Wikipedia talk:United States Education Program/MOU

Potential concerns for online and campus ambassadors

I don't see anything particularly onerous in the language of the MOU, but concerns have been raised on the mailing list so I have started this talk page section. Protonk (talk) 01:04, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Just so everyone knows, I am now on the other side of all this. As a professor, I'm so swamped with work, I didn't even bother to read the MOU - I just signed it (at least I basically know what is in it, as I helped suggest items for it, but others won't). And I'm a responsible Wikipedian. Rather than dither about what is in it, I suggest this be shortened to five bullet points. Awadewit (talk) 01:15, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

That was me. My first concern was this line: "Report to the rest of the pod if problems arise with students, or with students' interactions with other editors." Yes, of course, my first step with any new user when they have problems, make mistakes, don't know policy, etc., is to talk to the user. This is doubly true for students we are mentoring. The phrasing though, implies to me that mentors shouldn't take any other action with respect to their students' editing. I would like clarification here that, if, for instance, a student adds original research to an article, that the mentor can remove that information directly. In other words, I would like clarification that the mentors can continue to act as editors on the pages that they are mentoring. Or, is this MOU essentially creating a structure similar to WP:INVOLVED for admins, implying that when mentoring someone, you shouldn't be involved in any editing of the article in question. This seems to match the later point that says that online ambassadors will "Help the pod, or individual students, connect with active Wikipedia editors who contribute to related topics who may be able to provide content feedback on student work." I read that line as implying that mentors won't overview the content themselves, and should seek out additional editors to do so. If this is, in fact, the intent, I am concerned; however, since I may simply be misreading the purpose and implications of those lines, I'll wait for feedback before I explain the concerns.

One additional minor concern I have is that it indicates that online ambassadors will assist on the Ambassador IRC channel; I just wanted to be sure that being involved with IRC was not a requirement of ambassadorship. Qwyrxian (talk) 01:27, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that ambassadors will be held to standards of malicious compliance. Unlike the rest of wikipedia there isn't a stocks where you will be dragged should you fail to fulfill elements of the MOU. My guess is that if you don't offer updates or you don't assist with courses then the regional ambassador (or whatever mechanism has been agreed upon) will ask you to remove yourself from the class or the program (this is conjecture on my behalf!) just as they might in the absence of a MOU. Remember that the MOU is there for WMF, us and the professors so everyone can understand the expectations we have for each other. I don't think it exists to be interpreted in the fashion you are suggesting. If the right course of action in a situation is to talk with a student editor before sending a note to the pod (or...and this is just my opinion...in lieu of such a note) then take the right course of action. Further I think the specific interpretation you are getting from the MOU is incorrect. Protonk (talk) 01:45, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I am surprised that there is now an MOU for ambassadors, although I certainly understand why one might be necessary. Generally Wikipedia has no firm rules, so I would expect this document to be a guideline (or ambassador program policy) but definitely not "you-must-do-everything-by-the-book". I don't want a page telling me how to help students, because my style is likely very different from many other ambassadors. Much of the material in the MOU seems like common sense, but it's all very detailed and lengthy. We need to cut it down and then just make a guide for ambassadors so they know what is expected of them. Wikipedia is, after all, still a volunteer program and we aren't required to do anything. I don't think signing this MOU should override IAR at all, and I will certainly ignore what is spelled out on the MOU if doing so will allow me to better help a student in a particular situation. Ambassadors should be considered regular editors, like every other Wikipedian, and can edit any student's article however they want, assuming they're not being stupid. I would hope that no student adds OR to an article, but any user, ambassador or not, should feel free to remove that and explain the issue to the student. And I would certainly hope that no student gets in a nasty dispute (especially as many of these topic areas are contentious), but the ambassador--assuming they are not already heavily involved--should feel free to help settle the situation. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 01:56, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

• How about a condensed version covering the highlights for readability? That would allow us to get the gist of how responsibility is to be divided without rewriting the MOU. Remember that the MOU applies to three parties (basically): WMF, CA/OAs, and the colleges. All three parties have their own social norms, rules and regulations which each should follow independently of the MOU. I don't think the section on instructor responsibilities is meant to materially contravene any school rules or state/federal laws and where a conflict would exist between the MOU and any "local" (for lack of a better word) rules then common sense should prevail. Protonk (talk) 04:19, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

• As a general comment, I don't see anything about this being a policy. There is a point in making expectations about communication explicit. Stating expectations on how the various parties will fulfill their respective roles will help prevent misunderstanding. -- Donald Albury 10:27, 5 August 2011 (UTC)
  • I assumed it was more of a set of guidelines (and Protonk, a shortened version would be nice), but I'm wondering why it has to be "signed", then. It's not going to end up being binding, and if breached, then the most we can do is ask an ambassador to leave (not sure how that's going to work with professors, but that probably won't happen). Expectations are fine, but this just seems way too formal and confusing. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 23:29, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

IRC not mandatory

I adjusted the MOU slightly; it was an oversight to imply that IRC for Online Ambassadors is mandatory. That was never the intention. IRC is just one structured way that ambassadors can help students, if they wish to use it.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 18:40, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Some responses

Hi all! First off, thanks for the awesome feedback. There are a few things I want to respond to here on some themes from all of your posts, so forgive me for just starting a new section rather than replying to individual posts. Let me start with some background -- for the last two terms, professors and WMF have signed an MOU that lays out what we expect from professors and what they can expect from us. Ambassadors have been added to the document for this term because one consistent piece of feedback we got from Campus and Online Ambassadors was that they wanted everyone's roles clarified, so professors had appropriate expectations of what the Ambassadors would do and not do, and Ambassadors knew what their responsibilities within the group were. This MOU is also very "pod"-focused, to encourage greater communication among professors and Ambassadors, not just between professors and Wikimedia Foundation staff. Also, a lot of professors and Ambassadors who participated last year said that they would have liked to have received more information about what is expected of them and what exactly they could expect from other members of their "pod." Think of this document as an expectation-setting document rather than a policy, exactly as Donald Albury and Protonk suggest.

I think the point about it needing to be shorter is certainly well-taken, and we'll work on the condensed version that can serve as a reference point throughout the term. I don't want to cut anything out of this document as it is, though, because there are a lot of important nuggets in there that I think it's good to have everyone read once before the term starts to ensure that everyone is on the same page. For future terms, we'll work on a shorter version overall.

About the specific points: First, bear in mind that as an Online Ambassador, you are first and foremost a mentor to these students, and as such your role in working with them is to be a mentor, not an editor. They're getting graded on the work they contribute to Wikipedia, and if you edit their work for them to make it up to Wikipedia standards, they can't learn from their mistakes. You're also removing a chance for them to edit their own work based on community feedback, which is often part of what they're being graded on. Maybe a specific example would help explain this point. Let's say a student contributes five paragraphs to an article that don't meet the NPOV requirements. In this situation, the ideal role of the Online Ambassador is to edit a few sentences or a short paragraph of the student's work to meet NPOV standards. Then leave a comment on the talk page, explaining NPOV, showing what you did to one paragraph, and then asking them to redo the other four paragraphs in the same style that you did the first one. In this example, you're providing them a learning opportunity, which is what we expect from the mentorship. Feel free to fix a typo, but if you see a student consistently use a word wrong, point that out to them and ask them to fix it. You can remove original research, but explain the policy, then offer suggestions to the student on how to fill that gap with reliable sources. It's a judgment call, of course, but essentially, feel free to edit a student's article, but make sure you're helping them improve their contribution, not just doing it for them. We want them to learn how to edit! For more advanced things like submitting an article to DYK, feel free to just do that yourself. If a student gets in a nasty dispute, please do step in! Mentors are there to offer suggestions, but they're also there to have the student's back when something goes awry. If you can't step in for some reason, ask another Online Ambassador to -- we certainly don't want students in disputes without Ambassador assistance.

The line "Help the pod, or individual students, connect with active Wikipedia editors who contribute to related topics who may be able to provide content feedback on student work" actually isn't designed to discuss the can-I-edit-a-student's-article point at all. One common complaint we heard from professors is that students didn't get enough feedback from the community on the content itself, they just got feedback on whether it was encyclopedic in tone, etc. Certainly, it's the professor's role to provide an ultimate voice on whether the student is correctly describing their topic (they're the subject matter experts), but they were hoping to have people with subject-matter knowledge from the community provide feedback to students. The idea behind this bullet point is that if you don't have any special knowledge of the student's topic matter, seek out a WikiProject whose editors might be able to provide some content feedback such as identifying if the student is missing an important section, or go through the edit history of a similar article and seek out some editors there who might be able to provide some content feedback. If you are knowledgable about the topic, feel free to be that community member! The point is that we'd like to have OAs take an active role in ensuring students get content feedback from an editor knowledgable on that topic area.

Finally, ignoring what is spelled out in the MOU: Please don't. The Online (and Campus) Ambassador role is something to which you applied and were accepted, so it's a bit more formal than many other Wikipedia volunteer roles. It's important for us to have all parties involved with the same expectations of each other and of the Wikimedia Foundation, and if you're not okay with what's expected of you, we need to find another solution, not just have you ignore the MOU. Fetchcomms, can you provide an example of an action that would help a student while failing to meet the expectations in the MOU, as you suggest?

I apologize for the length of this comment, and since that was one of the criticisms of the MOU to begin with, I end with a five-bullet point highlighted summary! :)

• The MOU isn't a policy, it's an expectation-setting document.
• I will work on a condensed MOU for ease of reference throughout the term, but please read the full document at least once.
• Approach student articles as a mentor and help them learn how to make whatever edits you'd normally make (except for very advanced things, which you could do for them as long as they know what you've done). Do help them in a dispute if one were to arise.
• The content feedback point is about finding editors (who can be you if you have it) to provide subject-matter-knowledge-based feedback on the students' work, not just comments on meeting Wikipedia policies or formatting requirements.
• Please don't ignore the MOU.

-- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 23:52, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure how this is going to work—we can't stop non-ambassadors from going ahead and completely rewriting a student's work if it's just not up to WP standards, right? I know that these articles are being written for a grade, but as not every Wikipedian is an ambassador, we can't expect everyone to just fix a couple sentences and then explain NPOV to the student and let them fix the rest. Mentoring is certainly important, but not every other user is going to keep that in mind before editing a page written by a student. (This will probably be less of a problem for students who work on a userspace draft consistently throughout a period of time rather than posting an article directly to mainspace or posting their draft two days before it's due.) After all, the USPP/UEPP can't just tell a user to stop fixing articles for others. I can think of several ways these issues can be avoided, such as by requiring students to make 50–100 small edits to existing articles during the first couple of weeks so they understand the basic editing guidelines before posting a draft consisting of entirely primary sources or spammy prose, but obviously this will differ between classes. I'd hope that professors have planned/are planning their grading requirements and editing assignment syllabi with the advice of content-experienced Wikipedians, but I don't know what the current situation is. If it were up to me, I'd let the students loose, with the simple requirements that they be editing fairly actively during the entire semester and write at least one article over a course-relevant topic, so they can truly learn for themselves and from how Wikipedia actually works—not with excessive hand-holding.

Regarding your second paragraph, I think that's definitely one of the biggest challenges Wikipedia is facing right now: not enough subject matter experts. Maybe that's why our articles on Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber are a heck of a lot better than ones like microwave plasma, despite the fact that countless academic journals have published articles discussing it. Finding those experts are going to be really tough, especially as many WikiProjects are barely active and the students' articles are starting to get more and more specific (and even for an article like De-Ba'athification, I strongly doubt there are more than one or two active Wikipedians with a strong knowledge of U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and the Iraqi political system—there aren't even that many active Iraqi editors). Sometimes, asking other students or even other professors for feedback will be more effective than posting to WikiProjects, and sometimes the opposite will be true, so I hope the MOU doesn't discourage the former type of feedback.

As for your last point, you ask a very difficult question. I personally consider IAR to be the most important "rule" of Wikipedia, something that can override any other policy, guideline, or list of expectations when absolutely necessary and when it is sensible to do so. Such a situation isn't easy to predict, and even as an administrator, I've only invoked IAR a handful of times over the past fourteen months. To answer your question, I could ask other students to provide feedback in a situation I described above, where there are no active subject matter experts on Wikipedia, rather than posting on a few WikiProjects' talk pages and waiting for nothing to happen. Another example: the MOU says that OAs should "(as much as possible) protect students from disruptive Wikipedia editors". If a student is in a dispute and both parties are acting completely inappropriately (e.g., personal attacks, hounding, deliberately messing with each others' articles, or making threats), and I or someone else has already tried to defuse the situation with no success, then I'm going to act in an administrative capacity and block both of them per standard Wikipedia policy. In such a case I would not "protect" the student by blocking only the other editor—that would be a double standard and would probably lead to a lot of outside complaints about the education program, too. (Now if the other user was clearly a troll or sockpuppet or something along those lines, then I'd probably just give the student a stern warning, and the length of any block would depend on the situation.) If such a block jeopardizes a student's ability to finish his/her article on time, there's nothing I can do other than to instruct him/her on how to request an unblock.

If my point of view here is a problem, please let me know and I will consult a few other admins to see if what I would do is out of the norm. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 03:38, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Fetchcomms. Completely agreed: there's no way we can stop non-Ambassadors from editing students' articles, and honestly I think that is one of the good things about the assignment. Our research shows that a lot of students were so scared that Wikipedians would be reading and editing their work that it made them do a better job (many students found it ironic that they did a better job of citing for Wikipedia than they did for a traditional term paper). I think the difference is we wouldn't want to encourage a student's particular mentor to be the one making extensive changes, we'd want the mentor to help the student learn how to make changes. That all being said, if the student has written something egregious, of course you should feel free to remove it. And (I'm jumping to your third paragraph here), I don't think that's at all contrary to the MOU. If the student's acting inappropriately enough to justify blocking, block away. Students aren't a protected class on Wikipedia, and they shouldn't be. "Protect students" in this case means things like suggesting an alternative topic if the student chooses one that's a likely target for edit wars, or if a student does get in a dispute with another editor, help the student understand what the dispute is about and look for ways to resolve it. The reason this is in the MOU is so it's clear that it's not the professor or Campus Ambassador's responsibility to watch out for students if they get into a dispute on-wiki, it's the Online Ambassador's responsibility.

I agree with you that some topics are harder to find subject-matter experts than others, and I think this is actually one area where the Online Ambassador being in the pod can be very useful. Several professors have asked us about ways to work with classes at other schools, and I think having a couple of the OAs coordinating this would be awesome -- if your class is complementary subject-matter-wise to another OA's class, see about doing some peer editing across classes! We definitely want to encourage this as much as possible. Even if it's just a copule of students in doing informal comments on each others' articles, I think it'd be great. So please do encourage other students to comment on articles! In sum, I don't have any concerns at all with your views. :) -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 04:27, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Well that's good to hear! :) Thanks for clarifying all of that—I guess I was just a little muddled on the wording. /ƒETCHCOMMS/ 14:28, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Sign page?

When I just tried to sign the MOU, there was no Wikipedia:United States Education Program/MOU/sign page there. If others have already signed, where are their signatures? -- Donald Albury 10:19, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean no professors have signed yet? They're just getting started -- Adrianne is the only one who's signed, I think, and you can see hers if you click on the "Children's Literature" listing in the TOC -- but more should be coming in the next few weeks (all the names are professors who have verbally committed but who haven't signed yet). Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question. -- LiAnna Davis (WMF) (talk) 23:57, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

What I meant was that when I clicked on the link I am ready to sign the MOU at the bottom of the page I got an error message. It does work now. -- Donald Albury 00:13, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Mailing list

The memorandum says that CAs are to send reports to the ambassador mailing list, but it's not entirely clear which list... Is there signup information somewhere, or is that sent privately? --Elonka 04:26, 19 September 2011 (UTC)