Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

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AKU VICTOR ADIGIZI[edit]

     ==={ }===

105.112.33.95 (talk · contribs)

  1. Why do you want to be a Wikipedia Ambassador?
  2. FOR EDITING
  3. In three sentences or less, summarize your involvement with Wikimedia projects.
    GIVING THE BETTER CONTENT OR TRYING (OPTIONAL)
  4. Please indicate a few articles to which you have made significant content contributions. (e.g. DYK, GA, FA, major revisions/expansions/copyedits).
    DYK
  5. How have you been involved with welcoming and helping new users on Wikipedia?
    NOT YET (OPTIONAL)
  6. What do you see as the most important ways we could welcome newcomers or help new users become active contributors?
    DYK (OPTIONAL)
  7. Have you had major conflicts with other editors? Blocks or bans? Involvement in arbitration? NO I DID NOT.
The ambassador program is no longer active, and you do not have the editing experience that would be required if it were. I expect that this request will be closed and removed very soon. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:35, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Sourcing and POV concerns with Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB (Fall 2019)[edit]

I've come across a few of the articles created by this course in the new pages feed, and I'm rather concerned with the output. While contributions from WikiEd courses often leave something to be desired, in this case the vast majority of the articles created by students appear to only include sources from the World Bank and IMF, despite those organizations not being independent of the World Bank. This is a disservice to both Wikipedia and the students, because it leaves Wikipedia with a bunch of one-sided articles and leaves the students with the impression that the World Bank is an uncontroversial and indisputable authority on its own operations. It is doubly concerning that this course appears to have been taught more than once. Is there any way to make sure that students in this course are properly instructed in Wikipedia's policies on neutrality and source reliability? signed, Rosguill talk 17:13, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Moving this discussion from Shalor (Wiki Ed)'s talk page to a more centralized forum at Mathglot's suggestion. signed, Rosguill talk 17:13, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
  • Thank you for moving the discussion here, Rosguill! I do share in your concerns with this and have brought this up with many students. We will reach out to the instructor to discuss this as well - it's imperative that there are secondary, independent reliable sources on this topic, especially as the World Bank and their efforts in various countries have been the subject of controversy on multiple occasions. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:21, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I see two issues, here. One is the more immediate one, relating to the content additions by this group, which Shalor speaks to above, and may benefit from other opinions. The other relates to a (perhaps) longer-term issue, namely, the question of the interaction between students and the training modules; do we know whether all the students concerned completed them, and in how long? I'm not asking for disclosure of any private student editor information, just whether WikiEd folks have access to such data as a tool for analysis, and future improvement. Can we measure student retention of class material? Subjectively, from Rosguill's report, it seems less than ideal. How does this group of students stack up against random other classes: is this typical, or is there something different going on there? Do we know the level of preparedness of the instructor for dealing with issues of this sort? For these aspects, would like to hear more from Sage, Helaine and others. Mathglot (talk) 23:02, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Alternatively I would just suggest that content creation is hard especially when that content creation is writing brand new articles. By way of example I have a fair amount of content creation experience I still spent about 3 hours (admittedly filled with quite a few wiki distractions) revising/extending three or so paragraphs of content today. I think WikiEd students are above average in their new article creation abilities if we compare them to the like group of editors who submit to AfC. However, that doesn't mean that they're actually at the level of competence we need. But solutions to that get tricky for me in a hurry because I don't think "more/better training from the WikiEd people" is far easier to suggest than it is to actually do. I think ultimately it's up to the community to find solutions and I don't know of any that don't get complicated for me fast (e.g. butting up against my belief in the third pillar. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:17, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Regardless of the general difficulties of content creation, it can't possibly be that hard to explain to people that the majority of sources in an article need to be independent of the article's subject. This course in particular has the compounded issue in that the World Bank publishes a lot of reports that look authoritative and reliable, so students who are unaware of the importance of independent sources see them, decide they're reliable, and call it a day. You can see documentation of exactly this thought process when you look at the peer reviews for the articles on their talk pages (not all of the articles have them, but many do).
There's a further issue which is the nature of the course material. It's one thing if Wiki Ed courses mass produce articles about subjects that are not quite notable but otherwise harmless. Here, we're mass producing what is essentially (with AGF: inadvertently) pro-World Bank propaganda. I think we should consider steering Wiki Ed courses away from potentially contentious, controversial, or otherwise difficult subject areas if we can't guarantee that they'll be able to properly instill Wikipedia's policies into their students' work.
One possible suggestion for partially solving this is to have students collect a GNG-worthy pile of sources before they begin work on an article. While I don't think that this is the primary issue with the World Bank articles, there have been times when I've seen students put some heartbreakingly good work into subjects that just don't meet notability guidelines, and the format of school courses means that it can be very difficult for a student to change topics if they realize that there aren't enough sources available halfway through. If implemented well, this could head off the source independence issues that we see here, as students would be forced to include independent sources in this proposed first step. signed, Rosguill talk 23:31, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Rosguill I don't disagree with you on any of the particulars of why these World Bank articles were not the right fit for these student editors. But WikiEd already does attempt to steer away editors from potentially contentious, controversial, or otherwise difficult subject areas (as it does a few other areas like featured content). But that doesn't mean the instructors will listen to WikiEd. And we see, from this very noticeboard, the disruption that can be caused by classes who are not formally taking part in WikiEd (or its international WMF counterpart). The people who are the subject area experts for WikiEd are accomplished editors and so I start from a point of if it were easy to do WikiEd would have already done it. And I say from my own professional experience that even if you, as an instructor (not WikiEd), require students to to do things like source reviews and submit potential sources before starting any real research, students still might not listen or try to to find ways to do shortcuts (e.g. they collect great sources and then still end up only using 1 or 2 bad ones that you'e said not to use in the end). And if you think it's hard to get through to students it's even harder to get through to instructors who would really need to be the ones to implement your ideas about sources. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:44, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
Rosguill I gave a talk about wiki at the World Bank a few years ago, and met a few of the dedicated Wikipedians who work there. The folks I spoke to were information-intensive people who were interested in finding more 3rd party, academically sound reliable sources both for use on Wiki and for use in their daily work at the Bank. My takeaway from these conversations was that there are many places in the world which don't have public domain government information to provide basic facts and data about populations and infrastructure, and that on some topics, the World Bank compilations may be all that's available. Oliveleaf4 (talk) 13:20, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Oliveleaf4, If the World Bank is the only source for a country's involvement for an article about the World Bank's involvement with a country, then we as Wikipedia cannot write an article about that subject. Their reports may still be useful for academic researchers or investigative journalists, but trying to base a Wikipedia article on a single source with a conflict of interest with the subject would be a violation of our policies against original research. signed, Rosguill talk 17:16, 1 February 2020 (UTC)
Who cleans up? (No one.) How frustrating. What authority is required to move these into the sandboxes of the users that created them? Because every time I'm sampled them (a month ago and now), there is very close to nothing worth keeping, because every major axis is problematic. If I check a source, just a couple so far, I find misrepresentations and just now a plagiarized abstract from a source (Mexico). There are too many problems in too many articles that will never be checked and corrected. I am willing to help sandbox them, but the aura of "Education project" on articles such as these gives a sense of "untouchability" that has always been at odds with the Wikipedia ethos. I'm going to try sandboxing one now ... naw, they're all equally bad and I can't pick one. The writing alone is too poor for them to stay in article space. Outriggr (talk) 10:23, 2 February 2020 (UTC)
Hi all -- I'm the Chief Programs Officer for Wiki Education, so making sure student editors are adding quality content is ultimately my responsibility. My team has been working really hard over the last few weeks during the end of term rush of content being added (our student editors added 2.5 million words of content in three weeks!), so I'm trying to give people a bit of a breather now that we don't have (many) students editing, since it's winter break — meaning only about half my staff is working this week. I ask that you give us another couple of weeks to get everyone back from vacation, and let us do a debrief on the last term about what worked and what didn't, with everyone who's worked on this program present, before we answer bigger picture questions. So I promise I will get back to you about your very valid questions, but I'd like to do that after we've had a chance to talk internally as a team. That being said, if there are specific edits that are of a concern that you'd like us to look at, please feel free to continue flagging those! But for the bigger picture questions about the program at large, we'll get back to you by mid-January at the absolute latest. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:36, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
(edit conflict) The issue of steering students away from fraught topics has been a perennial one. There has come to be a pretty robust consensus that students should stay away from any topic where Discretionary Sanctions are in effect, and I have found the WikiEd people to be very helpful in that. This sounds like a case where the topic is POV-difficult, but not subject to DS. To some extent, I think there can be a misguided tendency for instructors to think that it's rewarding for students to work on "hot" topics related to current events, when the reality is that these are typically the worst ones for inexperienced editors to stick a toe into. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:45, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
That is true. However to the extent that student editors could be capable it would be students in what appears to be a 400 level class. Perhaps one piece of guidance that could be given (and maybe - per my remarks above - already is) would be rather than try and create 50 new articles, as this class has done, students in "hot" topics would be better off working collaboratively and creating 15-20 new articles. One of the great thing about Wikipedia, and something I know several successful instructors utilize, is that unlike the typical group project there's a great record of "who did what". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 23:54, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
I'm not sure that really ameliorates the controversial topic issue, and could introduce the problem of the students essentially meatpuppeting their own consensus of what the article should be. That having been said, the proposal of having more students per article could be an improvement for WikiEd projects that don't have POV concerns. signed, Rosguill talk 23:58, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

As someone who has been quite reluctant to make my views on the effects of student editing known from the day this noticeboard was founded, I would be particularly interested in hearing from LiAnna and colleagues (when they have time to regroup in the New Year) about what they see has been accomplished to address the continued threat to our medical articles by uninformed student editors that I raised eight years ago. What specific measures have been put in place over the last eight years to help avoid established editors having to be unpaid tutors engaged in extensive cleanup?

A specific measure I would like to see is a list of admins who are willing to remove all content created by courses that have demonstrated poor supervision or poor engagement with Wikipedia policy and principles. When poorly supervised students are making editing a chore, and it can be demonstrated that course supervisors have not engaged adequately, we should have a means in place to simply remove their work. I recently spent a good chunk of time correcting edits to Lewy body dementia made by a high-level UCSF course that was editing the wrong article. (Lewy body dementia is not dementia with Lewy bodies; I wrote both articles, and the students were adding content at LBD that pertained to DLB and was already covered. This demonstrates a glaring lack of supervision, and not only that, they altered the citation style while at it.) I should have reverted the lot, but because I took some years off, there were good edits interspersed.

Lianna and colleagues, what has this program done to help retain editors like me considering the damage students do to my watchlist? I am unsure that even high-level courses add value. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:04, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

SandyGeorgia, I think that list of sysops could be a good one but it also feels like we would need community support to do that because while I would be happy to be on such a list (sysop work that is content focused? sign me up!) I think some firmer level of community support for what you're suggesting would be helpful otherwise what ends up being removed could be frustrating to the referring editor and sysop alike. But this does feel like the sort of concrete solution endorsed by the community I was talking about above. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 19:06, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I am surprised (no, actually, I am shocked) that there has not been a drive to get community consensus on how to deal with the seriously detrimental effects of student editing relative to editor retention and quality of content. An RFC on the topic might be in order. But we know who can't formulate a decent RFC among us :) It is astounding that eight years have passed since I resigned FAC to help address the effect of student editing in medical articles, but nothing has changed in this area.
PS, for anyone who happens to look at dementia with Lewy bodies, please understand I am not proud of the lead. I wrote the article intending to take it to Featured status and to encourage collaboration among medical editors, but I was forced to overcite the lead, which then made it a dreadful read with choppy prose, that would embarrass me at FAC. At any rate, at least it is an example of a complete medical article, even if the lead is awful.
SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:32, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
In the abstract, I would support something like this, up to and including a CSD similar to WP:X2 but probably less temporary (so probably like WP:G15 or something). A new CSD may be overkill, but WP:CIR should also apply to students and educators, and we need some way to ensure that. There's only so much WikiEd can do unilaterally, and I think the community can help by considering what we want the relationship between the encyclopedia and academic courses to be like in the future. — Wug·a·po·des​ 19:52, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
Yes. Someone should start a discussion somewhere to begin to gauge consensus for a new CSD, with an eye towards an eventual RFC. That someone should not be me :) :) Please ping me if it happens. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:01, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I created User:Wugapodes/WikiEd_Brainstorm to spin this discussion out and see if we can develop some kind of working document to present to the wider community. Anyone is welcome to contribute. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:51, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
I guess I'll say this here, but it would be worthwhile keeping such discussions in sync with what is already at WP:ASSIGN (as well as at the WikiEd training materials). I think that there is already a reasonably good consensus that any editor (not limited to admins) should always feel free to revert student edits, just as one would revert unhelpful edits by anyone else. No editor here is a teaching assistant, and it's not our responsibility to go more gently on students than on any other users. As for deleting pages, I think it is very unlikely that the community would ever agree to making a new CSD category for this (but it's easy enough to use WP:PROD right after the end of the semester). --Tryptofish (talk) 00:43, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Long reply from Wiki Education[edit]

Hi all,

Thanks for your patience as we had a chance to regroup after the holidays! I'd like to give a bigger picture explanation of how we support classes that will likely answer most of the questions, then get into other answers.

Wiki Education is an independent nonprofit organization that supports higher education faculty in the U.S. and Canada. So as AugusteBlanqui notes on User:Wugapodes/WikiEd Brainstorm, there are a lot of other classes operating on the English Wikipedia since it's a global project. I will also say from my experience talking to a lot of university faculty, my guess is there are tens if not hundreds of "underground" courses operating during the term that either don't know Wiki Education exists or are outside our support region and thus may or may not have a lot of support, depending on the extensiveness of the education program in their region (you can see more about global education efforts at outreachwiki:Education). So while I am happy to take suggestions and talk through what we do with classes we support, please know this won't affect all of the students editing English Wikipedia.

Wiki Education has four staff working on our program where university students edit Wikipedia as a class assignment (our "Wikipedia Student Program"). Helaine (Wiki Ed) is our program manager; she works with faculty to ensure their assignment design is good for Wikipedia. Ian (Wiki Ed) is our Senior Wikipedia Expert; he supports some student editors and also manages our two other Wikipedia Experts, Shalor (Wiki Ed) and Elysia (Wiki Ed). Everyone who is teaching with Wikipedia through our program has a course page on our Dashboard software; course pages are automatically mirrored on Wikipedia in this category. The Dashboard software enables us to proactively monitor the work that's happening across all of our courses. It also provides extensive training modules for student editors and instructors. We do track whether students complete assigned training modules; in fall 2019, 67% of student editors completed all modules assigned to them, which is pretty standard. Many of the students who didn't complete the training also didn't actually edit in the article namespace.

Chart showing Wiki Education student editors vs other new editors.

One thing to keep in mind is Wiki Education supports around 400 courses each term (it was 388 courses in fall 2019). That's hundreds of instructors, and thousands of students (we supported 7,532 student editors in fall 2019). In fact, we bring 19% of all of English Wikipedia's new active editors — see the chart at right. We can't manually look at every edit every student is making, although we look at quite a lot of them. We've developed numerous internal processes to keep track of all of these courses, and the vast majority of classes don't encounter any issues during the term. We also use technology with the Dashboard to detect common situations that warrant a closer look. The Wikipedia Expert assigned to each class gets email notifications based on various student behaviors — nominated an article for DYK, edited an article under discretionary sanctions, has an article nominated for deletion, etc. This is a notice for the Wikipedia Expert to go see if there should be some action they need to take. They also respond to requests for help from individual student editors or faculty.

At the end of the term, we do a long course "closing" process, where we look into what the students in the course did on Wikipedia. Wikipedia Experts assess the quality of the overall class into one of four categories: "Excellent", "Good", "Fair", and "Hurts Wikipedia". For courses that get a "Hurts Wikipedia" rating, we discuss whether it's something that's fixable and if it is, we do a phone call with the instructor to go over what they would need to do differently to work with us again. If we think it's not fixable (e.g., the instructor insists that students add original research), then we ask them not to do a Wikipedia assignment again. Not all courses are suitable for Wikipedia assignments, and we do our best to head off problematic courses before they start. But if they do, we ensure we only encourage repeat courses from instructors whose students' work is not likely to harm Wikipedia. Our Wikipedia Experts making this judgment (Ian, Shalor, and Elysia) are all (in their volunteer capacity) experienced editors.

We've been doing this program for nearly 10 years at this point, and we've learned a lot along the way. Our support resources have evolved a lot over the years, and they continue to get better every term. One change we're rolling out for the spring is a new Progress Tracker for students on the Dashboard: This modularizes the steps to article writing, including specifically asking for a bibliography first. We hope this will help address some of the challenges in article selection and sourcing we've had in the past, by making it easy for students to see creating a bibliography as a preliminary step to take before starting sandbox work. New training modules, revised guidance, and extra support has been added each term, and we work hard to try to make this a good experience for both Wikipedia and student editors.

In terms of some of the specific suggestions here and on User:Wugapodes/WikiEd_Brainstorm:

  • I know it can seem like students create a lot of new articles when you have a problematic class like the UCSD one creating the World Bank articles with non-independent sources. But 90% of articles our students edit are existing ones: In fall 2019, our student editors created only 646 new articles and edited 6,380 existing articles. Many of those new articles are in under-covered subject areas; see, for example, classes working on African Archaeology articles, or biographies of women scientists.
  • Classes like the Colorado College one working on women scientists are why I think saying students can't work on BLPs is problematic — many of our student editors create excellent biographies, and we have a lot of experience steering student editors to create BLPs without issue. If you have seen BLP issues with our student editors, please flag them to us.
  • Some classes do great work where each student works on their own article, such as this one on Classical Greece. Others ask students do to group work, resulting in article contributions like this USC class's work on the Deepfake article. We find both individual and group work assignments can be successful.
  • As several of you noted, we do try to steer students away from controversial topics that we know won't go well, including some DS topics and GAs/FAs, but students don't always follow our requests. We discussed this internally as a team as part of our debrief last week. We noted that while we often send a note to an instructor and the instructor says "I'll talk to my student about it", we don't currently do any follow-up to see if the student understood and will change the behavior. So we're going to try some new internal processes for follow-up this spring to see if we can be better about closing the loop on actually getting a behavior change when we do offer feedback. We hope this will address that challenge this spring.
  • Regarding copyright, our Dashboard is using the same copyright detection software that User:EranBot does, iThenticate. Our Wikipedia Experts receive a notification any time the software thinks one of our student editors has copy-pasted something to Wikipedia. Our Experts do a check to ensure it's not a false-positive; if it is a copyvio, they remove the student editor's additions and leave a note for them. This obviously doesn't address issues of poor paraphrasing (we have a training that covers that too), but it does catch the most egregious examples of copying and pasting.
  • As Tryptofish said, any editor should feel free to revert unhelpful edits and leave notes about the why for students, or nominate unhelpful content forks for deletion, or delete a copyvio you see, just as you would for any other new editor. Student editors aren't in a different class than any other new editor. Their instructors grade on what the students did, even if it gets deleted, so don't feel like you need to treat them any differently than you would another new editor. That being said, one slight difference for courses we support is they have us, so if you are having a problem with one of our student editors, feel free to ping Ian, Shalor, or Elysia about it, and we can talk to the student and/or instructor.

If you have other questions or comments, please let me know.--LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:42, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. My primary concern at this time would be to ask about how exactly the class quality assessment is carried out, and whether this process can be made more transparent. If it was working effectively, we would not have had the issue that led me to start this discussion, as the output of Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB (Fall18) was just as poor as Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/UCSD/IPE Money and Finance IMF WB (Fall 2019) signed, Rosguill talk 17:48, 15 January 2020 (UTC)
Hi Rosguill, that's a very fair criticism. I went back and looked at the fall 2018 course record in our database; Shalor closed out that course and noted the exact problems you mentioned in the notes section, but an error from 2018 in how we identify which courses need intervention enabled that to slip through without an intervention. We've changed our internal processes to fix that mistake, so it shouldn't be able to happen again. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:53, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

User talk:Munderscore[edit]

has been blocked for vandalismclaims to be a student. Guidance is needed by the student and the teacher. Thanks, Deepfriedokra (talk) 17:59, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, @Deepfriedokra:! I left messages for the student and potential instructor -- I appreciate the note here. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:12, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Unreasonable Requirement by Instructor ?[edit]

I have a difficult request to deal with. It is difficult because the student, User:Zzhu8516, has been put into an impossible situation by her instructor. She has submitted Draft:Triple pelvic osteotomy (TPO) (canine and feline). It was previously tagged for speedy deletion as copyright violation by reviewers User:Sulfurboy and User:Theroadislong and repeatedly resubmitted. I then Rejected it to try to stop the repeated resubmissions. She writes on my talk page: 

Maybe i had violated the copyright.But i did not mean to do it. This is my first time to edit a wikipage. For my uni, i am studying a course which asks me to write a wikipage and need to post it. If it is not published or delete or there are any problems with copyright i might get a failure to this unit.So i am so urgent as the assignment is already due. Also, my uni is in a English speaking country and i have to edit in English. I also dont have the right to ask my tutor to ask in the education board. I think i have the ability to do this by my self.What i am trying to do now is that fix all the problems and try my best to let it submit succesfully.That's the reason i resubmitted several time yesterday and i do revised a lot of places .But i am feel worried that i still have not got passed.

So it appears that the student has a problem with an instructor who doesn't understand Wikipedia.

I think that I have done what I can do, because it isn't my volunteer job to change Wikipedia policy for a student who has an unreasonable instructor (or who misunderstood what the instructor said, due to a problem with English). I agree with User:AlanM1 that the subject probably should have an article, but not the current draft. But does anyone have any comments or suggestions? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:49, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

I am the writor of this article.The problem is not i violated the poiucy or what my tutor ask is unreasonable. It is that i am trying my best to revise it. I hope my effort could make sense. Or if i violate the policy for once, then i can not make some changes? I will be labelled as a rule breaker and i can not publish any article since then? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zzhu8516 (talk • contribs) 02:14, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

This is being discussed more completely at the Teahouse. And, yes, as User:Nick Moyes has explained to you, if that is what the tutor is asking, their request is unreasonable. Robert McClenon (talk) 15:50, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Epistle to the Galatians[edit]

See the discussion at ANI Wikipedia:Administrators noticeboard/Incidents#Epistle to the Galatians: multiple redlink authors massively changing and adjusting. Jahaza (talk) 22:14, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I pinged the students. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:42, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Level 2 English course intending to edit Featured medical article[edit]

@Springerhe, Shalor (Wiki Ed), Whistler54, and Hdiaz002: regarding Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Butte College/English 2 (Spring 2020), Tourette syndrome and Alzheimer's disease.

Two medical Featured articles have been tagged by students from a level 2 English course. Alzheimer's disease is a tad bit outdated, but Tourette syndrome was just overhauled thoroughly for its March 3 main page appearance. In either case, students are discouraged from editing Featured articles, and it would be extremely unusual/difficult for English 2 students to add content that will be retained to a featured medical article.

My alternate suggestions for these students are:

  • There is an almost-brand-new biography out on Georges Gilles de la Tourette that can probably be obtained via the Butte College library and useful content can be added there. The book, as well as several sources that could be used for expanding that article, are listed in the sources there. (The Walusinski book can be obtained at Stanford, UC Davis or Berkeley.)
  • Caring for people with dementia is an article where some meaningful content can be added by an English student, since some of that would not necessarily need to conform with WP:MEDRS.

Will Shalor please make the necessary contacts and adjustments? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:11, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

@SandyGeorgia: Thanks for catching this, and thanks so much for the alternative suggestions. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 12:29, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

There is another at Featured article Huntington's disease, User:Kweeden, instructor User:Ffasching, course Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/DeSales University/Advanced Pathophysiology (Winter), Wiki Ed User:Elysia (Wiki Ed). While this is an advanced medical course, I hope the students are aware of WP:MEDRS and understand that high-level, recent, secondary reviews are needed for editing a Featured article. Some of the sources in the Mechanism section of the article now are dated, so it might be possible for a student to improve that article, but unless they use the most recent and best secondary reviews, their edits are unlikely to stick. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:12, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging, @SandyGeorgia:! We will follow up to ask the students to avoid working on Featured Articles. I'll also echo Ian's thanks for your expertise in suggesting alternatives, we'll pass those suggestions along. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:28, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
The challenge with editing FAs isn't just medical/technical, which I assume that this group could handle. The difficulty is that the goal of FA is more than factual content; it's also WP:Brilliant prose. It's difficult in a single subject-specific class to find both people who are really good with the facts and also people who are really good with the form. And, there's just not necessarily much room for improvement, so it might not be satisfying. On the other hand, if they tackled articles like Neurodegeneration, Nystagmus, Wakefulness, or even Huntingtin (the gene) (I'm assuming they are interested in neurology as a general area), then they might be able to make truly substantial improvements. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:22, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Script to detect unreliable sources[edit]

Main page: User:Headbomb/unreliable

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. The idea is that it takes something like

  • John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

I'm still expanding coverage and tweaking logic, but what's there already works very well. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:59, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

This looks really neat, thanks for sharing! I and several other Wiki Education staff have installed it. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:43, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Another writing course editing medical topics[edit]

Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Northeastern University/ENGW 3306 (Spring 2020)
@Elysia (Wiki Ed), Amyc29, Smwebster, Zefr, and Alexbrn:

Has this course been made aware of WP:MEDRS? Cannabidiol as a treatment for anxiety should not even be an article. Will Wiki Ed staff do all of the necessary deletions of inappropriate content resulting from this course? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:54, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

CBD for anxiety is an urban legend at present, with no MEDRS sources or regulatory agencies indicating such use. This article should be deleted. --Zefr (talk) 15:57, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
We also have this: Treatment of Hidradenitis suppurativa. Wiki Ed staff, please get this course content off of Wikipedia so that WPMED editors, already stretched thin, don't have to do this work. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:59, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
See talk to deal with copyvio. I have pinged User:Diannaa. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:28, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
And this. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:00, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
This course is recently moving articles from sandbox to mainspace; could Wiki Ed staff please get an embargo on that? This course is not writing encyclopedic content and is not apparently aware of MEDRS. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:06, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
  • Agree these article were problematic. And the upcoming ones look to be on some problem topics too, including A diet to success ... really? And I see Psychedelic therapy has lots of unreliable sourcing. Alexbrn (talk) 16:08, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
@SandyGeorgia: Thanks for this. I will get in touch with the instructor, and get the problematic stuff out of mainspace (for starters). Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:36, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
Holy cow, medication tourism and we already had medical tourism; ton of work to salvage and merge anything worthwhile. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 18:43, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
I think whoever is responsible for this needs to be blocked, this is a total waste of time that causes immense damage to the Project. Alexbrn (talk) 18:59, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
And to editor morale. What a way to spend a day. Somewhere we started a discussion with Wugapodes and Barkeep49 about actions that admins can take in these instances. This is another in legions of instructions who have never written articles[1] trying to instruct students in writing on Wikipedia. They should not be let out of sandbox. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:05, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
User:Wugapodes/WikiEd Brainstorm — Wug·a·po·des​ 19:24, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, continuing discussion there. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:29, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Considering the level of problems found in one day from this course, all of these might need to be checked ... all of them contain considerable medical content.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:23, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

While I absolutely appreciate the feedback here and am working with students to address these issues, I would ask that editors kindly assume good faith and recognize a few things: first, these are students who are earnest, yet new to editing Wikipedia. Though we spend a lot of time in class (and through their training modules via the Wiki Education course dashboard) in discussing the challenges of editing medical content--everything from maintaining NPOV, adhering to the standards of medical content on WP, and utilizing secondary sources rather than primary research sources--students are still learning and sometimes there are missteps. In addition, in the last 24 hours our institution has shifted to fully online course instruction for the remainder of the semester due to COVID-19 and students are moving off campus and trying to make sure they are up-to-date with assignments and that has led to some haste in moving content to mainspace. I would again respectfully ask for your patience as I address these issues with students directly before taking harsh actions and threatening to ban people who are fully operating in good faith. Thank you.Amyc29 (talk) 21:05, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
I'm not seeing any questioning of "good faith". This seems more a question of broken procedures. In particular it is imperative that some way is found to stop damaging content being spammed into mainspace, and somebody needs to take responsibility for that. Alexbrn (talk) 21:14, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Amyc29. In general, I'd like to ask for a bit of patience right now. There's a lot of confusion in higher education in the U.S. right now, as a large percentage (probably even a majority) of classes are very suddenly moving to online only this week in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many students are confused about schedules, due dates, and how to communicate with instructors now that they don't have face-to-face meetings; others are being very suddenly kicked out of dorm rooms and asked to move elsewhere with very little notice. Amidst this confusion, there may be more students moving content that hasn't been reviewed or approved into mainspace. If you see problematic content, please do flag it to the Wiki Expert assigned to the class — Ian (Wiki Ed), Elysia (Wiki Ed), or Shalor (Wiki Ed) — and they can move it back to sandboxes until we can sort it out with the professor, just as we did today. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:45, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

An understandably unfortunate situation ... thanks for making us aware. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:49, 11 March 2020 (UTC)
I would also add: a number of my students (especially some international students) do not have reliable internet at home and they are concerned about their ability to complete online assignments once they are required to leave campus this week. So again, I would reiterate the request for a bit of patience while I manage things. Amyc29 (talk) 02:13, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Possible instructor vandalism[edit]

I stumbled across this edit from a WP:SPA, wasn't sure where to report it or the best way to handle it. I suspect this was either a teacher making this edit to demonstrate the basis of his opinion of Wikipedia to students, or it was a student making fun of an educator with a positive view of Wikipedia. I'm leaning towards blocking the account and leaving instructions to appeal the block (I'd recommend requiring him to verify his identity through his @sarasotacountyschools.net email address if he wants to do that) and a link to WP:Student assignments on the user's talk page since, at this point, it is at best a vandalism-only account, and at worst WP:Impersonation. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages)Have a blessed day. 23:08, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

It's either disruptive editing (pure vandalism) or disruptive editing (WP:POINT). There's probably enough there for a WP:REALNAME block, but that isn't the purpose of this noticeboard. --AntiComposite (talk) 23:47, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
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