Wikipedia talk:Education noticeboard/Incidents

Creation of this board

This page was created as a fork of Wikipedia:Education noticeboard to separate incidents about classes from other discussion about the education program. The notice of this board being established is at Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard#WP:ENI. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:27, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Bookkeeping

See my additions at the top of the first "incident" (which doesn't really rise to the level of an "incident" IMO, but whatever):

Article(s): Cholera (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), Zimbabwean cholera outbreak (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views).

Course: Education Program:Rice University/Poverty, Justice, Human Capabilities, Section 2 (Fall 2013)

Instructor: DStrassmann, RobinPaige

Online volunteers: Czar, Mike Christie, JMathewson (WMF)

Student: Kimmyfromtexas (talk · contribs · logs)

Can this info become a standard header for incidents? If so, can someone add it to instructions? And is someone going to sort out the instructions at WP:ENB relative to WP:ENI? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:54, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

That's a nice header. I'll add it to instructions. And am working on the ENB header and instructions. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 17:04, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Scope

Student editing, not just Education program editing. Many courses are unregistered-- the problem the community has with student editing was caused by the education program, but this board needs to address all student editing issues, because they are different from what admins normally deal with at ANI. I hope the headings of this board page will be updated. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:03, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Yup. Have edited header accordingly. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 17:12, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thank you jb for everything ... I just do not have time to keep up ... and appreciate anything you do! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:15, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Archiving

I have no idea if I have really set up automatic archiving on this page. Can someone who knows more about such things figure this out? Thanks! --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 20:38, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

over my head (I sometimes can find my way to the restroom, though). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 20:52, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

By the way, do you all really want to be closing/archiving threads before the term really ends? Not much difference in these cases (since term is almost over), but when we start a new term and we bring an incident for a given article or course or editor, keep the section until term ends and the student (inevitably) finishes and leaves ???? That would be easier than having to re-open a new incident on the same article at each course deadline. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 21:13, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm just thinking it helps legibility if editors come to this page and can see with some ease where attention is required immediately. It makes this page more helpful and efficient if we can immediately be guided to issues that require resolution in the short term. If that means opening a new incident if problems reoccur, then so be it. That's my feeling, at least. I'm open to other ideas, though. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 22:49, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I just looked at it, and it looks to me to be correctly set up to archive after 10 days. I, also, think it best not to keep threads for an entire semester. If anything, it might be better to speed it up to 7 days or maybe even 5. Most really active incident boards archive around 3 days, to avoid becoming overly long. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:54, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Any objection to my making it 7 days? --Tryptofish (talk) 23:49, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

not from me. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:05, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. I'm going to go ahead with it (and not wait for anyone else to object ). --Tryptofish (talk) 00:08, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Instructions

... say to contact professors via email. Not Doing It. First, that's not the way I operate, period. Second, that will just reinforce the bad tendency of profs to not be active here. I don't think that belongs in the instructions; YMMV. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:31, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I agree with that. Posting to a user talk page should be enough. We don't establish classses of users as having special rights to be contacted by e-mail. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:34, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Happy to take that out. It's merely copied from the instructions on WP:ENB. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:37, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

 Done. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:39, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to change it at ENB too. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:40, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:49, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Motor system, test case

Since my whole, documented test case has now been desconstructed, separated, moved to another board, and totally refactored, I am saving a link here for archives. Meaning, if this new board doesn't work and I ever have to go to ANI, that was an example of one of everything. Not complaining, just saying! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 23:49, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I was trying to be helpful by weeding out the spin-off discussions. I can undo all that if you'd prefer. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 01:35, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

No need, all fixed! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:44, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

How this board will be used, three problems

Re-thinking several of the above issues:

1. Wikipedia:ENI#Cholera incident is closed, but it's not. (User talk:Kimmyfromtexas#Cholera) Actually, I don't think anything changed except the section heading, and all of the problems listed in the incident are still there; DocJames put the text back to give the student a chance to correct it (see discussion with Mike Christie on my talk). In other words, again, we're making allowances for students that we don't make for other editors, and it's unlikely the student will come back to correct the text. With "normal" (returning) editors/editing, you remove bad text to talk, you discuss with the editor on talk, the new editor learns, you put the text back in when/as it's fixed. If the student doesn't return to correct the issues, either Doc or myself has to do it, and I've also got to look at the Zimbabwe article. Marking this closed when it's not isn't helpful to the course, to the student, or to the medical editors who are waiting to clean up the article. Please re-open this incident, and an incident should not be closed until the text is clean. Which brings me to point 2:
2. I'm not bothered that my test case was deconstructed because it's in diffs. But I set out to show what one term, from only a few of the courses, a few of the articles, and a few of the students was like for a medical editor. Point being, this is the third November I have spent doing this, and nothing has changed. If something isn't done about those courses on this board, then the next step is to go to ANI and ask for admin action. So, how threads are set up on this board matters for future dispute resolution. I had a fully documented case that shows that there is no "there" "here"-- there is no one editor, group of editors, or entity who can help the medical editors deal with the onslaught, and for me, it's a question of what next so that I don't find myself doing this again next November. Which bring me to ...
3. Once this term ends, who is going to be dealing with the Georgia IT course, the Sanetti course, all of the courses I originally listed in my Test case, now at Wikipedia:ENI#Various? How will these issues be prevented next term? For example, the Case Western Reserve/Sanetti course approached the project with a course design that was POV by definition. The Georgia IT course needs a complete course restructuring. The Rice University course has lesser problems than some of the others, but problems nonetheless. All of these require followup. Who is doing this? Which board do we post to on overall followup matters at the course level (are those "incidents" or do they go to the regular board)? In other words, in two weeks, or four, we will find out that none of these students return, and we will have lists of hundreds of articles that need cleanup (including the two cholera articles, whose incidents should not be closed), and what will be the next step to making sure these same courses don't repeat same? The whole point of my Test case thread was to document one term so that if something isn't done with followup on specific problematic courses, and if there is no one here able or willing to deal with these profs, then it would be time for ANI.

SandyGeorgia (Talk) 09:57, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Re point 1: I've reopened the incident and posted a clarification of exactly what the diff is between the version Doc James preferred and the current version. I'd like to verify that Doc James really picked the right version to revert to before we discuss further. Re points 2 and 3: at the course level, Jami can contact the professors and communicate issues to the professors. At the individual article level, Tryptofish and others have said on the main noticeboard that simply reverting to a better version is OK, and I agree with that (so long as it really is a better version, of course). Are you hoping for people who watch this board to work on cleaning up any problematic student edits? If so, since we're relying on volunteer labour, I don't think there's a guarantee that you will get a response to every incident. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:43, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Mike! I haven't looked at what Doc or the student did ... I've looked at the text on the page, and it still has problems. No, I'm not wanting this page to serve as a checklist for what we need to get back to and for cleanup. I am looking for a clear measure of when/how we decide something is resolved, and to me, that means a response from the instructor that they have followed, understood, engaged, will adapt course design next term, whatever.

For example, the Georgia IT students have no idea whatsoever of Wikipedia policies and guidelines, can't even find nor know how to use a talkpage, and yet they were entering peer reviews on talk. Their instructor agreed they wouldn't do that next term. Resolved. In the cholera case, the incident was closed with no feedback from either the instructor or the student. I'm not as interested in the resolution of this one article (as things typically go, I imagine Doc or I will be doing the cleanup anyway) as I am in making sure the professor has engaged and the problem won't repeat. At any rate, nothing is resolved yet because the article still has problems, we don't know if the professor will adapt instruction, and we don't know if the student is coming back for cleanup or if we should. Normal article-- I'd have fixed it already. Student editing-- we're giving her time. Weird situation.

On points 2 and 3 and the more general, I'm still not sure how we will take all of these incidents and summarize them at term-end (in a few weeks) to what problems were encountered in each course, what needs to be done to prevent them from happening again, and which board we use for doing that. Is the big picture summary going on this board (incident) or the other board (ENB)? And who takes the lead in that? If there are not significant changes in the Georgia IT course, I want to be able to go to ANI and ask that they be uninvited from Wikipedia, if necessary, via admin action. Where do we hold that discussion and who takes command? I am far less concerned about individual articles than I am that this not continue happening. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:13, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Sandy, I'm thinking hard about the issues you raise here, and it seems to me that you are asking for things that need to be set-up on Wikipedia, but that haven't been set-up yet. Eventually, we will get a guideline or policy out of WP:ASSIGN, but until then, what we have is the existing dispute resolution infrastructure. I imagine that, in theory, you could always start an RfC/U on an unresponsive instructor, but we all know what a time waste that would be. You can take them to ANI, but you'll have to point to a specific policy violation if you want an admin to block the account. What I keep coming back to is something I've said so many times that Mike, correctly, quoted me about it just above. Always, always, always – just go ahead and revert the student edits to an earlier, better version, so long as it actually was better. Where you say "Student editing-- we're giving her time", that's your choice, but nobody is forcing you to do that, and it's probably the wrong choice if it's causing you dissatisfaction. If a student has a less-than-optimal educational experience, that's 100% the instructor's fault, and never the fault of other Wikipedia editors. I also agree with Mike that it's impractical to use this, or any other noticeboard, as a place to seek other editors to go and clean up after students. There's nothing wrong with making such a request, but there's no guarantee that enough editors will be inclined to act on the request. One idea to which Mike refers, that I do think is workable, is for us to work towards using this page as a place where editors can report a problem, and get a WMF person to reach out to the instructor about it. I imagine that there is a limit to how frequently WMF folks can be expected to do that, but we have a history of it working successfully. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:39, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

I understand where you're coming from, Trypto, but I'm coming from a whole 'nother place. I want to see how this board is going to function to a) prevent this from continuing, and b) to provide a term-end wrap up for the instructors who have given us the most grief (this term, Georgia IT).

Wholly reverting a student's work is easier said than done. In multiple instances this term, they have come back to my talk page begging to have their articles back, and dealing with students takes enough time away from medical editors that it makes it hard to create or update content we are interested in (Bencherlite has been waiting months for me to update the citations at Tourette syndrome, which is overdue for TFA). I decided this term, I wanted to see something done before December comes, we forget how horrible this is, and it happens again next November.

And we can't just revert articles that need to be merged or AFD'd-- it is very time consuming. I am viewing the incidents from this term as a Test case to what our processes can be for dealing with bad courses.

I still have not gotten an answer to the basic question: where (on which of the two boards) should we start a thread that will summarize the problems with the Georgia IT course, the Case Western course, and the Rice course, so that someone (who?) will give feedback to the professors, so that if changes aren't made, we can go to ANI for action?

Mike Christie, I was supposed to travel this weekend, but cancelled due to dh sick with ear infection, so I will get to the cholera example sooner rather than later ... I think I'll do it on the incident case here, for the benefit of everyone/anyone interested. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:38, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

OK. My guess is that, if you want either (a) a good resolution, or (b) action at ANI, then here at the Incidents board is the place to post. It's like ENI corresponds to ANI (whereas ENB corresponds to AN). As for "someone (who?)", my guess is that your test case may reveal that no one responds, but hopefully I'm guessing wrong. You can always just post here, leave a notification, to look here, on the instructor's talk page, and let what happens happen. In my opinion, that would meet your obligations before going to ANI, although whether ANI will actually do anything – because we don't really have the policies we need, yet – seems iffy to me. The approach I take to students who come to my user talk (I get them too) is to point them to a policy or guideline to read, and briefly summarize my concern in friendly but succinct terms. Then I leave it in their lap to fix whatever they need to fix. I remain friendly to answering follow-up questions, but I don't entertain WP:IDHT and I don't fix things for them. I find that takes very little of my time, and sometimes turns out quite nicely. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:51, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Oh, and another thing. If you (understandably) don't want to go to AfD, etc., and reverting, per se, does not apply, you can always just stubify the page. That's effectively the same thing as reverting. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:54, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, so I'm imagining that in a couple more weeks, we'll start (here at ENI?) a thread on each of the problematic courses, where we can summarize/list the issues that will hopefully be resolved before they design their next-term courses, and we'll see what develops from there and who, if anyone, does anything. If we get lucky, the instructors themselves will respond (not holding my breath).

As to whether to stubbify, for example, the epilepsy/cannabidiol article was badly dangerous, I prodded it, it's gone. There will not be an article there in the foreseeable future, since research on that topic hasn't even started. Colin is the best to advise on whether the other epilepsy article should be prodded. I would have merged salvageable content from the postmenopausal confusion article to menopause and redirected, but WhatAmIDoing gets to deal with that one (I don't agree with keeping duplicate content, ala student essays in the wrong article, but I'm not going head-to-head on that with another medical editor). SandyGeorgia (Talk) 00:21, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

software plans

This is not relevant yet for how incidents get handled, but I want to note that the next priority for course page software development (after we finish the features I noted at ENB, including making it easy to identify students from Special:Contributions) will be to implement Notifications. We will probably start with notifications for all course participants (students, instructors, volunteers) for edits to the course talk page. That would make it easy to get the attention of everyone in a course whenever problems occur, and it would probably make course talk pages the best place to discuss things after an initial post to this board. I don't want to make any timeline promises, but I'm hopeful we can have that in place before classes start to get really active next term.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:30, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

But Sage Ross (WMF), if it works like our current Notifications system, it won't notify the Georgia IT course instructor of anything, because they don't engage Wikipedia-- they aren't even logging in to see notifications. (Part of why I strongly believe they need to adapt or be shown the door ... ) Ditto, if the students are only logging in to Wikipedia when a course deadline approaches, they won't get the notification in time to do anything. The problem is we only hear from students when they are at a course grading deadline, and desperate to dump their sandbox in. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:39, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

It's true that a user who isn't logged in wouldn't get typical notifications, but that's solvable to some extent. We will probably set email on by default for course-related notifications, and I've been thinking about a step in the enrollment process to give student editors (and instructors, at the point of signing on to the course) a chance to turn on email for all notifications (and add an email address if they didn't enable email already). This could perhaps be opt-out, so that the default upon joining a course would be to turn on all email notifications.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 16:59, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

I like it :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:03, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

I like it too! And I want to underline that setting up the e-mail feature as opt-out is a very constructive solution to a lot of the problems that we have been running into with class projects generally. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:21, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Support A default of email notifications being on would address concerns about professors not being aware of problems with student editing and make Wikipedians' attempts to interact with students much more likely to be beneficial to Wikipedians, Wikipedia itself, students, professors, and the educational experience. I do not immediately see any harm that can come from this and I see a lot of benefit. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:34, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Archive setup

Jbmurray, I think you set up this board? It just had its first archive,[1] to Wikipedia:Education noticeboard/Incidents/Archive6, raising a lot of questions. Where is a link to archives displayed on this board? Why Archive6? What are 1 thru 5? Are Incident archives being mixed with the regular board archives? I don't speak this language ... SandyGeorgia (Talk) 05:34, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

No intermingling is going on; we just need to change one value in the archive setup to fix the numbering, and also copy/alter/incorporate the archive navbox used by the regular board. I'll do it tomorrow if nobody beats me to it. Maralia (talk) 05:53, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, as I say above, I don't speak this language, either. Maralia, if you could fix this, it would be wonderful.  :) --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 10:18, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Maralia, it would be most kind of you to sort it out. Best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 15:06, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I started the fix, but it may not yet be fixed all the way. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:55, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Trypto. I jiggered the noticeboard header to add the purge box & search archives box that the main noticeboard has. I also tightened the prose in the header in the process. The archive box that you added should suffice, but it doesn't seem to have caught up to your move from /Archive6 to /Archive1; will keep an eye on it and fix it if needed. Maralia (talk) 17:37, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

And thank you, too. Your further edits helped a lot. I think the change from 6 to 1 had been waiting for the CSD I requested of Archive 6 (after I moved it to 1), and the archive box has now caught up with it. I think it's desirable to be able to search the archives. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:25, 5 December 2013 (UTC)