Hosta

Archives

January 2015 - April 2015 May 2015 - August 2015 January 2016 - December 2016

Would you re-assess the article I created Serial rapist. It has been greatly improved by others and myself and is undoubtedly not a 'start' class article. Thanks,

Morrison Foster is also not a stub any longer.

Chest pain in children is not a start any longer.

Barbara (WVS) (talk) 02:23, 28 November 2016 (UTC) and[reply]

Barbara (WVS) (talk) 12:57, 10 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Barbara (WVS): Thanks. We were short-staffed for a little while so no reviewing took place, but I am maintaining a list that we will hopefully get to later this month. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:51, 10 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good to me, please don't feel like there is a rush. This stuff is not going anywhere. It is difficult to find anyone who will review my articles. Still not a huge deal. Did you see the article about Temple university wanting a visiting scholar? Oh yes, you are quoted in the Sunday Pittsburgh Post Gazette (I got my copy a day ahead of time).Barbara (WVS) (talk)

@Barbara (WVS): I'm not sure which article you mean regarding Temple. I saw one in the school paper, and of course the one I wrote on our blog, but those were a few months ago. They're looking for an experienced editor to articles on the history of Philadelphia, but haven't found the right person yet. If you happen to talk to a Wikipedian from the area that may be interested, send them my way. :) Regarding the Post Gazette, I looked for the article on the Post Gazette website but didn't see it. Is it a paper that doesn't post everything online? --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:18, 12 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Apparently, they don't post everything online. After my final exams, I will contact the reporter about that. I did scan a copy for myself but would need an email address to send it to if you wanted to see the jpg. Best Regards,

Barbara (WVS) (talk) 19:16, 12 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Barbara (WVS): Ah. Whenever you have the time, I'd love to see it (ryan [at] wikiedu [dot] org). Thanks. :) --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:38, 12 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

		Holiday greetings, you deserve
		An outstanding editor, you are. Keeping up the good work, much appreciated it is. The very best wishes for a joyful holiday are wished for you. Barbara (WVS) (talk)

I stalk a lot of pages, and your reply to the school librarian struck a chord. At Wikimedia UK we do a lot of editathons and over a couple of years I have developed a lot of paper material. The latest is deposited (hidden) at Commons:File:Women in Red Creating an article-8 Mar 2017.pdf, it was prepared for a Woman in Red event in Cambridge. It is not designed to be used as online training but it appears that some folk are using it that way. I can see that a High School Librarian might find it useful to support teacher... I have put dropbox links to a .odt at User:ClemRutter/training. If you want to use it as is- feel free, if you wish to customise it to form a Wiki-Ed project edition (with a dire warning about COI and suitable school based projects then I would be happy to cooperate. Please respond directly to my talkpage. ClemRutter (talk) 20:39, 28 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@ClemRutter: Thanks for this, and apologies for just replying now. I was hoping to have time to properly go through these materials before responding, but alas, I have not. These may be helpful when we do our next update of training and other materials, so I'll be sure to review. In the meantime, if you have particular ideas about how they may complement and/or how elements could be incorporated into our materials (e.g. training, handouts), such recommendations are always welcome. Thanks again. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:45, 17 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I saw your post on ANI with the class project mess. It seems a rather complex issue, and you'd had a lot to say on it, so I hope it's alright if I cover a few things too.

This isn't the first time I've run across issues with educational projects. I've helped to clean up copyvio issues before (I don't know if students are just used to plagiarizing and don't get caught or what, but experienced Wikipedians are some of the best copy detectors there are), and those same issues occurred with these projects. When I was spot checking them, sure enough, "Huh. This abruptly changes tone, it looks copied." Sure enough, it was. I'd generally expect students to understand what plagiarism is and how to avoid it, but maybe we need to improve on making clear it's just as unacceptable here as it is on any of their school projects.

I also, to be quite honest, really question the wisdom of the approach you seem to indicate was taken, of encouraging students to directly create new mainspace articles with no review. Selecting an appropriate topic, and then creating a workable article on it from the first edit, is hard. Doing a draft and having it reviewed is definitely a gentler way to ease new editors in, as is editing existing articles first to get an idea of what an article should look like. In this case, that approach led to a significant number of inappropriate POV forks.

Also, is there any kind of up-front "instruct the instructor" type process? In this case, the professor was making the situation a great deal worse, by handwaving away advice, attributing criticism to racism and sexism, and essentially encouraging the advocacy and the POV forking to "bring visibility" to whatever the students were writing. Especially in a sensitive area already subject to discretionary sanctions, that's going to cause a major issue. Indeed, if the disruption continues, discretionary sanctions might come into play. I'm very surprised they haven't already, to be quite honest. I can't imagine topic banning a student from the area they're supposed to edit in would be a good outcome for anyone.

And that leads to my final point. There was discussion of whether there should be different advice for instructors considering having their students edit in highly charged areas. There should be different advice for that, and the answer should be a large, red, blinking, bolded, 72-point "DO NOT DO THAT." Those areas are minefields even for experienced editors. Throwing students, who probably for the most part have never edited Wikipedia and don't know how to, into an area where everything they do will be under a microscope and subject to harsh criticism and potential sanctions, is absolutely not fair to them, and is also not fair to the community spending time to deal with the fallout. When teaching first-year chemistry students, you don't immediately put them to working with nitroglycerin and hydrofluoric acid. You work them up to it. Now, if students have already done introductory Wikipedia-based classes and have gotten a feel for how to edit neutrally, determine if a reference is reliable, engage in discussion productively, etc., they might then be ready to enter more difficult areas (very carefully). But don't just throw them straight into the hardest thing possible.

And, finally, I think it's necessary for students to have a firm understanding that being on a student project gives them no exemption from rules and policies here. I've run across that on some occasions, when students writing for a project wrote promotional material, essentially fan pages, and I had to G11 them. They were astonished and had the idea they could "write whatever" because it was under an educational project. Fortunately, most of them were receptive to advice and did successfully rewrite what they did, but it still clearly surprised them. So, I hope that might be some useful ideas for how to improve education projects, so both students and the editors who run across them can have a better experience. (I'll also ping EJustice, the instructor here, in case they have any thoughts from the other side of it.) Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 15:02, 17 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Seraphimblade: Thanks for the message.

encouraging students to directly create new mainspace articles with no review - I may not have been clear here, as nearly the opposite is the case. Perhaps my explanation of why we don't use AfC was misleading, as the alternative isn't simply creating articles but having staff Content Experts review and/or work with instructors and students to help them review each other's. Most students do not create new articles. Of those that do, only a relatively small subset do so in controversial areas. When we begin working with a class engaging in controversial areas, we typically do recommend expanding rather than creating, and we offer best practices for those who are nonetheless intent to create a new article. As for review and creating a workable article on it from the first edit, have you had a chance to look through the timeline/instructions students are given? There are opportunities and suggestions throughout the assignment/materials to request feedback from the class's Content Expert before moving out of their sandbox. While it's in the sandbox, students are also reviewing each other's and continually improving it until eventually going live (see weeks 6-9).

is there any kind of up-front "instruct the instructor" type process - there's instructor training, and other guidance is provided by way of our assignment design and staff support. There are also certain fundamentals that we consider big red flags (and, if inflexible, dealbreakers) in terms of providing support -- assignments that involve grading based on what "sticks" in an article, requiring original research, creating articles in too short of a time period, breaching experiments, very large classes (this hasn't typically applied to multiple sections of the same course), clear mismatches between class level and subject complexity, etc. There are others, and then there are several other aspects of classes that are cause to flag the class as important to keep an eye on, and which call for more specialized advice, but which aren't necessarily dealbreakers. This sort of advice is the kind that isn't so urgent to communicate to everyone so isn't all in the training. For example, how to edit medical articles (although in this case we do have a special training module), keeping in mind WP:MEDRS and WP:MEDMOS, or how to work with controversial subjects (I've already mentioned some of the precautions we advise in such classes). But as anywhere, we cannot force anybody to do (or not do) something. It's hard to know where the line is between what our preparation can and can't ensure/prevent. It seems like a lot of what people have suggested Wiki Ed do in this case did happen. But again, advice on ways our support can be improved are always welcome.

large, red, blinking, bolded, 72-point "DO NOT DO THAT." - We'll be discussing how to take more care in this respect, to be sure. Tell me if you disagree, but it seems the issue here wasn't simply the controversial area (for which students do receive special advice and often edit successfully), but a controversial area combined with the mission of the course (plus the more typical new user mistakes). An important lesson we take out of this is to pay more attention to course descriptions beyond just the subject area, and tailor the kind and extent of our support accordingly. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:41, 17 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Totally agree with this last point about tailoring the support and I think we're going to have really productive de-briefs come summer to flesh this out. But overall we've had a great experience with a lot of students learning a lot about neutrality, it's importance, particularly in today's social and political environment (Think "Alternate Facts"), and how hard it is, even for folks steeped in the world of creating neutral content like experienced WP editors, to tease out what's going on culturally, in editorial exchanges, and in what it takes on newbie and experienced people's part to bring certain topics up to snuff. Much respect! EJustice (talk) 17:52, 17 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Only three quick things to say here re: Seraphimblade, in order of importance...1) Discussing race and class is always controversial so we might as well say new editors shouldn't write about that at all, even if there's a fairly non-controversial 30+ year history of peer-reviewed research about environmental justice that sees virtually no coverage on Wikipedia. It's a big deal and has a lot to do with understanding and solving environmental problems. So it's educational content the world needs, provided by people trained to create it. In the spirit of being direct, do you think it would be acceptable for WikiEdu or Wikipedia guidance more generally to say up front, "don't write about race or class at all, newbies"? Thankfully the community's own guidelines are kind of the opposite of this (WP:BOLD). My frustration with the editors who have engaged negatively is their blindness to their own blindness on this front...their unwillingness to see how hard it is to get this stuff discussed neutrally and to engage positively in the effort to do so. Every time I read WP's guidelines, I am fortified that the intent is to be positive and engaged, so I'm sticking with that. 2) Thanks for your warnings about copyright and plagiarism. Students at a school like Berkeley (and probably any other University) have been having their work electronically checked for plagiarism since high school more than likely (and their work for Wikipedia will be checked for it at the end of the semester), and WikiEdu and Wikipedia guidelines are quite clear on copyright issues. One person checked about 40 of the class pages and found a total of 4 copyvio's. 2 were for government material and therefore not copyvios and 2 were, I believe "close paraphrases" of journalistic accounts (plagiarism, perhaps, not copyright violation, I'm checking on this). In the latter case more than 500 words were deleted as a result, even from the revision history so we have no way of comparing the early editorial work to see how to improve. 3 SeraphimbladeWould love to hear your experience of good ways to get educational content about racism, class, sexism more fleshed out on WP. Thanks again!EJustice (talk) 17:52, 17 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]