Sisipherr

I am now talking to myself. Sisipherr (talk) 21:57, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Please dont answer yourself as you'll have the first and second signs of madness right here if you do. Amortias (T)(C) 21:59, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

thanks much! I decided that I needed a less storied account to use while teaching editing as a professor rather than as a Wikipedian of the night. Turns out I'd already used this name to create an account 8 years ago. Handy. Sisipherr (talk) 05:28, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Sisipherr, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:

• Introduction and Getting started
• Contributing to Wikipedia
• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page and How to develop articles
• How to create your first article
• Simplified Manual of Style

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or click here to ask for help here on your talk page and a volunteer will visit you here shortly. Again, welcome! Amortias (T)(C) 22:01, 2 September 2014 (UTC)

Course pages and the Wiki Education Foundation

Hello!

I'm Ryan, classroom program manager with the Wiki Education Foundation. We're a small non-profit which supports higher education instructors and students in the US and Canada as they work on Wikipedia as part of a class assignment. I left a brief message in the thread at the education noticeboard but wanted to go into more detail here.

Classes we work with have "course pages", places on Wikipedia where students can enroll, where instructors can easily track their work, and where members of the community can go for more information about the class. You can see an example course page here: Education Program:Ball State University/History and Psychology (Spring 2015). That page was created using our Assignment Design Wizard, a tool which creates a draft of an assignment including timeline based on some specifics you provide about your class.

In addition to the technical tools we have a variety of teaching and learning materials available electronically and in print. Most of them are available at the "for instructors" section of our website. There are even some subject-specific handouts there, including one for editing psychology articles.

We also provide staff support. As classroom program manager, I'm here to support instructors throughout the process and to provide general class support while our content experts help students with the material they contribute, providing feedback and guidance as they start editing.

If you'd like to know more, I'd be happy to talk to you here or, if you would prefer, you can email me at (ryan [at] wikiedu [dot] org). It sounds like it may be too late for us to help out this term, but hopefully you will experiment with a Wikipedia assignment in the future and we can talk about the various possibilities and best practices for doing so.

Thanks. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 03:42, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Ryan, thanks so much for contacting me! I'm Emi, a professor of Medical Writing and Rhetoric. It's about 1am over here, but I wanted to drop a quick question: Should we set up a course page in order to work on a Wikiversity Project? My main concern is protecting my students from having negative experiences that will turn them off of working with Wiki projects in the future. (The first time I worked on Wikipedia when I was a student back in 2004, my very first edit received an immediate negative response informing me that I "just had to be a girl to have screwed up Wiki code so badly." I was so horrified that I deleted that account and didn't try again for 2 years, so I know just how much a bad initial experience can discourage someone from trying again.) In the future, I'm hoping to find ways to get my students involved in Wikipedia, a project I support so strongly, without putting them in the line of fire. I'll do some research to see if there's any way to get our toes at least slightly wet in Wikipedia, after learning the basics in Wikiversity, without creating chaos for other editors. Sisipherr (talk) 05:08, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Hi Emi. Sheesh, sorry to hear about these experiences you've had.

While Wikipedia and Wikiversity are both Wikimedia projects, there's not a lot of overlap between them. Wikiversity has its own rules, its own administrators, its own programs, etc. As its primary aim is not to produce an encyclopedia, there's far less undoing of each other's work, I think. But I'm not familiar with the sorts of programs they have to support classes. The course page system and our organization are really only equipped to work with Wikipedia. If you do decide to keep working with Wikiversity, though, I can likely find some people for you to talk to there.

There's never going to be an excuse for the "just had to be a girl" type comments as it clearly runs afoul of Wikipedia's policy on civility. That's not to say it doesn't happen, of course, but there are enough volunteers now (vs. 2004) who don't go for that sort of thing that someone making such a comment on-wiki is more likely to be brought to task, I think. Gender issues in particular are handled more thoughtfully now than in 2004 and there are a whole lot of initiatives to increase the participation of women and others who don't fall into the typical white male demographic that forms most of the active editing base. If someone makes a sexist comment or an attack that has to do with you -- or a student -- as an editor, you can let me know and I can help you to take it through the proper channels.

I will say, however, that that doesn't mean your students won't be criticized. Subjects which are controversial or which deal with medicine or psychology in particular can be difficult to edit as there's much more of an emphasis on edits being correct the first time. That doesn't mean anybody's going to be blocked or the like, but it does mean that well intentioned edits might be reverted and a message left on their talk page explaining why. Some examples which can lead to this sort of thing include if they add content that doesn't cite a source, if a source is cited but it's a primary or old source, if they write in an informal or otherwise inappropriate tone, or tack large blocks of content to the top or bottom of an article.

A technique we've found to work really well is to have students work first in their sandbox (you should see a link to yours in the top-right part of the page), then solicit feedback on their work before actually making changes to the article. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:00, 10 April 2015 (UTC)