Wikipedia talk:Education program/Educators

Redirect of educator page from Outreach to this page

I have redirected Outreach:Wikipedia Education Program/US-Canada/Join to this page in order to consolidate information/resources related to the Wikipedia Education Program in the US/Canada. You may click on the link above to see the history of the redirected page. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 23:04, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Link to Wikipedia Adventure?

Hi folks! I've seen a lot of students and class coordinators using The Wikipedia Adventure for orientation. TWA is a 1 hour, 7-mission interactive guided tour which teaches the basics skills of editing, policy, and social best practices. It incorporates a narrative, simulated interactions with other editors, badges for recognition and achievement, and multimedia encouragement and support. I was wondering if you'd consider including a link to it along with the Education Program training in the 'Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia' section. I think the WEP training pairs nicely with TWA, as the first is sound and structured, and the second is immersive and engaging. I think they're a killer combo! What do you think? Best, Jake Ocaasi ^{t &#rfrdporno124; c} 13:46, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Venkat karan Venkat karan (talk) 16:28, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

spam?

is the appsys business at the top of this page just spam? it's hard to figure out what it's doing here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sara.koopman (talk • contribs) 21:40, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

It was. Thanks for pointing it out—I have taken care of it. Maralia (talk) 22:06, 2 February 2015 (UTC)

Things to avoid when designing assignments

Generally I think the education outreach is fantastic idea. However, the FAQ and other materials that provide guidance on designing assignments should include a section on Things to Avoid When Designing Assignments. For example, instructors should make certain students do nothing at article talk - zip zero nada - unless the assignment involves sticking around the article to make changes to article text, which may involve back-and-forth dialog with established eds who have the article watch-listed. Per the established talk page guidelines, an article talk page is only for discussions that genuinely seek to improve article text. Collecting drive by homework assignments in the form of suggestions from people who have no skin in the game of article text is outside the scope of article talk. In my view, such homework can be deleted as WP:SPAM because the ed who posts them is WP:NOTHERE to build article text but to check a box off on their class assignment. Students are not acting in bad faith of course but the practice inadvertently abuses the volunteer time being invested by real editors who have the talk pages watchlisted. Here is a current example (apologies for picking on this class and instructor... by this criticism I mean to welcome and improve your course experience and hope you do another in the future!)

• Week 4 of this course "Evaluate an existing Wikipedia article related to the class, and leave suggestions for improving it on the article's talk page."
• So far (and its only Monday morning presumably of week 4) at Talk:Climate change this has produced two distinct threads

• This and
• That

On one hand many new sets of drive by suggestions may turn up important things to work on. The problem, however, is assigning the posting of a driveby remark is very annoying and sucks enormous time from established eds who expect to engage people who are going to actually work on articles. Alternative 1 Have students post these sorts of suggestions on their own user talk. They can still do peer review/grading of the posted suggestions. Alternative 2 Have students post proposed edits at article talk and have them graded on their follow through, however it unfolds, in the WP:BRD process. Alternative 3 in the example course I am picking on (sorry about that once again) reverse the order of the Week 4 and Week 5, to extent students could first make article edits, and later defend them if they are reverted via BRD process, or if the edits are not reverted, students could find some current WP:RFC, load the debate into their brain, and then cast a well reasoned WP:NOTVOTE. Conclusion There are probably many more alternatives, but I do think we need a Things to Avoid When Designing Assignments section and in that section frown on using article talk to post homework in the form of driveby "suggestions". Unless pagewatchers will receive salary as teaching assistants, then I might feel differently about it.NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 14:09, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

I appreciate your feedback on this and to hear how this affects editors of well established pages. To be clear, the actual instructions for my assignment are not shown in full in this page; they are housed in a CMS for our institution. But, I take your point and especially like the idea of having them post on their own user talk pages. Ian Porter (talk) 20:22, 16 October 2017 (UTC)

To clarify, some students posts at article talk are welcome. Others are not (at least not by me). If the assignment is to attempt to deploy an alleged improvement to the text of the article, then that may indeed involve participation at article talk and would be very welcome! It is the one-off remarks where students speak then vamoose that are problematic, and in my view, best kept in their userspace. But a riotous participation at article talk swirling around actually deploying text changes in the article itself, in accord with our regular editing policies etc..... Hallelujah that would be great. NewsAndEventsGuy (talk) 22:35, 16 October 2017 (UTC)