Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

Welcome to the education noticeboard
Purpose of this page Using this page This page is for discussion of items that relate to student assignments and the Wikipedia Education Program. Please feel free to post, whether you're from a class, a potential class, or if you're a Wikipedia editor. Topics for this board might include: Content issues created by real or potential student assignments Improving student assignment output quality per the RfC Questions about the trainings or any question from instructors or students Discussion of the education program itself, the Wiki Education Foundation, or the Wikipedia Education Program. Students who have done great work and need {{The Excellent New Editor's Barnstar}} And any other issue that might relate to student assignments Of course, we should remain civil towards all participants and assume good faith. There are other pages more appropriate for dealing with certain specific issues: An issue requiring immediate administrator attention → Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents (and post a link here) Vandalism by non-participating students from schools → administrator intervention against vandalism. Cut and paste moves/history merge → the cut and paste move repair holding pen. Students revealing sensitive personal information → requests for oversight. Please DO NOT make such requests here; reports here are visible to everyone. Course announcements from dashboard.wikiedu.org / outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org → /Wiki Ed course submissions Issues related to dashboard.wikedu.org / outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org → meta:Talk:Programs & Events Dashboard Click "Click here to start a new discussion thread" below to start a new thread. Please start new threads under a level-2 heading, using double equals-signs and an informative title: ==Informative title==. If a thread is related to an ongoing discussion, consider placing it under a level-3 heading within that discussion. You should generally notify any user who is the subject of a discussion. You may use {{ping}} to do so, or simply link their username when you post your comment. It is not required to contact students when their edits are only being discussed in the context of a class-wide problem. If no comments have been made within 30 days, your post and any responses will be automatically archived. Please sign all contributions, using four tilde characters "~~~~". If discussion is already ongoing elsewhere or if there is a more natural location for a discussion, please continue the discussion there, and put a short note with a link to the relevant location on this page. If you cannot edit this page because it is protected, please place your comments on this page and they will be addressed. Managing threads By default, threads will be automatically archived by a bot after 30 days of inactivity. If you'd like to make sure a thread does not get archived, use {{Do not archive until}} at the top of the section. Use {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}} within a section to have it archived (more or less) immediately. A brief Archives page lists them with the years in which those now inactive discussions took place.
Click here to start a new discussion

No sig means assignment templates converted to sections don't get archived

Hello! Are you a student in CMN2160B at U. Ottawa, and you're wondering why you were pinged here? It was a mistake, my apologies! Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 22:42, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Sage (Wiki Ed), The sort-of Rfc on Wiki Ed assignments decided in favor of Option 3: Put the template in a new section, and update it as needed. However, this option did not include the addition of a standard user signature, which is required for bot archival. So, it seems to me, that this whole development has replaced what the majority of users originally saw as an undesirable accumulation of dashboard templates inside the Talk header that rarely got removed (but which were often collapsed), with a scheme where each assignment template gets its own section header as an independent discussion section, but no signature. Upshot: they stuck around forever before the change, they stick around forever after the change (but take up a lot more vertical space than before). Remind me why we did this, again? Or, did I miss a piece of the story? Mathglot (talk) 10:40, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Mathglot: They can still be manually archived. Maybe the archive bot could be updated to detect the new format as a valid archive-able section even without a signature? I might be able to add a signature from the first user who adds the template, without breaking the ability for the Dashboard to update the template to reflect subsequent changes (like other usernames being added or removed). Cleanly handling the removal of the section including a signature (for when a course is no longer planning to work on that article) would be a bit complicated, though.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:42, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

I seriously doubt the archive bot would be updated to do that, as it's not its charter to do so and would open it up to all sorts of special requests, but feel free to check at User talk:Σ. If you can add a signature just from the first user who adds it, that would guarantee eventual archiving, although if the course were 4 months and archiving delay was 3 months, it would be archived before the course ended. Ideally, you should add a signature either: 1) every time the assignment template updated (there doesn't have to be any content, just the sig is enough), or 2) just update the sig line, keeping only the last one. Here's what it would look like for the top assignment section at Talk:Communication if every update was signed (example constructed from actual updates of the top assignment template):

mockup of course assignment section with {{unsig}}-style signatures added

Here's what the top section at Talk:Communication would look like, if every update to Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/University_of_Ottawa/CMN2160B_(Winter) were signed in the style of Template:Unsigned: Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 January 2022 and 22 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Zc012. Peer reviewers: Yingzhuo Yang, Ayeesha.t. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Zc012 (talk • contribs) 17:53, 2 February 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ayeesha.t (talk • contribs) 20:42, 3 February 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Minhhang1406 (talk • contribs) 21:23, 12 February 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yingzhuo Yang (talk • contribs) 07:00, 25 February 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jiang jiteng (talk • contribs) 21:39, 7 March 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jiang jiteng (talk • contribs) 18:27, 8 March 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Minhhang1406 (talk • contribs) 04:35, 13 April 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Minhhang1406 (talk • contribs) 04:35, 13 April 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cecilia226 (talk • contribs) 08:13, 13 April 2022 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Darkbolt21 (talk • contribs) 18:49, 13 April 2022 (UTC) Or, another way to do it: just keep the last update, and drop the "unsig" code and use your own: Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 12 January 2022 and 22 April 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Zc012. Peer reviewers: Yingzhuo Yang, Ayeesha.t. — Assignment last updated by Darkbolt21 (talk • contribs) 18:49, 13 April 2022 (UTC) Note the wikied-dashboard class in the <span> tag above; this facilitates the bot finding it, and permits users to adjust visibility, if they so choose.

There would be no real reason to use the "unsig" style wording, you could use a standard sig of the same style as ~~~~ with your own lead-in text, so instead of "Preceding unsigned comment added by..." you could have, "Assignment template updated by...". Further, instead of signing it every time, you could just replace the sig each time (Assignment template last updated by...") which is all that the archiving bot cares about.

The current situation seems untenable to me. We went through this whole process to get rid of assignment templates from the page, and the current procedure does not do that, but rather, it makes it worse wrt to vertical page height, scrolling, and unwanted visibility of templates that stick around forever.

Yes, of course, they can be manually archived, but before we started all this, they could have been manually removed from the header (in a much simpler operation than manually archiving a discussion) but people were complaining then that templates stayed on the page forever (even if collapsed) and it wasn't good enough to be able to manually remove them, so we went through the Tfd, and then the "Rfc", and bots were unleashed on existing pages to convert them, and dashboard procedures were changed to match, and after all that, it's not better, it's worse and doesn't respond to the initial motivation that started all this.

We need to go the last mile, and tag the individual discussions with sigs so the bots can archive them. (Unless someone has a better idea.) Either a sig-every-assignment-update approach, or just a replace-the-last-sig approach works for me. The only thing that doesn't work, imho, is what we have now where converted assignment sections stay on the page forever. Mathglot (talk) 22:24, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

• Ping "Rfc" participants: @Primefac, Sdkb, SandyGeorgia, ProcrastinatingReader, Markworthen, BilledMammal, and Tryptofish:
• Ping Tfd discussion participants not already pinged: @Gonnym, Trialpears, OwenBlacker, RexxS, Clayoquot, Femke Nijsse, Rhododendrites, Wugapodes, Ozzie10aaaa, and Nikkimaria: @The Mysterious El Willstro, Czar, Brojam, Epipelagic, El cid, el campeador, Aircorn, Sadads, Goszei, Nerd271, and Zoozaz1: @Favre1fan93, Uanfala, Daask, Senator2029, Saotura, and Dpleibovitz: Mathglot (talk) 22:26, 3 May 2022 (UTC)
• Fix ping @Femkemilene:. Mathglot (talk) 22:29, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I understand the issue. Any text in a talk page should be signed, whether it is by a human user or a bot. If the bot isn't signing then it should be fixed. Gonnym (talk) 22:33, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

  Exactly. Mathglot (talk) 22:36, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

  The bot should sign. Strictly speaking, the archive bots only require timestamps to function, but I think the name of whoever made the section should also be there (name of bot, name of editor using tool, whatever). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:22, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

  Adding my concurrence. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:08, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

  I agree - the bot should sign. Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 05:58, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

  Fine with me, too (bot signing). --Tryptofish (talk) 20:17, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Adding signatures

I'll work on this next week. (I'm on vacation to attend my sister's wedding until then.) Thanks for bringing this up, Mathglot.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:38, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure imitating the output of ~~~~ or ~~~~~ (including whatever prefixed boilerplate you want) will work. If in doubt, check with User:Σ. Enjoy the wedding! Mathglot (talk) 01:05, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. Something will need to be done about existing sections too, I think, to make sure they can be archived by bots. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 11:52, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

If we don't really care about the actual timestamp, I can have a bot go through and put a ~~~~~ at the end of the extant template uses. Primefac (talk) 14:47, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

That'd be fine with me. Maybe a short note to make it clear it's not the actual timestamp (like unsigned. 17:38, 5 May 2022 (UTC)) ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:38, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

@Primefac: Okay with that, but if it's not too difficult, could we use |end_date= from the assignment template for the bot-added timestamp? Assignment templates, like this one at Sichuan cuisine for example, typically have a course end date listed as |end_date=. If there's no user sig or {{unsigned}} already there, can we use end_date instead of time now? If some talk page has a template for a 2016 course assignment and archiving algo=365d, it would be annoying to have it around for another year after the bot run. Mathglot (talk) 20:46, 8 May 2022 (UTC)

And then there's this assignment template added in March 2015 to Talk:Artificial intelligence with no |end_date=. It's still present and not bot-converted to date. Not sure if the bot could easily find that one. It does have |term=Spring 2015, but I don't know how commonly used that param is (or was); maybe Sage (Wiki Ed) might know. Where used, the param value is often seen as "Season YYYY" as in this example, but I believe it's completely free-form text. Mathglot (talk) 05:30, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Signature count and style

As usual, there's more than one way to do it, so I invite comments on what the signature text should look like, and whether it should leave a new sig every time (half a dozen or more updates to an assignment are not rare), or just keep one sig showing the last update, whenever it was, and by whom, replacing all earlier ones. Mathglot (talk) 04:17, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

• Keep the last sig only – I vote for keeping the sig representing only the last update to a given assignment template, as shown in the bottom example in the show/hide section under #No sig means assignment templates converted to sections don't get archived, above. No reason to keep all of them, and it will just uselessly expand the page even further. All other edits to the template are in the page history.
• Use this text – As for the text, I vote for the text in that same example; like this:

<span class="wikied-assignment" style="font-size:85%;">— Assignment last updated by [[User:Example1|Example1]] ([[User talk:Example1#top|talk]] • [[Special:Contributions/Example1|contribs]]) hh:mm, dd Month, YYYY (UTC)</span>

which resolves to: — Assignment last updated by Example1 (talk • contribs) hh:mm, dd Month, YYYY (UTC)

If you have an opinion on the signature text or how many signatures should be kept, please share it below. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:30, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

I agree that it should just be the "last updated by" signature. The other way wastes too much space, and there is still the editing history. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:17, 4 May 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, this is helpful. I'll try to implement it like the above example.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:03, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Note: I updated the css class name in the sample code above to class="wikied-assignment" (was: "wikied-dashboard") because it is more flexible this way, if you want to have assignment templates addressable separately by css from other wikied constructs. Mathglot (talk) 06:23, 13 May 2022 (UTC)

Signatures are now live

Thanks everyone! Signatures are now live: example. (They were actually finished a few weeks ago, but the Dashboard changed IPs recently and had been affected by a global IP block until today, so I wasn't able to confirm that the signatures were working properly until now.)--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:15, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

@Sage (Wiki Ed): I came to this discussion via User talk:Primefac#PrimeBOT Task 24 question and I ended up there because of an archiving related question at the Wikipedia Help Desk. My question is why are the WikiEd posts being added to the top's of talk pages when new posts are typically added to the bottoms of talk pages. Could this somehow affect the archiving of a talk page (particularly manually archived talk pages) if people are assuming that the older posts tend to be at or near the tops of the talk page? -- Marchjuly (talk) 13:39, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Marchjuly: Currently they are being added to the bottom, not the top. Here's an example of the current behavior. In the past, they were being handled more like WikiProject templates, and were being put in the top section (and were not being archived).--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:09, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Also, just as a minor note Marchjuly, the location of a post on a talk page does not affect the behaviour of the archive bots - if a post is older than the minimum time, it will be archived, whether at the top or the bottom or somewhere in the middle. Primefac (talk) 21:42, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks Sage (Wiki Ed) and Primefac for clarifying things. FWIW, Talk:Dentistry (including the Wiki Ed related post) was manually archived. I'm assuming that the course in question was Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Northern Colorado/Hearing Loss Prevention so the Wiki Ed post is no longer relevant, right? -- Marchjuly (talk) 22:22, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:10, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Copyright violation problems in a course

Two students in Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/UC_San_Diego/HIEA_140_China_since_1978_(Spring_2022) have "improved" articles about Chinese technologists by copying-pasting large quantities of translations from Chinese references. (I've reverted and asked for revdel). The editors of the articles in the above discussion are also students in this course. Ian (Wiki Ed), I think the instructor needs a heads-up about this. The dashboard shows the students to have been a bit lax in training in this course. These two editors spent 52 seconds on the Plagiarism module in one case and didn't do it in the other.

I do want to add that relative to the size of Wiki Education (341 courses running at the moment with over 6000 students) we see only a small number of problems each semester. StarryGrandma (talk) 00:48, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

@StarryGrandma Thanks for letting me know. I've revdel'd the appropriate revisions on those two articles. Per IAmChaos's note above and their message here, it's apparently something went wrong in the chain of communication. It's probably too late to have much impact on this semester's work, but we will get in touch with the instructor to try to explain what's going on, and try to avoid similar problems in the future.

Copyvio-via-translation isn't something I've really though about. It presents an interesting problem - it's something that probably should be addressed in our trainings, but doing so creates a potential WP:BEANS problem. Definitely something to address carefully. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:48, 31 May 2022 (UTC)

Yet Another Species Draft

I just reviewed another sandbox submission to expand an article on a species:

• Draft:Tuberolachnus salignus (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

I encounter these drafts from time to time that are submitting an expanded version of an existing article. It is almost always on a species. We have a lot of articles on species, because there are a lot of species, and many of them are stubs and can be usefully expanded. The question, again, is whether anyone knows if this is a class project, and who the instructor is. Expansion of articles is good, but Articles for Creation is not Articles for Expansion. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:26, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

All I can tell you is it isn't a student who's participating in a Wiki Education class project. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:04, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Resurrected from the archives (#KMUOS)

See Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard/Archive_21#Project_#KMUOS. @Doug Weller: One of the accounts involved in that previously, Special:Contributions/Asma_Alblooshi, has reappeared recently, and begun again with creating articles which are either terribly sourced and terribly written; or which are outright copyright infringements in (sloppy) translation... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 02:17, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

@RandomCanadian I'm a bit loathe to block, but there's a real problem here. I would say ANI is the best venue. He might even get offered mentorship. Doug Weller talk 14:46, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

I blame WikiEd. W?F annually collects $35M in profit but nothing is done to stop this disruptive editing. Had I been hired to run WEF I'd've had campus ambassadors on the ground in every country to confront, if not coopt, these instructors. But no, we threw away our volunteers and the entire effort in late 2014. Imagine if WEF were held monetarily responsible for the disruption to our community? (I am not watching this page, so please ping me if you want my attention.) Chris Troutman (talk) 22:21, 24 June 2022 (UTC)