JMungall
Joined 15 December 2015
Latest comment: 1 month ago by EMsmile in topic Student editor quality issues
Welcome!
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Teaching through Wikipedia: politically incorrect perspectives and advice edit
Thinking about using Wikipedia as part of your course? Doing so gives students experience integrating technical knowledge and in copy-editing, both relevant to their professional development. In terms of implementation, here are my observations based on several years of experience.
- The most important step is the selection of topics that allow students to contribute new content. The instructor should make sure that good general sources exist on the assigned topics, preferably reviews and textbooks. A major part of the learning experience comes from students re-describing or summarizing what they read from these broad sources.
- Students should be graded on the quality of their content, not the quantity.
- Peer review (by fellow students) is a joke, how can a fellow student critique an article on topics that they barely fathom, not to mention dealing with conflict of interest in grading their friends?
- Bear in mind that editors at Wikipedia are not supposed to serve babysitters or graders for your class. We often, even routinely, erase everything that classes contribute, especially when the instructor is uninvolved.--Smokefoot (talk) 02:16, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Student editor quality issues edit
Hello,
One of the students in your course, Ghostpants321 added over 31,000 bytes of disruptive, subjective, poorly formatted, poorly researched, and grossly misspelt edits to the Sea rewilding article. This was previously commented by Ian from Wiki Ed but the disruptive edits continued after this. I have reverted all of them as they are in violation of Wikipedia editing guidelines and, frankly, deleterious to the article itself. I have also requested page protection for the article so that this persistent, disruptive editing will not continue; I am going to check other edits from this class for quality control purposes. As @Smokefoot said above, other editors will erase anything and/or everything that the class contributes if the edits are detrimental to Wikipedia as a project. Please be (more) involved in your students' editing practices and assure that this does not happen again. Kazamzam (talk) 20:00, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
- @Kazamzam and Ian (Wiki Ed): Part of the problem is that Wikipedia editors, including those that supposedly advise on this process, are too busy congratulating themselves and so busy enabling this garbage. They have lost sight of the main point of wikipedia, which is good info. --Smokefoot (talk) 00:46, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
- @Kazamzam and @Ian (Wiki Ed). I have had a look and I agree that Ghostpants321 created a train wreck and I thank you for correcting that. I've been browsing the other students' contributions this evening and I'm finding that most of them look pretty good. I have a teaching assistant who manages the Wikipedia assignment so I have not been on top of it.
- I didn't get any comment from Ian on this subject. If he had commented to me I certainly would have acted sooner.
- Thanks for your work tracking and correcting the student edits. I've asked the TA to look more closely at the quality of material that has been moved out of the sandbox.
- In general, I would point out that the practice of encouraging professors to get students to work on Wikipedia will inevitably lead to some poor work getting moved out of sandboxes before instructors have had time to correct it. In the balance Wikipedia has determined that this is worth the risk, because it trains a large pool of potential new editors on Wikipedia. I agree with that assessment and I don't regret having trained nearly 300 students on Wikipedia over the past 8 years, but I can certainly see how I could be doing a better job of riding herd on them. I have not been aware of an expectation that I would be going into the main pages and editing each student's edits myself, but maybe I've missed an important message.
- I might suggest that Wikipedia change the process so that student work cannot be moved out of the sandbox until it has been approved by an instructor. This way the bulk of the students' edits would be trapped off the main page until it had been corrected, and at least then the work that made it onto the main page would be done to the standard of a graduate student rather than an undergrad.
- thanks for your comments and corrections. JMungall (talk) 01:50, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
- @JMungall - thank you very much for your response. To clarify, there is no expectation that you as the instructor would be going to the main pages to individually review and verify the students' edits. I'm not sure what the quality control and assurance processes are for WikiEd courses but it was surprising to me that this volume of material made it to the main page without some form of oversight - you as the listed instructor are the first point of contact I went to.
- While I am very impressed by your work with so many students-turned-editors, I have to disagree on the other students' contributions. I have gone through 11 (thus far) articles assigned to the students and found mistakes, from spelling and grammar to POV-statements to things that straight up don't make sense, in every article, with Effects of climate change on the water cycle being particularly egregious. I think the issue is that, from what I've seen of other WikiEd courses, the teaching method is "rewriting" the articles or at least large sections of them in the editor's sandbox and then overwriting the existing article. From a current editor perspective, this is frustrating because it creates a lot of unnecessary work to undue, but from a new editor perspective, this is not a great approach for teaching people how to edit - it's not collaborative, it limits opportunities for mentorship, growth, and revision, it doesn't offer an opportunity to build consensus, it doesn't include much use of the talk page until after the edits have already been made, etc. It misses out on a lot of the BEST parts of editing.
- I'm not involved in WikiEd so this is my limited perspective on a much broader issue, but it's also feedback I've heard from other editors. I can't comment on the sandbox approval process (@Ian (Wiki Ed), any idea if this is feasible?) but for my money, it might be worth looking into something more like the Articles for Creation process where students can pick a topic related to the course and build a new article on their own with feedback from the AfC editors who are super experienced and can offer a lot of feedback on the how-to of editing while the instructor(s) and TA(s) can work more on content. For example, one of your students was assigned the topic of ore shoots, which does not appear to exist. Perfect opportunity for them and in my opinion, writing an article is one of the BEST ways to learn the ancient WikiWays. I have a few drafts I'm working on currently and would be happy to discuss further. Much obliged for the work you and your eight years of students have done. I'll try to be a little nicer in my edit summaries going forward; if there is anything really flagrant, I'll let you know. Best, Kazamzam (talk) 04:05, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
- Hi @Kazamzam, @EMsmile, @Ian (Wiki Ed): I would like to follow up on this thread and the related on on the page about the water cycle.
- I'm glad someone has finally reached out to me on this matter. I have always used the Wiki Ed package and their online training to get the students started, and having never received any feedback from mainstream Wikipedia editors I've never thought there was much of a problem. The students are told repeatedly to avoid copying entire articles in and to use the Talk pages but I see that they are not all getting this message or perhaps simply don't understand. Our students are often pretty clueless but with the right training and motivation I find that most of them are capable of good work. On the other hand some of them are simply lazy and looking to get credit for the minimum possible amount of attention to details - people like that are hard to work around but maybe keeping their efforts restricted to the sandbox would be helpful.
- Upon reflection I'm realizing here that normally the people making edits on Wikipedia are a self-selected group of people who want to improve the transfer of knowledge (with or without personal axes to grind) but when I throw forty students in and tell them they need to do this to pass my course, I'm bringing in a set of editors with a different set of motivations that only partially intersect with those of all the other editors. Some will share your urges to make Wikipedia better, but some are just trying to get by without any sense of the importance of the project.
- It seems that the main issue with the water cycle article was simply that the student made all the changes in a copy of the article in the sandbox and then copied the revised article in to replace what had already been there - the content has not changed all that much but it looks as if the entire article has been replaced. I can see how that would be irritating to the previous editors of that article, but if we tell students to do all their work in the sandbox then this sort of result is probably inevitable - what needed to be done differently in this case was that the only things changed in the main page should have been the edits, rather than copying the edited version in to replace all the original text. But once the student has done all that work in the sandbox it is not going to be easy for them to see where the incremental changes were made.
- I suggest that we need a track-changes tool in the sandbox so the students can work in the sandbox but then only shift what is new into the main page. Maybe there is one, but I can't find it. Alternatively I can just tell the class to take their edits entirely offline and work in Word with Track Changes on, and then move each change into the main page individually. The problem there is that the instructors can't see what they are doing from within Wikipedia.
- Anyway I want to make this work better next time (I'll probably only be doing this one more time, next winter, before I shuffle off into admin and ultimately retirement). I will follow up the links you've suggested and I'll look for more guidance from @Ian (Wiki Ed). It's too late to change the outcome this year (and to be fair, it wasn't all bad!) but the creation of a more comprehensive set of tutorials on the effective use of Talk pages, submission of proposals to Talk pages before editing on the main pages, on careful tracking of changes to prevent wholesale replacement of text, and on establishing stricter guidelines for professors regarding the correction of work before it goes into the main pages, all might be helpful to my class next year and to others in my situation. I'll create those tutorial materials myself and try to share them with the Wiki Ed group, but input from people like yourselves before I put changes into effect for next year will make my efforts a lot more useful.
- I hope you'll all weigh in with suggestions.
- thanks JMungall (talk) 19:22, 18 April 2024 (UTC)
- Hi JMungall, great to read your thoughtful reflections here! You are probably the first professor I've ever come across who's reacted to feedback in such a positive manner. I've reached out to a few of them over the years (to point out issues with their student as editors) but usually got no response. Usually no, or very little responses from the students either. And none of them ever stuck around after their course assignments finished (or at least I didn't notice). In the field of climate change articles there is so much work to be done and students could be a great resource if only their goals, the course goals and Wikipedia goals fully aligned...
- In general, I tend to tell them to rather edit the smaller articles, like the "climate change in country X" articles, rather than the bigger ones, like climate change adaptation.
- The article effects of climate change on the water cycle is a smaller one so that was a good one to pick. But the process of copying everything back across from the sandbox clearly didn't work well. I am doubtful that sandbox work can work well at all because what if the live article is continued to be edited while the students works on an older version in their sandbox? I think it's probably better if they work directly in the main live article but always incrementally. Lots of small changes so that other editors can follow rather than a big change in one go.
- Are the students advised to work in their sandboxes? I think this only works for either new articles or when it's about completely new sections. But not when it's content that will be interwoven with content in existing articles.
- I am all for student editing in principle. I see great potential. And it really hurts me when I see it not going to plan, for whatever reason.
- Like I said on the talk page of effects of climate change on the water cycle we should examine how Olle does the teaching for his students in Sweden because they seem to produce very useful content most of the time. See his dashboard of courses.
- By the way, retired academics are the best when it comes to contributing to Wikipedia. I hope you'll hang around even if your retirement is not too far off. :-) I've interacted with several retired academics and some have been wonderful and generous with their time and telling me which articles to modify how. For example Kevin Trenberth (he's not editing himself but he's sent me marked up Word docs of Wikipedia articles which I have then edited together with him / for him). EMsmile (talk) 20:37, 18 April 2024 (UTC)