User talk:Ryan (Wiki Ed)/2017

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Please

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
Barbara (WVS) (talk) 12:57, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
@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)
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)
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)
@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)
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)

Re: Starting a classroom assignment

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)

@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)
The latest revision was done at short notice for the British Society for history of medicine for our Wikipedian in Residence at the Wellcome Library there is a new dropbox link. After the obligatory sort talks, Alice gave a high energy how to edit- mainly using VE, and our clients (mainly retired medical practitioners) set about dong stubs from a list of redlinks. Three of us then gave individual help using- the booklet to show examples of article structure, referencing and edit summaries and plain wikicode. Sure I will look at any material and give suggestions- just point me and I'll shoot. ClemRutter (talk) 21:26, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Education project issues

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)

@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)
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)
  • I am very pleased with the responses here by Ryan (Wiki Ed) and EJustice to the original post and agree with all of those responses wholeheartedly. In particular, I wanted to agree that large, red, blinking, bolded, 72-point "DO NOT DO THAT" is not appropriate for the educational materials. It is my belief that doing so would directly violate two of our core pillar policies of "anyone can edit" and "be bold". Experienced editors do not WP:OWN controversial articles. Having a content expert oversee the addition of issues of class and race with respect to environmental issues is completely appropriate and we should welcome it. IMHO, this class's work is a very positive addition to Wikipedia, despite all the hand-wringing and misplaced ad hominem claims of WP:NOTHERE.
Additionally, I believe that having new editors and students work on controversial areas is an excellent way for these students to learn about how conflicts are resolved--something they would not encounter if they only edited and worked on articles on obscure topics, that perhaps no one else but the student has an interest in. Having students work on a controversial subject puts them right into the thick of it, as to how Wikipedia really functions and gives them a chance to work with other experienced editors who are also interested in the topic and familiar with the WP:RS. Students overseen by content experts and Wiki Ed support are likely to bring the most current and relevant high quality WP:RS into our articles and help alleviate systemic bias. The presence of students in controversial areas is a net positive and again, I welcome such work. --David Tornheim (talk) 21:00, 17 April 2017 (UTC)
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)
  • It is hard to work on charged topics in Wikipedia - it is hard to write neutral, well-sourced content, and it is hard to behave cluefully. There is a learning curve in Wikipedia and even experienced editors get into trouble on such topics. But people work on them every day. Seraphimblade's point is that it is foolish for inexperienced editors to go wading into that territory. And I'll add, especially when they come in, all fired up.
And that brings us to the real issue here, which is the mission. From the course description forward, this class was "charged" with the mission of advocating for environmental justice in Wikipedia, in the face of the US government's recent and imminent changes to policies. Fired up. The notion of using Wikipedia to "educate the public" about some issue is not new. People try to do this all the time - people storm into Wikipedia with all kinds of missions (and David Tornheim, who has been egging EJustice onward down this bad path, is one of them) and they disrupt things for a while, until one of four things happens: they leave here angry and frustrated; we throw them out; they kind of linger and fester; they finally figure this place out.
EJustice, like most advocates who comes here, doesn't see Wikipedia at this point. He doesn't hear the community. He sees a canvas on which to advocate, and shuts out feedback on the basis that those who don't agree with what they are doing are morally retrograde, consciously or not. This is what advocates always do here. There is nothing new under the sun. The only difference is that he is leading 180 other people down this wrong path. I am still hopeful that he can start to see and hear.
None of that is saying that our content about topics related to environmental justice doesn't need improving. It does. We are going to be able to salvage some of the class' work, but it will take painstaking work cleaning it from advocacy. This class is like an old-school polluter that has dumped a bunch of ... stuff ... some of it OK, some of it garbage... into the commons, and now volunteers need to sort it out.
The bigger issues about the education program are going to take yet other work.
Ryan, I would like to ask some process questions, at this point. Any experienced Wikipedian looking at the syllabus and the size of this class would have seen this train wreck coming a mile away. In this specific case, what was the "intake" process? I can only imagine how awkward this is, but did anybody talk with EJustice before this started and try to explain to him that this was very likely going to become a train wreck, and explain why? If so, how did that go?
I don't know that you all have any way to say "no" to instructors who want to work with the education program, but are clearly going to cause a ton of disruption, and won't listen when you try to guide them to a better path. And I don't know that it would be better to say "no" and have them come raise hell anyway, or better to say "yes" and try to manage the damage. But this class has been a big drain on volunteer time and is going to continue to suck up resources for a long while, and that is good for no one. So the last question - how can the Education program prevent this in the future? (Limiting the size of classes that can participate (and no scooting around that by sections), may be one way to limit the risk... saying "We don't have the resources to manage a class this size" would be a reasonable thing to say.. but again people might charge ahead anyway... hard.)
There are four questions - would you please answer them? Thanks. Jytdog (talk) 03:58, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • Commenting here EJustice, I was recently made aware of more of your class' articles and have found some more word for word copyright violations. I am not finished yet, but the recent ones were pretty blatant and some with questionable citations IMO. I have concerns about the neutrality as well, but for this specific class, my biggest issue has been plagiarism through not knowing the correct way to cite direct quotes and copyright violations. There have been neutrality issues on the articles I have worked on, but I found the students there engaging and pleasant to work work. I agree more work needs to be done on teaching students about NPOV, but to be quite frank, while the majority of the articles I have checked for plagiarism and copyright violations have turned up fine, the ones that I have found that do have copyright violations were generally very blatant and things that students at a university should know better than to do. So far I've found copyvios in articles from: the Washington Post, National Geographic, San Francisco Parks, the Scientific American, and CNN. My biggest suggestion for WikiEd after this experience is to provide basic Plagiarism 101 like used to be taught to freshmen in secondary schools. This would solve a lot of the issues. TonyBallioni (talk) 04:12, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
  • I'm noticing a lot of SPA's commenting on the AFD's over the past couple days. Example 1, Example 2 Any educational materials that talk about consensus (what it is, how to seek it, etc) or participating in discussions should include a warning that inviting friends or creating alternate accounts to try to sway the outcome is prohibited. The college environment makes doing this extremely easy and enticing. – Train2104 (t • c) 04:36, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for your thoughts EJustice. As far as writing in those areas, I think your idea of using things like high-quality journals as references is a very good one. What I was seeing as a problem in many of these student projects was things stated as fact, and then referenced either to partisan publications (ThinkProgress was one I saw more than once) or advocacy organizations, some of which were trying to get me to sign up for "action alerts" when I visited their site. Those aren't references we'd take material from and state it as undisputed fact, and we generally use partisan or activist sources with extreme caution. Otherwise, it causes the problems we saw here, disputed assertions being presented in the article as undisputed fact. If something is controversial, we certainly do reflect in the article that it is controversial and why, and we appropriately reflect the consensus of sources (for example, on climate change, we reflect that the overwhelming scientific consensus that it is a real phenomenon and is caused by humans), but we don't pick sides. As far as the deleted revisions, while I can't offer to restore them (if I restore copyright violations, I'd be taking responsibility for them), if you've got some you'd like me to have a look at, I can certainly check them and let you know how much material was copied, and how close it was (direct word for word copy/paste, nearly direct copy/paste with a few words changed, close paraphrase). If you have some particular revisions you'd like me to check out, let me know and I'd be happy to. Seraphimblade Talk to me 23:46, 18 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for this offer Seraphimblade. A few of our students' pages had 1-2 sentence direct quotes, properly cited/footnoted, but NOT in quotations, which could easily have been a fear of using the wrong markup text kind of problem. The revisions themselves were deleted. Are you able to look at those cases? I have a fair amount of experience with copyright issues and, besides the quotations not having quotation marks around them, the use of a single sentence from a news outlet does seem to fit fair use even by WP's standards, which I've read closely. I understand that the lack of quotation mark alone makes them subject to deletion and revision deletion, but can an editor not simply add the quotation marks and either do a rewrite or advise the editor to do so to clear up any shadow of copyvio? Is deleting the entire revision (and in one case it was over 500 words, of which perhaps 25 were quotes) the only option?
if you have the rights to look over the revision deletions that would be instructive for me and the students. if not, I'm letting this one lie until the waters calm. Thanks again. EJustice (talk) 01:11, 19 April 2017 (UTC)

Break

Sorry to take a couple days to respond to the messages above. It seems like it might be useful to break down a few separate issues/questions, some of which may be better discussed either in a separate thread or at another time, some of which I can answer here, and some which do not have a clear answer. I started a new heading because my response doesn't address the copyvio issues immediately above -- I'm not up to date on what's going on there, but will ping Ian (Wiki Ed) to make sure he's aware.

  • Should students edit controversial topics? -- This is, of course, an important but difficult question with no easy answer. For one thing, there's no obvious way to delineate what is or is not controversial. One aspect that people have mentioned is that which is covered by discretionary sanctions. While those areas are by definition contentious, they cover broad topic areas that include a broad spectrum of contentiousness. Even within a contentious article there are less controversial ways to improve it. Discretionary sanctions also don't include many other contentious subjects. Granted, DS matters because it means mistakes have more potential to incur harsher penalties, but that brings me to the second thing: students do frequently edit in controversial areas with success. Because all students in Wiki Ed-supported classes have an additional system in place to help them, they're more likely to be successful than the average new user, and more likely to follow up on what mistakes they make. That said, it's also true that when a class does have trouble, those troubles are compounded by the number of students engaging at once. That brings me to the next bulletpoint/question.
  • Once it's clear a Wiki Ed supported class has trouble, what should happen? - We can try to set a class up for success (see next bulletpoint), but if there are issues, we spend extra time with the class, working to: explain to the instructor what concerns/problems there are and best practices related to Wikipedia policies/guidelines, make suggestions to the instructor for how to proceed, and provide feedback to students. We also, where it would not interfere with community processes, may intervene to help with particularly problematic content, either removing, deleting (in rare cases), or userfying/draftifying. This is where my recent announcement on ENI came in. Assuming community concerns/best practices/suggestions are communicated/explained accurately (again, see next bulletpoint), is there something else Wiki Ed should do? Is there anything we do that we shouldn't?
  • What can we do to avoid these issues in the future? - We've talked about many aspects of this question, and there have been many suggestions for ways to improve communications and onboarding practices. I appreciate that. We very much want to avoid problems, too (as a very small organization, there aren't a lot of peoplehours to spread around). In this case, the class's assignment is over in a few days, and we are in the midst of a particularly busy time for student editing. Wiki Ed's priority is Wikipedia and its content, so what I would like to request is to pause discussion about the big picture questions related to this class with a promise to revisit them over the summer. We (Wiki Ed) need to prioritize immediate content (there are thousands of other students currently editing). To be clear, this is not a request to ignore any of the class's content issues -- please continue to flag those where they come up, and thank you for doing so -- but rather a request to table the "how could we prevent this? was this a good idea?" sort of questions relating to advocacy, new vs. existing articles, the way Wiki Ed onboards instructors, etc. Little student work is done over the summer, and we don't start onboarding many classes until we get closer to the fall. In the summer we'll thus have more time to engage in these discussions as well as an opportunity to make changes to trainings, practices, etc. based on community feedback that we can implement for the fall cohort.
  • what was the "intake" process - Intake, which we tend to refer to as "onboarding", is a fairly involved process (there aren't many steps, but there's a good deal of information communicated, and some variation in the way it's communicated based on the particulars of the class). I'd like to defer a detailed description until the summer, when I know that all of the people involved will be able to communicate their part (in the process in general and/or in this case in particular).
  • I don't know that you all have any way to say "no" to instructors who want to work with the education program - Given the nature of Wikipedia, so long as someone isn't violating the Terms of Service or running against policy, people are free to teach a class and consider themselves part of the Education Program. Anyone is free to use the interactive training, handouts, etc. in doing so. That said, there are factors that will lead to Wiki Ed discouraging participation (e.g. instructors grading on what "sticks", very large classes making nonminor edits in mainspace, stark mismatches between course subject or level and intended topic area [especially for topics like medicine], instructors asking students to add original research, egregious COI issues, etc.). Most of the time when we discourage, they get it and decide either not to participate at all or to change their plans. In rare cases, we discourage it and they do it anyway. For practical reasons, we cannot dedicate staff time to such classes. Since I saw a comment elsewhere conflating WMF and Wiki Ed, just to be clear, the Global Education Program is under the WMF while the Wiki Education Foundation is a separate non-profit running the Education Program at institutions in the US/Canada. With a small staff and limited resources, it's hard to justify investing disproportionate time to courses that do not agree to follow our best practices. In other words, we know that we can help students to have a positive impact on Wikipedia, but as much as we can try to get everyone on board, if someone is intent on doing things in a way that we do not think will have a positive impact on Wikipedia, we can't sacrifice the quality of the rest in order to clean up after them (here obviously I'm speaking in the abstract rather than about any one class). Most of the time when a class moves forward despite our warnings, this leads to a bad experience all around and they either abort the assignment, never do it again, or accept our advice the next time around. Again, most of the time people understand that we've been doing for this a while and that we discourage things because we know what doesn't work. Editing controversial subjects is not itself reason we say no, however (see above). As for the particular issues that have come up here (e.g. whether we should view 6 sections of a class the same way we do one large class), that's something we'll definitely consider before next term and something to talk about when revisiting this in the summer.

Please let me know if I've missed responding to something, and apologies (as usual, at this point) for the length of my reply. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:50, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Pinging involved users, but please don't take this as meaning anything I've written needs a reply. My hope, to reiterate, is actually to table much of this until the summer, at which point I will ping all of you again (less anyone who requests that I do not): @Jytdog, Seraphimblade, EJustice, and David Tornheim: and omitting those engaged just in the copyvio talk (apologies if I missed someone or if you would've preferred to be pinged). --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:53, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks so much for taking the time, in this very busy period to reply. I hear you. We can talk more in the summer. :) Jytdog (talk) 18:57, 20 April 2017 (UTC)
Yes, please do let me know when you take this up again. Seraphimblade Talk to me 20:23, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Scaffold

Is scaffold a term you use in your courses? If so, what does it mean? --David Tornheim (talk) 05:58, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

@David Tornheim: You mean in Wiki Ed materials/course pages? Not quite sure, offhand. What's the context for this question? Any time I've used it in the context of Wikipedia in the past, it's been to talk about a basic outline/structure of an article, of the sort that the manual of style might recommend. For example, to start drafting an article in one's sandbox by creating some typical section headings, maybe with a short summary or some sources under each one. Again, this is all how I'd use it personally, not a specific example of something we tell students. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:25, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback. An instructor had advised the student(s) to "scaffold" their articles--a term I had never heard before--and I wondered if this was a term used, even in passing, by Wiki Edu editors, and if so, what it meant. Thanks for helping me understand the term. --David Tornheim (talk) 16:44, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
Looks like Ian (Wiki Ed) had the most relevant answer. It's not jargon, though, if that's what you're asking (i.e. not used in a sense particular to Wikipedia or Wiki Ed) -- or, at least, not to my knowledge. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:47, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
Presumably adapted from the jargon of construction trades. Falsework more precisely corresponds, but would invite misunderstanding if used in an educational context. Jim.henderson (talk) 12:11, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Education noticeboard‎

The Instructor's Barnstar
This Barnstar is awarded to Wikipedians who have performed stellar work in the area of instruction & help for other editors.

I hope your efforts pay off with lots of well designed class projects! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 21:26, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

@NewsAndEventsGuy: Thanks! The timeline is the latest version of something that's been continuously developed and improved in collaboration with the community over the last few years. Sage (Wiki Ed) probably deserves the lion's share of this barnstar on our end, though, as he has lead the development of the Dashboard (not to mention many of its predecessors like WP:TRAINING). Let us know if you notice ways it could be improved in the future. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:02, 11 July 2017 (UTC)
Take a second bow for passing along credit! NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 23:04, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

International Human Rights Law

Hi Ryan. I can see that you have listed yourself as a student in my International Human Rights Law course. I was hoping to just keep students enrolled in my course in that list. Would it make more sense for you to be an online volunteer? Or, are you listing yourself as a student to monitor the course? Thanks. Humanrights4nz (talk) 04:47, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

@Humanrights4nz: Ah! Sorry about that. When I saw your question on the noticeboard I did some tests to remind myself under what conditions instructors can be added. I must've had the wrong tab open and accidentally enrolled in the course myself. Fixed now! --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 04:54, 27 July 2017 (UTC)

Greetings

I have uploaded a grant proposal today and would like to know if I submitted it correctly. It is here: Grants:Project/Engaging Academic Archivists, Librarians and Students to Address the Historical Gender and Racial Gap of Western Pennsylvania through the University of Pittsburgh Library System. If not please send me instructions on how to submit correctly. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐ ✉ 19:47, 25 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Barbara (WVS). This is great that you've put together this grant. I've never been involved with submitting grants to WMF, so am not a good person to ask about submission processes. Maybe the IdeaLab would be a good place to ask, but that may be better suited for grants that are less well developed than yours. Pinging I JethroBT (WMF), who may be able to help. If there are parts of it that you want feedback on, I'd be happy to do that, and will also be happy to endorse (I've only started to look at the proposal so far, but if it's along the lines of what we've talked about before, then it would be great).
BTW I hope you don't mind I moved this message from User talk:Ryan McGrady. That's an account I used when I was teaching with Wikipedia and is more or less inactive now (until I teach again or have some research I'm doing outside of Wiki Education). This page is best for anything Wiki Education/Visiting Scholars-related, or User talk:Rhododendrites for anything else (volunteer account).
Thanks --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:16, 26 September 2017 (UTC)
Update-The reviewers of my grant proposal have characterized my work as a WVS as unsuccessful. I believe that they have WVS mixed up with WiR and are looking for the non-existent metrics describing the training and contributions of my trainees. They want to know why the content coming from this area/region is so poor and claim that only 120 articles have been created in two years. I don't know where they got the numbers for their comments, but it's not justified to compare the success of a WVS with the success of a WiR. Ed tried to clear that up in response to the comments of the reviewers but I'm still not sure it has been made clear to them.
Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐ ✉ 18:15, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
@Barbara (WVS): Hmmm. Is this the comment you're referring to:

"WiR is a well-known solution, although this project seems to be a bit more risky than average: there is already an ongoing collaboration which was not that successful (122 articles and no trainings in two years)"

I'm not sure, but I understand that are talking about another [unspecified] Wikipedian-in-Residence somewhere, as an example of why the WiR model can be "risky" investments. Not quite sure, though. Is there another comment in there that suggests they're confused? I admit I don't have much experience with the grant process and the format of the page is a little daunting for a third party commenter. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:52, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
Yes, that is one of the comments. Another calls the project 'iterative' meaning that I'm doing the same thing that was done before. I'm being mistaken for the WVU WiR or as an unsucessful WiR. As a little background-About four edit-a-thons have been conducted in Pittsburgh during the past two and a half years. I attended, I trained and I created articles. I was never the organizer. I wan't even invited to a few of them. I didn't give any kind of talk but instead helped individual contributors as needed. Two of them were organized by Art and Feminism groups, one by the Carnegie Museum of Art, two edit-athons were organized by the YWCA in Pittsburgh. The most recent event was conducted by the WVU WiR at Duquesne University here in Pittsburgh about three weeks ago. I wasn't able to attend. This event resulted in the creation of three new articles. Ironically, I offered to provide follow up and additional training for some of these but was told that wasn't part of the event. I shrugged it off and thought an opportunity was being missed, but that it was out of my control.
I guess what I trying to say is that there really is no way to characterize my work as a WVS as unsuccessful. It is not possible that only 120 articles have been created since I created more than that. The dashboard states 122 and my article counter states 136. I'm not asking for another endorsement. I only believe it erroneous to say that my actual role as a WVS was (at least) successful and the only reason for saying that has to be some confusion about who-is-who and what a WVS is. I tried to answer this mistake and so did Ed. But is our response considered as valid as the reviewer's? I don't know the answer to that either.
You are right, I have found the discussion and attempts to answer the reviewers concerns very daunting. The reviewers seemed to be impressed with your comments on the proposal page. If you want to draft a response, you can send it to me and I will post it for you. I had to do that for the head of the Library at Pitt also. If not, that is okay. I'm only looking for a definition of the role of a WVS. I don't think some of the reviewers know what it means. If you are not comfortable responding, I understand-this is not your problem.
Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐ ✉ 23:25, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
@Barbara (WVS): Just responded by email. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:49, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

UWI et al.

In regard to your questions [1], yes, if there are US or Canadian universities with strong Caribbean departments I'd be interested. Of course the big problem is that I am in Mexico, which seems to make for some issues with memberships to certain subscribers. I know that the University of Florida/University of the Virgin Islands, have a collection of newspapers and other documents from the Caribbean [2]. It's difficult to search and not very user friendly. Then there is the Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries in Puerto Rico and the University of Texas at Austin also has connections. If there are other institutions, that'd be fabulous. As with all small countries with limited resources, there are typically only limited runs of any publications and then they are rarely republished or go into multiple editions. The biggest problem is that the Caribbean gets lost either in North America or Latin America and often sources which cover broad areas end up being about the bigger places in the geographic coupling rather than the islands. Often I find references to sources, but can not find any way to access them, as few seem to be available on line. SusunW (talk) 18:36, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

@SusunW: Thanks for following up. I've not heard of issues with granting access to people in Mexico in the past. Interesting. Regardless, I'd be happy to set up an outreach campaign to try to make it happen with an institution that has relevant collections. If it's something you'd like to pursue, could you just fill out this form? Next step would be for us to compile a list of relevant institutions. I can share that with you before reaching out if you like. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:34, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
I filled out the form and sent my CV directly to you. Thank you so much for your help. It really is quite frustrating to access materials on the Caribbean. For example, though I have a subscription through Wikipedia for EBSCO, I cannot access this [3] source. I contacted Sue Barnam, who is an admin on WP and a reference librarian for help. She cannot access it either through EBSCO or through UTEP at her library. I run into this a lot. Sources are there, I can find them, but I can find no way to access them. We have no lending libraries here, inter-library loan is non-existent. Copyright variances often do not allow me to access sources given my location that other researchers can access in different locations. Any help to make access easier and to quality resources would be greatly appreciated. SusunW (talk) 21:13, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

Re: southwestern Ontario regional history

I am sorry, I don't think I know anyone who writes southwestern Ontario-related articles. Wikipedia:WikiProject Ontario appears to be too stale to ask. I think there's definitely some history topics that can be written about this area. Ideas that immediately came to me includes First Nations (especially before European settlement), transportation (many intercity bus routes were lost in the region, see [4]), and economy/industry (automotive sector, agriculture). OhanaUnitedTalk page 15:31, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Also, you may want to reach out to @Magnolia677:, who have created and expanded dozens of southern and southwestern Ontario towns. OhanaUnitedTalk page 16:49, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
@OhanaUnited: Thanks. I found a couple other people active in those articles, but will reach out to Magnolia677, too. This is helpful, thanks. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:26, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
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