Wikipedia:Student assignments
This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting. |
This page in a nutshell: When students edit Wikipedia as part of an assignment, it should improve Wikipedia – without any serious violations of content norms. This page contains advice to all parties involved. |
This is an overview page of best practices and advice concerning student assignments.
If you have any questions about anything related to student assignments, please ask at the education noticeboard.
Course page
Each assignment should have a
An assignment's course page is created via the Dashboard for the class. (Outside the US and Canada, please use this version.)
The course page should identify the
Each student editor should also have a link to their course page, the article(s) they plan to or are working on for the assignment, and any draft at the top of their
Student user names
Each student editor should register their own editor account. Under no circumstances should more than one student
On Wikipedia, some editors use their real life names as
For each class project on Wikipedia, instructors should give thought as to whether or not students should edit under their real names. Some instructors have required their students to use their real names, so as to encourage taking responsibility for text and to mimic academic journals. Doing so can, however, unintentionally have a permanent impact on a student's reputation. If the student is perceived (correctly or incorrectly) by other editors as having plagiarized material or having engaged in other misconduct, there may be comments to that effect left on discussion pages that will be permanently accessible by Internet search engines. Instructors should think carefully about the irreversible effects such situations may have on their students' futures, and give consideration to allowing the use of screen pseudonyms. Further information can be found at Wikipedia:On privacy, confidentiality and discretion and Wikipedia:How to not get outed on Wikipedia.
Guidance
Wikipedia takes pride in being
Instructors are expected to have a good working knowledge of Wikipedia, and should be responsive to community concerns, and be willing to help address
If editors contact an instructor, they should try to be helpful. Likewise, if an instructor receives constructive feedback on a classroom assignment, they should be responsive. If issues such as copyright infringement develop, rapid contact with the instructor can be necessary in order to resolve issues before they negatively affect students' experiences.
Student editors should learn to communicate via the normal Wikipedia channels, such as on
Everyone – instructors, students, and other editors – should practice
Challenges
Student assignments can help improve Wikipedia, but they can also cause the encyclopedia more harm than good when not directed properly. Volunteer editors are sometimes left with a mess and the burden of fixing poor-quality edits, cleaning up or reverting
Students and instructors participating in assignments can feel overwhelmed by multiple policies and guidelines,
When experienced editors encounter the results of a poorly performed assignment, they can feel overwhelmed by an onslaught of multiple content or format issues in articles they care about. They might also feel as if they are acting as unpaid and unthanked
Despite the difficulties, successful assignments and classrooms do exist. When knowledgeable instructors, competent students, and editors collaborate based on those norms, an assignment has a good chance of succeeding. This information page is intended to point the way to achieving good outcomes.
A successful assignment requires careful crafting, based on a knowledge of, and in accordance with, Wikipedia's norms (known as policies and guidelines).
Learning these norms must therefore be one element of any assignment. To keep things on the right track, a grading system and assignment that are aligned with these norms are necessary, and students should be willing to put in the effort to provide a quality contribution.
Advice for students
First, welcome to Wikipedia! Wikipedia welcomes new editors, and we hope you will want to stick around after your class is over. Writing and editing here is an expression of
.You will find that editing Wikipedia will feel quite different than any other assignment you have done for school. When you do schoolwork, you produce work privately or with a team, and submit it to your instructor with your name on it, by a given deadline. Editing Wikipedia is nothing like that. Here, you will be contributing to an article that is publicly available and that has been created and maintained by members of a community of anonymous editors, any one of whom may change or even remove edits that you make to it, and none of whom have a deadline.
As soon as you start to edit Wikipedia, you become a Wikipedian, and you are obligated to follow all of the the same
Wikipedia has its own
Of particularly high importance, please read carefully what this page says about plagiarism and copyright infringement below, and please take it very seriously!
If you plan to edit an existing article but you want to practice with test edits first, then copy and paste the article into
Experienced editors might give you advice or might revert your contributions with an
Wikipedia is a collaborative environment that depends upon communication. If you think editors are being an impediment to fulfilling your assignment requirements, then please say so to the WikiEd liaison for your class (privately if helpful) or at the
Advice for instructors
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) supports a global Wikipedia Education Program that can be contacted through their page on the Outreach Wiki and has resources for many countries. The program's purpose is to help instructors and students learn about Wikipedia and avoid common pitfalls. There is also a separate Wiki Education Foundation (WikiEd) that offers support for classes held at institutions in the United States and Canada. Either the Education Program or WikiEd (depending on the country where the course is based) should always be contacted prior to starting classes.[7]
Ideally, you already have some experience as a Wikipedia editor. If not, there are materials available and people willing to help you learn. Available people might include another instructor who has experience with Wikipedia assignments, the WikiEd liaison for your course, or Wikipedia editors at the
The volunteer community here can be very welcoming to new student editors, but they are also limited in their ability to deal with new issues that suddenly develop, as can happen when many students show up at the same time. Often, volunteers have a niche area they contribute to, which may coincide with your class assignment. Because there may be many eyes on the articles where students work, and because you cannot control what Wikipedia editors will do, or when they will show up to make edits of their own, careful attention to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines from the start of the course will improve your students' experiences – and may save you from aggravating and time-consuming incidents just at the time when you are submitting your grades.
Always use the Dashboard to create a course page for your class every time that you teach it, and please ensure that your class follows the above advice for #Course pages, #Student user names, and #Guidelines; please make these requirements to receive assignment credit.
Your assignment and grading rubric should reinforce (and certainly not contradict) Wikipedia's norms, and your class should seek to improve the encyclopedia.
Please do not give students
Similarly, it is important to recognize that Wikipedia's mechanisms for reviewing drafts of articles or evaluating new articles are not designed to fit within the time frame of your class. This means that the articles for creation and peer review processes are not appropriate for class assignments. Please do not direct your students to use either of these, as the students will find the experience unsatisfying, and Wikipedia editors will resent being asked to make these reviews.
Encourage your students to engage with basic Wikipedia processes and standards. Make sure they understand the advice above for students, perhaps by making this information page assigned reading for a quiz.
Have students post specific suggestions for improvement directly on the talk pages of their peers' articles, and not offline. Incorporate responding to feedback into the grading rubric. Reward students who give good advice on Wikipedia. Reward students who seek out advice from experienced editors and then make improvements to the article based on that advice. If an active WikiProject exists around the content you'll be assigning your students to edit, encourage students to notify editors there. Penalize students who do not address the points that were raised by non-student editors.
Thank you for introducing your students to Wikipedia, ensuring that they fit in well here, and helping them leave behind a positive contribution for many readers!
- Page editing
Your students should post a
Consider encouraging your students to work in a sandbox and know that it is an option to have their assignment graded there for course credit. It is usually best to develop articles on the students' user pages, or as drafts. After evaluation, the articles may go on to become Wikipedia articles.
In particular, please require students to obtain your approval before moving content from sandboxes into the main article space. Students should not abruptly move large amounts of text into articles without first having the material reviewed either by you or by experienced editors, because otherwise we may end up having to revert everything that the student has done.
If you decide to allow a student to directly edit an article, it is often better to have the student improve a short article that is only in the early stages of development. Articles that are already well-developed before your course starts are likely to be watched by many editors, and so your students may find more editors objecting to changes at such articles, particularly if the articles are already of good quality.
Advice for other Wikipedia editors
Established editors should be welcoming to instructors and student editors. As always,
Depending on how classes are organized, students may have different priorities from established editors (class grades rather than improving Wikipedia; making a few changes and not coming back). Editors sometimes encounter large numbers of student edits in a short period of time, and can find it difficult to get students to pay attention to editorial advice.
If you see problem edits, explain your concerns on article or user talk pages. Make edits you consider appropriate, as you would in the case of other new editors. You are entitled to revert content or move it to the talk page, or to nominate a page for deletion if appropriate, especially when there are serious policy violations. (A student can always request that an
You are never obligated to be an unpaid teaching assistant. Please do not let student projects diminish your enjoyment of editing. Do not feel bad about reverting edits that justifiably should be reverted. Student grades are not your responsibility, nor is any other aspect of teaching the class, unless you personally choose to involve yourself. If you do not want to fix all of the problems on a page, feel free to leave it for other editors to work on, rather than becoming stressed by the effort of doing it alone.
You can point editors who appear to be new student editors in the right direction by using Template:Welcome student, or, in the case of content related to medicine or health, Template:Welcome medical student. Please note that these templates do not merely welcome students; they also point the students towards how to avoid common problems.
When students become interested in editing cooperatively, it can be a genuine pleasure to work with them. If you see a valuable student editor, please consider giving them The Excellent New Editor's Barnstar by placing {{subst:The Excellent New Editor's Barnstar|1=Put your message here. ~~~~}}
on their talk page. Likewise, if you have reason to single a class out for praise, also consider posting at the noticeboard.
Editing considerations
Choosing a topic
As you are getting to know your way around Wikipedia, and deciding which topic you want to write on, you will notice that wikilinking allows readers to easily access text in other articles by clicking on the link. Consider when adding text whether you are adding the content to the right article; if the content you want to add fits better in another article, readers can get there via a link. As an example, in the article Jumping Frenchmen of Maine some information about George Miller Beard and the startle response is needed so the reader can understand the topic, but detail about Beard and the startle response is expanded in the articles George Miller Beard and Startle response. Take care not to add content to the wrong article, as you may be duplicating work that has already been done, or you may be spending time generating content that will be moved or deleted if it's in the wrong article.
Be more cautious about removing existing content than adding it, and if you are removing more than a few lines it is a good idea to explain why on the talk page. Some students entirely replace the existing text and metadata such as categories; this is almost never a good idea, and is likely to lead to reversion of all of their edits.
Wikipedia has a large number of articles that are called stubs because they are very short and in need of expansion. Such pages are particularly good choices for class projects, because the addition of more material will be welcome. In contrast, adding material to an article that is already extensive in its coverage may lead to problems if the added material is not written and formatted exactly right, and student edits of such pages are more likely to be reverted by other editors. It is almost always better for students to expand short pages than to try to change long ones.
Some highly contentious topic areas (some dealing with political matters, current events, or religious conflicts, as well as various other controversial subjects) have been placed under special rules called General Sanctions and Contentious topics that are intended to prevent disputes between editors. When such restrictions are in place, editors who violate the rules may be quickly blocked from editing, including student editors who may not recognize the intricacies of such rules and be taken by surprise. Instructors should familiarize themselves and their students ahead of time with the sanctions that are applicable to the areas in which students might edit, and avoid these areas. A current list of these topics is here. These topics should be avoided entirely.
If you are starting a new article, the subject needs to pass the test of
Plagiarism and copyright infringement
Students and other new editors sometimes mistakenly believe that as long as added text is cited to its source, copying that text (or closely paraphrasing it) is acceptable. It is not. Plagiarizing could earn you an "F" in the course or being thrown out of the university; copying too closely can also be copyright infringement. If you are editing under your real name, the plagiarism can follow you for life. Students should realize that a potentially large number of persons may be silently observing all edits on a Wikipedia page, and consequently there is actually a very high probability that someone will notice plagiarism.
Some established editors are reluctant to "blow the whistle" on student plagiarism because of the consequences that can result for the student, and believe that it is the professor's job to review articles for plagiarism and copyright infringement. However, it is just as probable that another editor will come along subsequently, and pursue the misconduct at any time, and so it is in the instructor's interest not to leave any problems unresolved.
The following pages are helpful reading:
Editing medicine and health topics
Improving medicine and health topics often requires particularly careful use of sources. Specific examples of best practices are also shown below.
Wikipedia has unique sourcing and style guidelines covering health information. Health and mental health-related content in any article (not just medicine, biology and psychology articles) must be supported by independent "secondary" sources, such as expert
Students editing health-related content should read these pages that explain how to write and organize medical articles, how primary, secondary and tertiary sources are used in health-related content, and where to find ideal sources:
- Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles for general guidelines on how medical information is organized.
- Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) for information about sourcing guidelines specific to medicine and health-related content.
- Dispatches: Sources in biology and medicine for a tutorial on how to locate appropriate sources.
One way students can have a more rewarding Wikipedia experience in adding health information to an article is to begin by posting a list of sources they plan to use to the article's "talk page" (via the tab at the top of the article) before they start writing content from those sources; that will allow experienced editors to guide them towards optimal sources and comment on the appropriateness of the planned article expansion.
Examples of best practices
Examples of instructors leading assignments that are good models to learn from include Brianwc, who has successfully run a multi-semester program at a law school; jbmurray, who had students take articles up to good and featured status; and Biolprof, who had graduate students peer review each other's contributions multiple times.
An example of a thorough course page design can be seen at Signal Transduction (Saint Louis University). Another good example is North American Environmental History.
Resources
- List of policies* / List of guidelines*
- Quick directory / Editor's index
- Wikipedia:Five pillars / Wikipedia:Consensus
- Wikipedia:How to edit a page
- Wikipedia:Citing sources
- Help:Wikitext
Any questions?
Please ask at the
See also
- Wikipedia:Academic studies of Wikipedia in education
- Education Program Online volunteer log
- Wikipedia:USEP/Courses/JHU MolBio Ogg FA13/Student banner
- Wikipedia:Participation by academic projects
- Here, for a list of old classroom projects
- Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Courses/Trophy case
- Wikipedia:Historical page for school and university projects
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Classroom coordination, a historical project
- Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/How to edit
- Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia
- Wikipedia:Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia
Templates:
{{educational assignment}}
to tag the talk pages of articles and drafts from the student{{Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment}}
to tag the talk pages of articles and drafts from the student who is doing a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment.
Notes
- inappropriate advocacy. This article is, however, a good example where talk page discussions with students successfully led to policy-compliant content, but community consensus ultimately imposed a block on the instructorthat included a ban on running future class projects. This was an extreme case, but it does demonstrate the problems that may develop when communication breaks down, and that the Wikipedia community can and will act to protect the integrity of the encyclopedia.
- ^ Wikipedia is free as in freedom, meaning you are free to contribute to it and free to use the information contained within it with proper attribution. It also costs nothing to use Wikipedia; gratis means zero monetary cost. The term is used here to remove ambiguity between the two different meanings of free, which can also mean zero monetary cost.
- ^ If a contribution here adopts the essay style it can be reverted, tagged with {{essay-like}}, or possibly deleted.
- WP:FAfor a collection of high-quality articles.
- content forks.
- ^ cleanup templatesthat can be applied to an article which identify specific areas needing attention. They may be added either as a form of communication with an individual editor, or to attract the attention of other editors or readers of the article. They should not be removed without the issues that were identified having been addressed, or without consensus that they are no longer needed.
- ^ Please consider delaying your Wikipedia assignment to next semester if you are not familiar with how things work. You and your students will benefit from good planning.
- A-class) an article must be nominated and be supported by consensus following a formal evaluation by independent editor(s). The time frame involved is unpredictable and typically incompatible with the editing schedule of student assignments. Lower grades can be assigned or re-assessed by any editor but may not be accurate or reliable, especially when done by an inexperienced editor. These grades may be considered as a coarse filter of article quality, useful mainly within the editorial community. Consequently, they are ill-suited to an instructor's assessment of students' contributions, and article grades should not be employed as assignment goals. There is no benefit for students who are inexperienced editors in trying to assign grades on article talk pages, and any self-assessment task should not involve formally assigning Wikipedia article grades.
- ^ Students may not sufficiently understand the quality expectations of those processes; student nominations may overwhelm those process pages; reviewers are sometimes reluctant to engage a nomination, or fail a nomination, when they know a student's grade may depend on the outcome; past cases of students pressuring reviewers to pass nominations have come to light; and the quality of the reviews and speed at which they are conducted can vary greatly.
- ^ If you are concerned about page stability for quiz purposes, link them to this article with a permanent link to the current version by selecting it after clicking the "View history" tab at the top of the article.
External links
- Using Wikipedia in the Classroom: A Cautionary Tale, a 2014 blog post by Meghan Duffy, illustrating pitfalls instructors need to anticipate before making Wikipedia assignments
- Blog by Wiki Education with many success stories and case studies