Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-12-31/Op-ed
My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation
- Chris Troutman has been a campus ambassador for six classes in the Los Angeles area over the past four consecutive semesters. He is currently a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at University of California, Riverside.
The Wiki Education Foundation, the separate non-profit that administers Wikipedia's Education Program in the US and Canada, recently ended their support of the campus ambassador program. The program was started in July 2010 as part of the Public Policy Initiative. Campus Ambassadors (with the epcampus flag) are meant to be a real-world Wikipedia representative on campus, interacting with the professors and students before these new editors are sent to Wikipedia. While campus ambassadors presumably remain part of Wikipedia's global Education program, students in the US and Canada may no longer be seeing these volunteers in their classrooms. I was one of those campus ambassadors and I did not take the news well. It hit me hard because being an ambassador was primarily what I joined Wikipedia for. I found out about the campus ambassador position in 2013 and decided to start racking up edits on Wikipedia in order to submit an application. I have always thought that although we cannot seem to stop Randy in Boise from editing, we can always try to recruit his antithesis.
Wikipedia is great for the literate self-selectors that can teach themselves by going through our numerous instructional pages. Just as our edit-a-thons accomplish outreach amongst those that will not be self-taught so too does our campus ambassador program reach those not already interested in wiki. Campus ambassadors put a face and a voice to the nebulous Wikipedia movement. For many coming to Wikipedia for the first time this real person in front of them was far more approachable and understandable. I felt utility in bringing the passion I have for the semantic wiki concept to college students so they would eagerly jump into it, too. Our campus ambassadors could instruct in a way our tutorials could not. When the program worked well, students and professors interacted with Wikipedia properly and some good academic content was added. Students not only got a grade for their class but they also contributed to living knowledge. They learned about both the reliability of Wikipedia and the community of editors, well beyond the academic facts learned in their class.
My criticism of the WEF has been that it never made an effort to manage those volunteer ambassadors. While professors like Adrianne Wadewitz could function as their own campus ambassadors, random professors that had heard about Wikipedia might assign their students to edit articles unaware Wikipedia had a formal program with which to participate and had no ambassador knocking on their office door. Some Wikipedians might be interested in volunteering as ambassadors but had no nearby classes using Wikipedia to interact with and no plan to initiate collaboration. Unless a Wikimedia chapter subsidized these activities no money was being allocated to support ambassador activity. Coverage was therefore uneven and in some cases ineffective. When classes of more than 40+ students taught by ill-informed professors arrived on-wiki without the preparation campus ambassadors could provide, editors bore the brunt of turmoil as articles were inundated with poorly-sourced material or copyright violations. The WEF announced the change on December 18th, effective with the upcoming Spring semester. The announcement indicated that WEF sought to consolidate control of the program, making their own paltry staff accountable for interactions with the classes. But if the ambassadors we did have were insufficient to the task then reason dictates having zero ambassadors would not work any better. Unless the WEF planned to hire our intrepid volunteers I'm not sure what the way forward would be. What is the community's remaining education program in the US and Canada after all of its functions had been subsumed into the WEF?
Of course, the Education Program is less about teaching students and more about controlling the scholastic flood which arrives on our shores one way or the other. Wikipedia has been a magnet for some classes without Wikipedia's prodding and unless we put a person on campus these students will simply start editing without anyone on wiki knowing why. The education program noticeboard regularly documents these "stealth classes;" groups of new editors all sloppily editing in the same subject areas replying that their edits must stay due to a class assignment. I recall having to drop-in unannounced on one professor who failed to either reply to several talk page messages or return my numerous e-mails. They sent their students to Wikipedia with no regard for our guidelines or programs and I became the first Wikipedian they interacted with. Now I feel disempowered to conduct this sort of outreach and I fear many easily preventable problems will mount. Since the WMF fancies itself a grant-making organization I would suggest funding the ambassador program through organizations like the WEF and keeping coverage in both areas dense with institutes of higher learning and the schools where professors have historically been proponents of the program. I can only assume the WEF plans to effectively end the Education Program in the US and Canada by restricting course participation to the short list of professors they approve and banning the rest, batch reverting the edits of entire classes. Time will tell if this is the correct strategy.
- The views expressed in these op-eds are those of the authors only; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should email the Signpost's editor.
Discuss this story
Chris has been a great volunteer, and one who has done tremendous work with students and staff. I agree with Chris that in-person support makes Wikipedia editing more approachable and understandable. And I agree that in an ideal world, classes would function like the ones Chris has supported so well, where an active Campus Ambassador engages the instructor and student editors, and Wikipedia gets more good content in areas where we have content gaps. As my colleague wrote in the email she sent to Chris alerting him to the shift we're making to the support structure for Wiki Ed-supported classes,"If we could copy and paste you into every university, there would be no need for the changes."
The problem is the ideal world isn't reality; we supported 98 classes last term, and only a handful had active Ambassadors like Chris. Community members rightly objected when course pages weren't filled out and when students edited medical topics without understanding WP:MEDRS. Both of these objections are things Wiki Ed staff should have been able to head off, but we didn't, because our processes didn't work well. Thus we need to make structural changes to ensure courses follow our best practices, which are based on our experience of working with more than 600 classes over the last four and a half years.
The old model was a one-size-fits-all "Ambassador" role, where the volunteer was supposed to have a variety of skills, from onboarding instructors to teaching students how to edit, to giving feedback on student work, to wikifying and adding images to articles, to serving as the liaison between the editing community and the class. While some volunteers, like Chris, were great at all of these roles, few had the interest to do all of them, and most were really interested in Wikipedia's content. That meant courses fell through the cracks, weren't following our best practices, and led to problematic student edits on Wikipedia — and the Ambassador unfairly became the recipient of blame for what went wrong. At the end of the day, that's not okay: Wiki Ed's goal is to improve content on Wikipedia, and we need to make sure our structure and processes work toward making sure all courses are having a positive impact on Wikipedia.
The new model makes Wiki Ed staff accountable for the non-content pieces. We will be onboarding instructors, so we can be sure that all assignments meet our current understanding of best practices. We will be responsible for sending students through our online training, so we know students are getting an overview of how to edit and important policies. We will be in contact with instructors so we can alert them quickly if there are problems. We will be the ones the community holds accountable for fixing problems, so volunteers don't feel blamed when things go wrong. Structural problems are ours to fix, and one way we can do that is to take responsibility for ensuring volunteers, then, are free to do the specific content-related task they like most: copyediting, wikifying, checking sources, giving feedback, etc. (although staff will be also helping out with the tasks as well). You can see these task-based categories here: Wikipedia:Education program/Tasks. This also means any Wikipedia editor — not just those approved "Ambassadors" — can help out with student articles, making the entire process more Wikipedia-like.
That doesn't mean, though, that the Ambassador Program is going away. For several years, Ambassador applications have been processed by community members on the Education noticeboard; they will continue to be. The discussion about the userright seems to be leading to enacting what was initially planned, to enable the Education Program Extension (and thus the userright) to be used for a variety of purposes. And, as we communicated to Chris and the other still-active Ambassadors, we encourage them to continue supporting classes as they have in the past; the major change here is that we want Wiki Ed staff to oversee the non-content elements to the class, so we can ensure the course is following our best practices, and we are held accountable for any problems. We believe this will result in a better experience for everyone: instructors, volunteers, student editors, and the general Wikipedia editing community.
The suggestion that Wiki Ed will be restricting course participation, banning students or instructors, or mass-reverting their edits, is simply not true. Our goal isn't to ban student editors; on the contrary, our goal is to make sure what students are asked to do will actually help Wikipedia, and that the student editors are taught enough about Wikipedia policies to understand how to contribute effectively. Do we want to discourage 1,000-student classes? Yes. Do we want to discourage instructors who want students to write analytical essays on Wikipedia? Yes. And we can do that best by being responsible for onboarding those classes, when we can call a professor and say, "As a Wiki Education Foundation staff member with experience supporting 600 classes, your assignment will harm Wikipedia. But here's an alternative you could consider that would still achieve your learning objectives and actually help Wikipedia." In no way do we want to end the program; instead, we want to make sure the classes that are editing are filling Wikipedia's content gaps with high-quality content. And we think the best way to do that is through this process change. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:12, 2 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]