Wikipedia talk:Assignments

Comment by Ocaasi

"The person directing the assignment is responsible for the edits made as part of that assignment. They should ensure they have the time, degree of competence on-wiki and subject-knowledge in order to review and correct such edits. They are responsible for training their assignees to the level where they are competent to carry out the assignment. They will be held to account if the assignment itself is misguided, or if assignees cause problems that are not resolved. When the person directing the assignee is doing so as part of their employment, then the employing company or institution may also be held responsible."

I think this is slightly overbroad. I'd argue that the key is not responsibility since all editors are individually responsible for their accounts; instead, I think the focus should be on harm reduction. By ensuring proper instruction and competence, providing narrowly scoped assignments with periodic review, and by engaging with the community before, and as problems arise...harm can be reduced. We should really be codifying best practices, not just creating a sledgehammer to beat down the bad actors.

I think the balance of interests is between the freedom for a class to learn as they go, just like regular editors do, and the risks of damage being scaled due to the group nature of these assignments. It would be reasonable for assignments to more actively scrutinized, but I don't think we really have a mechanism to deal with outright failures. Blocking a single professor is not a useful response. A letter to an academic institution may be persuasive, but if we're spending our time cleaning up messes and doing damage control, we've frankly already failed.

I acknowledge there are going to be individuals who refuse to institute such appropriate procedures, and for them we need to be responsive and firm. But I don't think that assigning responsibility to the course leaders is a meaningful or enforceable notion. I just don't see how it would work in practice.

I also think that we should work with the broader Education Program to create a damage response strategy. That organization may be able to bring more weight to bear than just English Wikipedia editors. Just my thoughts, I'm glad you're working on this in a proactive fashion. Ocaasi ^{t | c} 21:00, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

A response strategy would be great. Not just "damage" response but also "newbie influx response" -- the issue of dealing with an influx of newbies has been of continuous interest on wikipedia. – SJ + 23:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Regarding edits made as part of an assignment as similar to that of newbie volunteers is the most fundamental mistake I see being made time and again by those defending the education programme. Until the difference is appreciated little progress will be made to reconcile the volunteer community with the education programme. Colin°^Talk 09:17, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

1700

Can this not be turned around to make it useful to Wikipedia. Perhaps the local chapter could have members meeting the academic institute. I look at this programme as an asset to Wikipedia. I see these numbers as a fantastic resource. I've tried to touch base with academics twice, once in Mumbai[1] and another time at Ahmednagar[2] I came here following the link provided at AN/I. I very strongly feel that the academician needs to be "converted" to understand Wikipedia's five pillars. I'm watching this page. Wikipedia needs to engage with them. Yogesh Khandke (talk) 05:37, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. – SJ + 23:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I agree with the "converted" aspect. Those running assignments need to be Wikipedians or at the very least employ Wikipedians. Without that, we get the issues we've seen with the UoT class. A Wikipedian would not have set that assignment. Nor would they have thought that hundreds (maybe thousands) of willing volunteers would gladly correct their students work for them. Colin°^Talk 09:22, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Intention

It is my hope that this, or something like it, becomes policy. Wikipedia policies do not currently cope with the situation where the editor cannot and should not bear full responsibility for their edits or cannot be held accountable for those edits (because, for example, their account was only used for a day). We need to shift some of this responsibility onto those setting the assignments. Colin°^Talk 18:03, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

As you know, I'm very interested in this too, and would also like to see a policy or guideline eventually come out of this. I'm going to try to see if this page and WP:ASSIGN can become better aligned with one another, with the goal of eventually having a policy or guideline here, that would be supplemented by additional information at the other page.

To that end, I think we should work on making this page compatible with being about things that can be enforced by administrators: if you fail to do things this way, you can be blocked or banned. That will take some thought, and there's a long way to go. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:13, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Per here, I'm pretty much in agreement with you both. Flyer22 (talk) 19:06, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Blocks and bans are not the right tools here. Clarifying the full editorial workflow, and showing groups of contributors how they can help contribute to all parts of that workflow, should help. – SJ + 23:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

The "blocked or banned" part of Tryptofish's comment somehow didn't sink in properly for me; I feel like I overlooked it. I only agree with the student(s) being blocked if the editing falls under WP:Disruptive editing. WP:BAN is a different matter; I doubt any of the students would need to be banned. Flyer22 (talk) 04:05, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm at a loss to understand the "full editorial workflow" comment. Wikipedia is rightly always reluctant to block and ban but these remain our ultimate decision in the face of disruption. Here the disruption is being made by those setting the assignment, and repeating the assignment in the face of clearly terrible results and community displeasure. The individual students haven't broken WP policy, nor would our existing sanction mechanisms be any use (their accounts last for minutes). Colin°^Talk 09:26, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure blocking a prof or TA who also rarely edits would be all that effective. Re: workflow -- once a teacher finds the relevant policy page, I think it would be effective for the page to lay out "how to contribute meaningfully" and "unintended costs of new bulk edits". Then each class can visualize ways to contribute that are a net help.

If this fails there are better recourses than blocking the prof's account. (Students should definitely not be autoblocked).

• Posting a geonotice for logged-in users at the uni's IP, pointing them to a discussion page (that would get attention quickly)
• Emailing the prof, pointing them to a "class remediation" tutorial ("how to clean up after your class")
• Contacting a nearby ambassador, asking them to visit the prof in person and find a TA to take on remediation duties

– SJ + 17:52, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Let me please clarify that I wasn't arguing that I want to see people getting blocked or banned! That wasn't my point. Instead, my point is that this is what policy is about: stuff that is expected of all Wikipedians, and where non-compliance leads to policy enforcement. If instead the best approach is one of "best practices", such as contacting professors and ambassadors, then we are in guideline territory. I think Colin wants policy, but other editors here are pushing instead in the direction of guidelines. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:38, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Alternatives

I think a simple guideline for teachers of this form would be helpful:

• Ask every student to go through an on-wiki tutorial - at the end of which they have auto-generated a userpage, corrected a typo, added an image, reverted a copyvio.
• Assign one "moderator" for every 9 students asked to edit. The moderator's task should be reviewing the edits of the others, helping them to meet editorial, copyright, and citation standards.
• Assign one "meta-moderator" for every 9 students asked to moderate (and no fewer than 1). Their task should be maintaining a project page describing the class's work & progress, and responding to questions about it.

– SJ + 23:32, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

This is a policy proposal, not a guideline. See WP:Assignments for student editors for a guideline, where your suggestion can be considered. It isn't part of this proposal to suggest/dictate the practicalities of how the prof/ambassadors/assistants/students arrange their assignments. The point of this policy proposal is to set some principles wrt assignments that the community can agree on. Colin°^Talk 07:07, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

This draft reads like a combination of the two. It is proscriptive, down to a number of practicalities: specifying what roles the 'director' should take, and what roles the 'assignee' should take. It's not clear to me that these need to be so distributed. For instance, many of the roles specified in this draft as duties of the director could be handled by student moderators. Similarly, students could be encouraged to post suggested changes to talk pages, or post suggested new pages in their user space (I don't see why you demand that the end result must be a direct improvement to main-namespace pages - that's a much stronger constraint than "don't use WP as a content-free wiki sandbox"). – SJ + 10:36, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Well it is very much still a draft. I think some of the work it needs is in being able to delegate responsibility. But one can't just say "I've delegated responsibility to the students, who peer-review each other's work". One's delegate has to be capable of doing the job and if they clearly aren't then that comes back (in terms of responsibility) to the person directing the assignment.

Yes.

Normally when folk set assignments (whether in education or work) they have a clear idea how to judge the quality of the output, what is desirable. There are definitely assignments being conducted on WP where those directing them don't understand what is desirable (e.g. inserting a random factoid isn't desirable) or how to judge the quality (e.g. looking for reverts in the article history). Peer review by other newbies will only get one so far.

Why should an assignment be repeated if it doesn't improve main-namespace pages? We're here to build an encyclopaedia to be read by our readers. All other activity is a cost. Colin°^Talk 11:45, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Many contributions that end up improving the projects are not in themselves direct improvements to the main namespace. Anons or newbies have a hard time editing active articles directly, so they often provide comments or suggest alternatives: on talk pages, in their own userspace, or in discussions with others. Others make edits which are quickly modified (by virtue of using the wrong style or format). However, the end result after revision is often better than what came before.

Sustaining a community of people who know how to edit, and are not put off by it, is valuable independent of how useful their first few edits are. In years past, many people got started in ways that weren't immediately "main-space valuable" but over time found ways that were more valuable. This includes many people who are highly active today. If we push away all those who don't immediately find a way to both learn to edit and learn to be main-space constructive, we will lose all of those future contributors. A more complete measure would be whether the participants in a project improve pages, or help reuse Wikipedia meaningfully, over a ~2-year lifetime. – SJ + 21:31, 26 April 2013 (UTC)