled in a much more friendly way than most new editors, but they generally do much worse than the average newbie -- both in terms of the quality of their edits, and in their willingness to interact with the community. Very few students have any interest at all in interacting; it's not going to improve their grade. Putting in enough work to build relationships with other editors and learn from them will improve their articles and hence their grades but that's far more work than they expect to put in. These classes are mostly indentured labour and while I think we can make the relationship work to the benefit of Wikipedia, particularly if we focus on the professors, they can't be thought of as just another class of new editor. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:58, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

The other flaw in the argument equating student editors with newbies is that they don't tend to stick around, so efforts to educate them and correct their faulty edits are a net drain on established editors and a waste of time. The time it takes to investigate and correct or revert their faulty edits, and then to try to educate them and engage them on talk, is orders of magnitude greater than what the student puts in, and further, the demotivating factor of having to spend one's time thusly can affect an established editor's work elsewhere. I have had one good experience (where the editors actually finally engaged on talk) at klazomania, but it is such an obscure topic that took weeks of my time, and the result is an article on a topic no one has ever heard of, no one cares about, and no one will ever read. I was dragged into correcting the article because of student edits, but fact is I ended up writing the fairly useless article myself because so much correction was needed, and I doubt any of those editors will stick around-- the motivating factors aren't there. I could have better spent my time. I'm still curious to hear from Jbmurray if a single one of his students is still editing Wikipedia. My comment about flagging talk pages is because I encountered articles that were being worked on in sandbox (wasted efforts) by more than one class at different universities-- they were working at cross purposes and without the benefit of oversight by established editors. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:06, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

Continued student editing

As noted above, it's hard to tell if students keep editing. There's no reason why they should use the same username, especially if they associate their class username with the university and a university project. Moreover, my sense is that rather than becoming regular editors, after an educational project on Wikipedia students simply feel happier with small edits here and there as an IP. But anyhow, here are student accounts that have been used after the assignment was over...

• created a new article (not a good one)
• one minor edit about the Vancouver Canucks
• worked on another educational assignment (with a colleague of mine)
• one minor clean-up edit
• created and worked on a new article
• some kind of test edit
• two minor edits
• one minor edit
• minor edits on everything from Lady Gaga to Newt Gingrich

So if educational assignments were really about turning students into regular editors, then on the face of it they are a dismal failure. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 18:10, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

So if few students keep their student accounts, or don't always edit under it even if they do, then it will be hard to gauge the success of this means of recruitment. It is also impossible to tell if the experience was a negative one. So I think we should ask some of the organisers of current and recent assignments to conduct an anonymous questionnaire of their students several months afterwards. They can ask how often they edit WP, whether they kept their user name, or edit as an IP or chose a new name, and how they felt about the assignment (positive, neutral, negative). Colin°^Talk 19:34, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

A questionnaire would sound a good idea. FWIW, my sense is that students' experience of these projects is overwhelmingly positive. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 16:28, 22 December 2011 (UTC)