Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

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Course coordinator currently involved in an ArbCom case relating to a course they are teaching

There will likely be an ArbCom case (Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#Holocaust in Poland) relating to User:Chapmansh. To rehash the drama, Chapmansh/Shira Klein recently published an article in an academic journal [1] accusing several Wikipedia editors of coordinating offsite to distort facts relating to the Holocaust. This has prompted ArbCom to propose a case in which Chapmansh may be made a party. Needless to say, this is going to be a big case especially given that it involves Icewhiz.

The reason why I'm posting this to the education notice board is because User:Chapmansh is teaching the course Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Chapman University/Jewish Life from Napoleon to Hitler (Spring 2023). In past iterations of this course,[2] students have edited in the Holocaust topic area.

I would say that if Chapmansh coordinates editing offsite in the Holocaust topic area during this ArbCom case it will probably not be an enjoyable experience for the student editors. Regardless of whether there is a conflict of interest, the students will probably be under a microscope the entire time given how many people are involved in this case. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 16:58, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Oy. Well, at least given that the class clearly includes a lot of historical scope prior to the Holocaust, we could presumably direct Klein and her students to stick to the non-Holocaust stuff, at least for this semester? _signed, Rosguill ^talk 17:07, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@Rosguill: That's what I would imagine is the best choice here onwiki (as well as to avoid Poland). I'll ping User:Brianda (Wiki Ed) who is the Wiki Ed expert assigned to that course. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 17:21, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Pardon me for butting in, I saw this mentioned at WP:ARC and thought I could help by clarifying a few things. The topic area of the Arbcom case, and the journal article, is not "Holocaust", but "Holocaust in Poland". In Wikispeak, that's part of WP:APL. WP:APL has, since May 2020, been covered by (what we now call) WP:ARBECR, which means that non-extended-confirmed editors can't edit in that topic area. If you look at the "past iterations of this course" link by Chess above, none of the students listed are extended-confirmed, and none of them edited in the WP:APL topic area--all those articles are outside of WP:APL. In sum: apparently WikiEd students already stay out of the topic area, and have for a couple years. Levivich (talk) 17:58, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

@Levivich: That's true, though keep in mind offwiki coordination by Klein has come up during the ArbCom case. There's nothing wrong with student editors contributing to our coverage of the Holocaust, but the perception that Klein is trying to influence Wikipedia's coverage of certain topics by using her position is something that could be discussed during the case.

Regardless of whether or not this is true, student editors could very easily wander into a minefield they aren't remotely prepared for. Your claim that none of them edited in the WP:APL topic area isn't actually true. ZyerAbdullah123 appears to have removed someone else's talk page comment on Polish death camps during the 2021 course. [3]

While I doubt that was intentional and is very minor (not even worthy of anything beyond a gentle reminder), people have a habit of assuming bad faith during very controversial ArbCom cases. Chess (talk) (please use {{reply to|Chess}} on reply) 19:16, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

An unsupported claim of offwiki coordination was made by an involved party, it should not be repeated and has no bearing here. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:22, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Accidentally removing a talk page comment does not constitute editing in the topic area. And you say "trying to influence Wikipedia's coverage" as if it's a bad thing. I welcome scholars trying to "influence Wikipedia's coverage" by pointing out problems in that coverage. I welcome teachers trying to "influence Wikipedia's coverage" by teaching students how to edit. Levivich (talk) 19:35, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

Although an accidental removal is not topic area editing, I think the point is that these things attract excessive attention during controversial ArbCom cases, and it does no service to students, or to the students' educational experience, to unwittingly find themselves in the middle of that. It's not about whether or not the students do anything wrong, but rather, about trying to keep the students from getting needlessly caught up in wiki-drama. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:38, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

I think Levivich makes a valid point that due to not being e-confirmed, the students can't edit this area much even if they wanted to. On the other hand, there are still many minor articles related to this topic area which don't have the right protection level slapped in, I believe, so as Chess' correctly notes with their example, they may occasionally stumble into the "minefield". To add another example: in the companion piece that the authors published in a Polish newspaper a few days ago [4], they actually mentioned that Klein became interested in the Wiki-side of the narrative after one of her students editing the History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland article (which is now e-c portended but wasn't back in 2018) got into a dispute with an editor who told him not to cite historian Jan T. Gross (the authors erroneously claimed that editor was myself, while in fact that editor who criticized Gross was Xx236; meanwhile I defended Gross and helped the student, for which Klein thanked me - see Talk:History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland/Archive_4#Postwar_Antisemitism; that misattribution error confusing me with Xx236 already got fixed in the Polish news article which now sports a small correction note - one error down, dozens more to go, sigh). Anyway, the point I am making is that it is possible the students will occasionally run into issues, but I wouldn't worry to much about it, those have been and likely will be isolated incidents. Teaching experience on all sides, really. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:04, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

To be clear, nobody should be going around to stalk/hound these students' edits in the absence of clear evidence of (a) bad faith, or (b) significant policy violations. Their professor writing an article about a topic shouldn't affect the status of their students. The reality, however, is that students in this class will simply be more likely to run into this kind of problematic behavior, and should be aware of what they're getting into. For what it's worth, anyone following these students around and/or undoing their work will themselves be subject to heightened scrutiny, too. A good practice would be to encourage anyone who's wary of jumping in to just edit in userspace rather than article space, moving good content into articles after some review (a good practice with controversial subject areas regardless). But Chapmansh has run many Wikipedia assignments in the past, and likely knows a thing or two about editing controversial topics from both teaching and research, so I don't anticipate anything in this thread coming as a surprise. At the end of the day, if there's something the article and the arbcom case make clear, it's that there's room for improvement in Holocaust-related articles, and it would be great to have additional editors making policy-based improvements. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:07, 14 February 2023 (UTC)

I'll confirm here that User:Chapmansh's students will not be working on topics related to Poland. We at Wiki Education understand the sensitivity around this topic, and are working closely with Champansh to ensure students are adequately supported for any edits they make. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 01:33, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

New pages being created with invalid syntax that needs to be cleaned up

I'm hoping that this is the right place to get someone's attention about new pages that are being created with many wikitext syntax (Linter) errors. For example, this page was created by Chapmansh in October 2022, via a process described in the edit summary as "Updating course from dashboard.wikiedu.org". It was created with 23 Linter errors.

How can I track down the source of these syntax errors so that they can be avoided in the future? In addition to the syntax errors, there is a large amount of unnecessary text formatting (span tags specifying fonts, which is not necessary or recommended for normal pages on Wikipedia) that should ideally be removed. Thanks for any tips about tracking down the source of these problems. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:52, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Just a note that this seems to be the same series of class projects as in #Course coordinator currently involved in an ArbCom case relating to a course they are teaching, above. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:58, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Also, when I clicked to edit the page and fix the syntax errors, I found a big red edit notice that told me any changes would be overwritten from a different site by some automated process. It looks like we may have to get an external tool fixed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:07, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Those pages are a combination of free-form content that is coming from markdown that gets converted to mediawiki, some standard structure that comes from the Dashboard code, and a set of templates. Hopefully the problems are coming from either the Dashboard code or the templates. What's the easiest way to see the details of these syntax errors? Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:51, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps the easiest way to see the errors on this page is to look at the edit I have made to clean them up. There were span tags wrapping multiple lines, unclosed or unopened wikitext formatting codes, large amounts of span tags containing useless or broken font formatting, LISTGAP errors, and a missing {{end of course timeline}} template at the end of the page, among other problems. I have found that "end" template missing on some other Spring 2023 course pages as well. I'll be happy to help track down the sources of these errors with you. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:18, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Looks like you created that 'end of course timeline' template, and the Dashboard code doesn't use it (so course pages that it gets added to will get overwritten). What problem does that template solve? (Currently, I think it won't be found on any course pages except ones where someone manually added it.)

For the errors such as span tags, I believe those are particular to that course's timeline content. The Dashboard lets instructors include arbitrary content in individual timeline blocks via a WYSIWYG editor, which then gets converted to MediaWiki markup to be posted on course pages (via Pandoc). Most instructors don't significantly customize their timelines, so it includes a standard set of content with relatively simple formatting, but for customized timelines, I'm not sure there is a complete solution aside from disabling timeline mirroring altogether. (I'm open to that, as I'm not sure whether anyone finds it useful, but I don't want to make such a change unilaterally.) Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:33, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

The end of course timeline template fixes a problem where there was a missing closing </div> tag at the end of the page. The <div> tag is opened by {{start of course timeline}}. Tags that don't exist in pairs generally constitute invalid syntax. Span tags in themselves are not errors, but when they are used to wrap block content, or when they do not have closing tags, they create errors. Bold markup that tries to wrap multiple lines also creates errors. Those sorts of errors appear to be created by the WYSIWYG editor or during the migration of the text from the dashboard to Wikipedia; whatever process creates the errors should be fixed, otherwise edits to fix the syntax will continue to be undone by page updates. The page I fixed once again has 22 syntax errors on it because it has been reimported with updates from the dashboard site, along with the errors created by the dashboard site or the migration process. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:50, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: Wiki Education has a Dashboard where professors/students engage with a course page. The dashboard automatically updates a copy of that course page on-wiki for ease of viewing/linking. In other words, this professor isn't responsible for technical errors on the page, and if there are errors on that course page there are likely errors elsewhere. Sounds like something Sage (Wiki Ed) should be able to help with. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:51, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

Sage (Wiki Ed): Wiki Education declares "Wiki Education engages students and academics to improve Wikipedia." Improving Wikipedia includes following Wikipedia style and standards, and that includes avoiding unnecessary HTML such as <br> tags where Wiki markup doesn't need them. Improving Wikipedia also includes avoiding lint errors. Just as we don't want educators confusing lay and lie, we don't want educators using markup contrary to Wikipedia style standards, especially on pages that instruct students what to do on Wikipedia.

I found Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Chapman University/Jewish Life from Napoleon to Hitler (Spring 2023) listed on Misnested tag with different rendering in HTML5 and HTML4 lint errors, so I edited it, and in the editor, at the top, it says, "DO NOT EDIT OR MOVE THIS PAGE! ... Be aware that any changes you make here will eventually be replaced by the official course page at dashboard.wikiedu.org...." Clicking the link takes one to the course page, but it's not apparent where the "replacement markup" is stored. Perhaps it would be apparent to someone who knows how to log in. There should be better instructions for those preparing that markup. Wiki Ed educators should be encouraged to familiarize themselves with, regularly consult, and abide by the Wikipedia:Manual of Style, and they should know about lint errors and strive to avoid them. I hope you will be a champion for good markup and good style on Wikipedia on the part of the Wiki Education project. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:26, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Student editor retention, or re-welcoming

Hi. Is editor retention a goal at Wiki Ed? It would be good to have some solid data about student editor behavior after their course ends, so that the past/current situation can be quantified, and so we know if current retention efforts are having any impact. I don't usually see student contributions after the end date of their course, but as it happens, I just recently ran across a student editor from 2019 ( Jmjosh90 (talk · contribs)^[noping] ) who now has 800 edits to their credit and is actively contributing, most of it recent. I was not at all surprised to see a bivariate distribution in their editing pattern, with a flurry of edits in 2019 ending around mid-December when their course ended, followed by a three year lull when they had almost no edits (no doubt while they were busy with school), followed by a ramp-up to active editing again (after graduation, one presumes).

This editor decided to come back of their own accord, but I wonder if we could significantly improve on that by some kind of outreach on our part at the appropriate time? I can imagine an editor retention project—possibly a collaboration between WP:Editor retention and the WP:Welcoming committee—to recontact student editors, say, two-to-four years later with custom welcome messages aimed at checking into how they are doing, and a friendly message that we'd like to see them back. This might depend on keeping e-mail notifications for student users active after their course ends, so they see the ping at their UTP. In order to know what works and what doesn't, some kind of data collection would help. The folks at WP:RAQ may be able to help with this, and I'll make a request there to see what might be possible. If this is already being done within Wiki Ed, please lmk so I don't make a duplicate request unnecessarily. If there is already a project page about Wiki Ed student editor retention, can someone point me to it? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:43, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Adding Sdkb, who has a good head for this sort of thing, and Shibbolethink, who has a unique background as far as understanding what juggling Wikipedia and intensive studies (med school, in his case) is like. I also left messages with linkbacks at WP:WT, WP:QUERY and WP:RETENTION, so hopefully we'll get a variety of feedback. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:55, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

• I'm not convinced of the 2-4 year mark, simply because by that time, most people would have moved on. I don't believe everyone would have email notifications or similar set up for their talk page, and maybe emailing just for retention would be too intrusive? Either way, my point is... I think if you're executing something like this, a shorter time period after the course ends would be much better. Say roughly 6 months or so, which feels like some sort of sweet spot in my opinion.
  Otherwise I think the idea is worth trying. You just need a list of editors and a rough timestamp for when their courses ended, so you would want a friendly welcoming message N months afterwards. It seems not high effort, and retaining just a couple more of them might be worth the effort anyway. Soni (talk) 01:19, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

  Thanks for your comments. Compiling a list of editors is the easy part; here's a link to the first 100 of 80,000 Wiki Ed students. For the hard part, see WP:RAQ. Mathglot (talk) 01:31, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

  I think it would be desirable to plant a seed immediately at the end of the course with a message selling the virtues of contributing, and then a followup perhaps a month later. Six months feels a bit late to me. isaacl (talk) 01:56, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

  I agree. It's better to remind students at the end of course (or shortly afterwards since they may be preparing for final exam) rather than wait a year. The end-of-course message can mention things like "you can still contribute to Wikipedia even after the course is over" or "take a look at these WMF projects and see which one interests you" OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 02:30, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

  First draft of a template responding to comments so far is at: {{subst:Student retention}}. Mathglot (talk) 08:12, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

  • Reading the draft, and I think it's too much of a wall of text. Twinkle welcome templates have perfected this art, but there's a few things you should ideally do. Links to have "Oh I can read more" if someone's interested, but without overwhelming someone who doesnt need more. Splitting paragraphs into lines and maybe separate points too. Formatting as a way to highlight some things more. Some images if possible.

  Twinkle templates that might be good inspirations would be Template:Welcoming, Template:Welcome cookie

  Soni (talk) 12:11, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

  • I suggest a very short message covering the following points: thanks for contributing; Wikipedia has a wealth of material that only exists because of editors like you; Wikipedia makes its information available freely to everyone with its share-alike licensing; we hope you will continue to contribute. isaacl (talk) 16:15, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Researching student editor retention is one of my potential future projects. We need a survey and a list of students. Do keep in mind that limiting ourselves just to Wiki Ed means limiting ourselves to just US & Canada. Probably not a big issue as I expect the results might be similar for most countries. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 13:10, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Piotrus, Yes, I had 'survey' in the back of my mind, too. Not sure what you had in mind, but I was thinking about finding out who *does* stick around, and then survey them to find out why, and to include some open-ended questions in the survey to get their feedback, such as, 'Why do you think that most of the students in the class you participated in didn't keep editing here? What do you think we could do to get more students in your class to stick around?' and things like that. As a first step towards that, we need to find out who is already in the "still-active" group, and that is one of the points of my db request, which already has returned some interesting results, thanks to some great work by Soni. I will be back here later with some easy-to-read tabular displays of that data, but see WP:RAQ if you want the raw form. Mathglot (talk) 22:16, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot I'd be happy to be involved in this, I can help design a survey. We could also try to contact students who are not active and ask them why they never came back. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 01:36, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@Piotrus: I would be happy to, as well, although I'd probably play second fiddle most of the time, as I feel oversubscribed as is (aren't we all?). In any case, I had this thought in the back of my mind, that if we (or someone) did our homework first as far as gathered more data as Soni has started to, and do a bit of analysis based on it, and then drafted a fairly professional or at least decent-looking proposal, this is something that Wikimedia might be pretty interested in, and either take on themselves if we're happy with that, or else if we/someone wanted to pilot it ourselves, they might approve a grant which we could use to implement some professional survey tasks. I'm getting ahead of myself here, but since you mentioned 'survey' a couple of times, thought I'd better spill the beans on one of the paths I thought this might eventually take. Far from the only path, btw, but it is one possible approach. What did you have in mind? (I'm subscribed, so you needn't ping; what about you?) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:50, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

I'd be interested in contributing some spoons on this, depending on what you need. I've been away from Wiki for a few years but should still have enough insights to Swiss army knife most things you need Soni (talk) 04:43, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

@Piotrus, I wonder how many of them create a new account or edit as IPs. Reaching out to the old account might miss people.

It might be worth asking in the annual editor survey as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:05, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing What annual editor survey? Is this a thing? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:20, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

I presume she is talking about m:Community Wishlist Survey 2023. Mathglot (talk) 04:27, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

No, the big survey about demographics, which is called m:Community Insights at the moment. A lot of the information we have in Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Demographics comes from this. The surgey belongs to m:Global Data and Insights Team these days. In the last few years, they've been more assertive about random sampling (instead of posting the links on the village pump and seeing what happens, aside from proving that high-volume editors are more willing to slog through an hour-long survey on Qualtrics than average people), so you might not have seen it for a while. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:59, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

From my (limited) understanding, editor retention after courses end is indeed a significant problem, and I'd love to see some good research on this from WikiEd.

I think a fundamental part of the problem is that, when something is introduced as an assignment, people think of it as, well, an assignment, and who ever carries on with an assignment after it has been turned in? Even students that go so far as to nominate articles they create for DYK often then disappear. I'm not sure exactly how to overcome that hurdle, but I think that's the much bigger one than lack of time as a student. I certainly hope that courses that use WikiEd end with an invitation from the instructor to keep on contributing; a talk page message might not be quite as impactful but couldn't hurt either. Students will certainly keep on using Wikipedia, so a relatively small ask like "now that you know how to edit a page, the next time you see a typo, go ahead and fix it!" might be good. Cheers, {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:23, 31 March 2023 (UTC) (please mention me on reply)

When I think of student editors who became highly active long term Wikipedia editors, User: Kevin Gorman comes to mind. He was a student at UC Berkeley in 2011 when he started editing mushroom articles and later moved on to woman philosophers and the men's rights movement. I knew Kevin and met with him several times at Wikimedia events. He had chronic health issues. He became an administrator but later got desysopped at least in part because he was excessively combative with right wing POV pushers. Sadly, Kevin died in 2016 but vicious trolls sometimes attack him, even recently. He had about 12,000 edits at the time of his death. Cullen328 (talk) 04:42, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi all, my apologies for my delay in chiming in here, I've been away from my computer. I can confirm Wiki Education does *not* focus on attempting to retain any student editors that start through our program. Instead, our goal is to retain good instructors. For example, I met this instructor at a conference, convinced him to try our program, and he has taught with Wikipedia every year since, bringing more than 50 students who have added great content to Wikipedia. We support hundreds of good instructors each year who we've retained to continue bringing new student editors to Wikipedia.

We've brought more than 114,000 students to Wikipedia through this program, and very few remain as long term editors. This strongly leads me to believe that you either get the Wikipedia bug and realize you love editing an encyclopedia, or you don't — and if you're not the kind of person who thinks that sounds fun, it's not going to stick, no matter what. I can say anecdotally when we talk to students, most of them are very enthusiastic about editing Wikipedia and claim that they plan to continue editing after the course is over. But very few actually do — so it isn't a matter of them not knowing they can, or not wanting to, it's a matter of their own decisions of where to spend their time — and despite their assurances, only a few of them really get that Wikipedia bug enough to prioritize it over other demands on their time. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:02, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Hm, that's interesting, and I guess not what I expected, although I suppose I had thought it would be a goal, at least in theory, and hopefully in practice if and when feasible and if resources were available for it, which I know can be a problem. I guess I view the student retention issue more as Skdb does, with the distinction between *having* to do a task in a formal education environment, and *choosing* to do it on one's own, being paramount. I still remember my distaste at having to read "Tale of Two Cities" in high school, and being forced to spend most of one school vacation slogging through "Pride and Prejudice" to prepare for a semifinal after vacation. Now, I am a Dickens fan, and I can't count the number of times I've reread Austen's premier novel (and the others) with pure pleasure, and enjoyed the various film versions of them as well. For me, that distinction was everything, and I now credit those distasteful high school courses as having planted the seeds that sprouted later. (I'll just repeat a plug for the discussion about student editor retention going on right now at WikiProject Medicine: WT:MED#Student editing.)

"Instructor retention" is something I hadn't thought of; that seems like a great idea, and it's clear your efforts have borne fruit. I would hope that with a bit of attention and planning, we could retain a fraction of our Wiki Ed students as well and convert them into volunteer editors after their university course-mandated editing is over, but it sounds like that is not in the cards right now, or at least, not if piloted by Wiki Ed. I wonder if this could be subsumed under some already existing project at WMF; User:Whatamidoing (WMF), do you know if there is a task or project group at WMF that looks at editor retention generally? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 19:56, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't think that any team is assigned specifically to retain editors. Several teams, however, look at editor retention wrt to their projects. Mostly, though, the goal is to make sure that you're not screwing up editor retention. I hear that it's a difficult metric to increase. People's real lives and real-world habits may or may not have space for editing Wikipedia, and there's very little that a website can do to change those external factors. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Adding: It's not just Wiki Ed -- the whole world of programs and organizations which serve to bring people to Wikipedia in one way or another have been chasing "retention" from the beginning. There are lots of guidelines and best practices out there from lots of experiments and programs, but as far as I know, nobody has come up with a process to reliably retain editors outside of extremely narrow cases (or when you introduce paid editing, which isn't the kind of retention the community particularly wants). It's a perennial "nice to have" internal goal for many organizations, but for anyone that relies on WMF or other funders, they need metrics and other goals they know they can consistently achieve. It's the harsh reality of grants. So Wiki Ed retains instructors, affiliates retain partners, etc.

At Wikimedia NYC, we would love to churn out die-hard Wikipedians, and we do sometimes, but not in a predictable fashion. So we measure total edit-a-thon participants, total events, total partnerships, etc. and run initiatives with different kinds of deliverables. We can do the work to form and maintain partnerships and we can do the work to bring people to Wikipedia through edit-a-thons, but we can't make new editors stick around. A research project about retention in our programs is something I'd love to do, even if just to confirm it's not something we can do reliably. I think that would be useful for affiliates broadly, and perhaps it already exists. Thinking from the community's perspective, it would probably be best for it to be an independently funded grant rather than something conducted internally at one of the organizations, but that might be a big ask. Either way, if someone's going to make claims about retention, it should be done properly and at a large enough scale to be representative. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:29, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

I think this is an interesting question and I have a lot of thoughts. I taught Wikipedia for the first time this semester, and my students' final reflection assignment asked them to offer their own advice on how Wikipedia should attract more editors. tl;dr: I think WikiEd has successfully solved technological editing barriers for students, increasing the likelihood that they can be attracted into truly voluntary editing, but by shielding the encylopedia from students' unskilled article creation, WikiEd also shields students from the authentic community connections that would motivate them to return.

Long version: I think specific student outreach could be good for Wikipedia, but requires exposing students to wikipedia-the-hobby in addition to wikipedia-the-encyclopedia. My experience was that WikiEd provided truly valuable resources for wikipedia-the-encyclopedia, which my students found extremely useful in surmounting various technical barriers. I think it is a genuine change in norms that my students all reported that it was easy to learn how to make edits to Wikipedia! However, I think WikiEd (perhaps out of real necessity?) walls students off from real wiki culture, thus making it hard for students to imagine wikipedia-the-hobby. All the wikipedia-the-hobby things that we did came from my own experience. Some key points from my students' reflections:

• My students universally had no idea they could edit wikipedia. They thought it would be technically challenging, and they expected their edits would be monitored and approved by official staff. They immediately got excited when they could make a "live" improvement. Any wikipedia assignment will get students past this particular hurdle, so WikiEd does well removing this block to editing.
• My students universally had no idea that wikipedia was fully operated by volunteers, and we had to return to this discussion point several times. This I think is the next major hurdle to pass before a student can be come a voluntary wikipedian: they need to understand both that and why other people edit wikipedia as a hobby (not as a profession)

• For example, they were deeply comforted to learn that Wikipedia:Recent changes patrol existed (since they actually wanted their edits monitored by "staff" to prevent mistakes) -- and then it was a real uphill battle to convince them that, for some people, patrolling wikipedia is a hobby. (It helped to tag wranglers at Archive Of Our Own.)
• Things that seemed to help students get past this hurdle included showing them WikiProjects, and talk pages, and AfDs, and policy documents, and every single time saying "this is a person's hobby." It also helped that I showed them my own edits, and talked about how I decide which specific parts of Wikipedia I work on, and why I like this hobby.

• Their own recommendations for how Wikipedia should get more editors were mostly things that I can't imagine Wikipedia would EVER do (for example, running paid ads on tiktok that explain that anyone can edit), but they focused on the idea that most need to be invited to join Wikipedia's community before they will even consider it.

Personally, I think WikiEd's emphasis on article creation sets students up for a walled-garden experience of Wikipedia that offers limited paths to entering the full encyclopedia. I thought the WikiEd interface wasn't well-equipped for assignments that had a mission in mind other than Writing An Article. The expectation seemed to be that students would write article drafts in draftspace and then the ones that got As would bomb the encyclopedia with content-drops that the student editor would never follow up on. That's a good way to keep incompetent and unwilling editors from disrupting the encyclopedia, but as a result it's also a bad way of inviting newbie editors into the reality of the community.

Now that WikiEd has a solid foundation of tools and trainings to guide students through the how of editing Wikipedia, I think it would be valuable to turn attention to assignments or modules that give students a truer taste of why people edit Wikipedia. For example, rather than asking them to "peer review" an article, it would be useful to expose them to authentic talk page conversations, or the Good Article process. It requires thoughtfulness to still prevent disruption from the students (and hostile reactions from editors who dislike student editors), but I think it would make students much more likely to respond positively to a post-WikiEd follow up that invited them to return to editing fully on their own terms. Or perhaps WikiEd doesn't need to change, but the student re-welcoming should focus on addressing the community connection aspect, by inviting them to join a specifically-chosen WikiProject or other group experience. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 18:31, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

@LEvalyn:, thank you, this is incredibly useful feedback, and makes me want to respond in detail, and engage with you further about how to follow up on your comments and experience with concrete steps we could take. (Just clarifying that I have no connection with Wiki Ed other than as a volunteer editor who is very supportive of them, so "we" is anyone who is interested and volunteers, not Wiki Ed specifically.) I think any response of mine here would be too lengthy, and I'll find a venue and link it from here. Just wanted to repeat that I'm very appreciative, excited even, by your response and look forward to hearing more about your experiences and ideas. Mathglot (talk) 19:54, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

I look forward to hearing your thoughts! I have gotten more and more curious about WikiEdu and the relationship between students and wikipedia as my wiki-life and classroom-life collide so I expect I'll see you around in this wiki-space. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:15, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Also, to more clearly tie my comments to the others made in this thread-- I think even if students did have more involvement in the community of wikipedia (as I suggest), we're still just rolling the dice as to whether any given student will be bitten by the bug, and that their potential interest is largely based on things like personality and hobbies rather than anything we can change. But, I think we can always make it easier for the bug to bite the ones who are ripe to be bitten. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:33, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

Usefulness of WikiEd

I'm curious as to what the usefulness of WikiEd actually is. The reason I bring this up is because in recent years, most edits having to do with WikiEd are highly problematic, so much so the point that WikiEd has become notorious for producing generally bad edits. In fact, most of the time while patrolling recent changes, I end up seeing student assignments added to talk pages or the sandbox guided tour (which is almost always marked with a high ORES score meaning it's probably bad, which is a bit of a concern), but nothing comes from them. When I do see something come from them, it's usually an edit that doesn't follow Wikipedia policy/MoS and is often reverted for that reason. I don't think I've seen any recent projects that have resulted in good edits from WikiEd. Keep in mind that based on what I've seen I'm of the mindset that we should either get rid of WikiEd, or completely reform how its supposed to function ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 18:08, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I think that is unfair to the staff at WikiEd. It's important to distinguish between WikiEd, and the use of the English Wikipedia for class assignments. WikiEd are a program of hard-working people who have limited resources and who try to keep class assignments on track. In my experience, they are very responsive to community feedback. Class assignments, on the other hand, spring up spontaneously whenever someone who teaches a class somewhere decides to make use of Wikipedia for the purpose. I've seen some excellent work by student editors, but there is undeniably a lot, maybe too much, that is a net negative. But we are better off when there is a WikiEd person communicating with the class instructor, than when class projects just show up from under the radar. By the way, see also WP:ASSIGN and, especially, WP:NOTTA. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:20, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

+1, regardless of whether student editors are a net good or not, having the WikiEd framework provides necessary structure to deal with the inevitable influx of student projects. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:28, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

What evidence is there that most edits having to do with WikiEd are highly problematic? That's a strong claim and the evidence I've seen in the past suggests it's not true. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 18:22, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

THe only recent case that I've encountered is regarding Clarinet. I know some editors on Discord have mentioned their dislike of some edits from WikiEd (altho I don't remember any specifically). In any case this may simply be confirmation bias which results from me mostly patrolling articles that tend to be problematic and therefore seeing most of the problematic edits. I probably should rephrase that to most recent edits being problematic, and even then I might not be seeing the full picture. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 18:33, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I think you are painting in much too broad of a brush here. The bad sticks in your memory more than the good. -- Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 18:55, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

That's probably the word I'm looking for instead of confirmation bias. Thank you. You are probably right, however I wanted to bring this up mainly to see other people's thoughts on the matter. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:16, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Eliminating or scaling down this project would likely do little to deter teachers and professors from incorporating Wikipedia into their courses; it would only reduce or eliminate a source of guidance and wisdom for those people, making it likely that the perceived problems with novice, student editors would be even worse. ElKevbo (talk) 19:14, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. Seems to me a bit like proposals to eliminate the Bureau of Crime Statistics and cut back on neighborhood policing as a solution to crime. The initial view might be rosier (especially if you're not patrolling the bad neighborhoods) but the overall picture might not be. Mathglot (talk) 22:24, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Yep. I am an instructor myself, but I follow a lot of wiki-education news etc. and my feeling is that generally everything "works". _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:25, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi all, same apologies here as the earlier thread for my delay in replying, but thanks to those of you who chimed in! @Blaze Wolf: I'd encourage you to look through the articles edited by the student editors in the last full term (we're just really getting started this term) — this will give you a broader cross-section of edits. Of course, not every student follows directions! So please do ping User:Ian (Wiki Ed) or User:Brianda (Wiki Ed) if you are seeing problematic work from any student editors in our program, and they can step in to help. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:09, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Volunteer-me is in the discussion at WT:MED. One of the themes there seems to be that student editors are persistent. Of all the new editors who make one edit, only 50% ever make three edits. This means that for the most part, if you revert a new editor's first edit, they'll just silently go away. Most students make more edits than that, and a few of them will ask why you reverted their edit or explain why they think their contribution was good. This seems to have translated into a perception that it's more work to reject their contributions than to reject contributions by non-students.

If these students were accustomed to our WP:ALLCAPS style of arguing, I suspect that they'd be throwing WP:OWN at us, and in at least some cases, we might deserve it. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:25, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

"Duplicate key" error when merging VE-edited sandbox back into live article

A student editor in this course at Carleton recently ran into a "duplicate key" reference error at a live article after copying their modified sandbox content back into the live article Insects as food. This was not the user's fault; they did nothing wrong; they merely used Visual Editor to edit a sandbox containing valid content copied from the article, edited in their sandbox, and copied back when they were done. Nevertheless, this generated a H:CERDK error message ("Cite error: The named reference ':13' was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page). ); see rev. 1147591354^[permalink].

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T333911

This one occurrence has been analyzed and fixed; however, this bug could recur at any time, and Wikipedia experts at Wiki Ed should be aware of the causes, the risk, and what to do about it if it happens. In addition, if it starts to become a problem, it may require changes to the conventions about how student editors use their sandbox to develop content. Details of this one occurrence can be found at User talk:EaglesEyes1#Citation error at Insects as food; the general case is being tracked as T333911. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:45, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

As a practical matter, we already have the means to mitigate the problem in advance. Some may remember the plug I gave to the wonderful RefRenamer script (now in ENB/Archive 22). The RefRenamer script replaces VE's cryptic numeric references like ":1" with something like "Jones-2019". Running the script on a given article *before the sandbox copy is made* reduces the risk of any such duplicate key errors appearing to near zero. Once the error occurs, it's too late to run the script; it's not designed to repair problems that already exist. Mathglot (talk) 02:21, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot, scripts are a power user thing. I wonder if it would make sense to have an experienced editor (e.g., you or someone at WP:VPT – now that I think about it, it's the kind of technical task that I'd expect @Blaze Wolf to be good at) check the class pages a couple of times a year and run the script on all the linked articles as a "just in case" action, instead of expecting individuals to do this. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:29, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Wait what- ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:24, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Waid was complimenting you, saying that you are among the technically-oriented, "power" editors who could efficiently and productively employ a script like that. Mathglot (talk) 19:51, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

I don't even know what's being discussed here... ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:53, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Errors sometimes occur in a Visual Editor environment under certain conditions, when Wiki Ed student-users copy sandbox content back to the live article, due to a combination of factors heavily related to VE's use of numeric ref names. Using existing script RefRenamer on Wiki Ed course-assigned articles before the student editors are let loose on them, greatly reduces the risk of citation-related errors occuring, and greatly reduces the effort in resolving such errors if a broken version of the article is published. The proximate reason for the ping, imho, is: who would be good at running the script? HTH. (P.S. Starting an entry with <Small> and ending it with </small>—i.e., mismatched capitalization of 'small'—breaks syntax highlighting on the page.) Mathglot (talk) 20:05, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Ah ok. I can definitely do stuff like that. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 20:42, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Indeed, they are. To a large extent, I'm on the same page with you: I noted in this discussion at Ian's talk page that in fact, I had run RefRenamer at all the articles assigned for the course in which this student editor is enrolled. This should greatly reduce the risk of this problem occurring during editing performed by the class going forward; but even more important, imho, is that it will vastly facilitate examination by experienced editors of *any* citation-related error that happen to occur due to the rational ref names, whether related to this bug or not. The script is fast, but it's not instantaneous, and sometimes requires some fiddling of ref names (notably, if author and publisher are missing) and although I was willing to do it for that one class, I wouldn't do it for dozens of them. Ultimately, the long standing issues with WP:VENAMEDREFS will have to be resolved to fully resolve it. But in the meantime, if we could distribute the work and get a bunch of people on board with, as you say, checking class pages on all the linked articles (especially *before* they begin editing), then I'd be willing to continue doing it on occasion as part of a team; but it's too much to ask of any one person. P.S. Had to smile at your last phrase, "...instead of expecting individuals to do this", but I know what you meant, Mathglot (talk) 19:49, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Discussion about student editing at WikiProject Medicine

There is a lively, ongoing conversation at WT:MEDICINE which started out as a commentary about a course in which most students have been assigned medical topics. Initially, the subject was about whether it's reasonable to expect students to be able to tackle such medical topics as a student, but quickly became active, and branched out into questions about editor retention, student writing quality on various topics, stats or demographic issues about student editors and new editors more generally, plenty of opinions, and more. Your feedback would be welcome at WT:WikiProject Medicine#Student editing. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 02:18, 5 April 2023 (UTC)

Possible school project off the rails

I've noticed a series of very similar users making consistently wrong edits (unsourced, personal opinion, etc) to similar topics (magazines). The last time I observed this odd pattern, another editor was able to track down a school project that needed additional guidance (see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Nwokenkwo Faustinus/Archive) and get it back on track.

Editors included this time seem to include User:BriannaI17, User:Lescas15, User:Hwbutterfly123, and I believe there are others but I was not able to catch their names.

Would this be the right place to start helping this group of editors get a better start? 49ersBelongInSanFrancisco (talk) 05:45, 21 April 2023 (UTC)