Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

There's a class assignment incident under discussion at WP:VPM#"Grid architecture" pages. If anybody knows how to get in touch with the instructor, or figure out who that might be, your assistance would be appreciated. I don't see any real harm to the project being done, so I think all that should happen is the instructor needs to be made aware of WP:ASSIGN, but without any response from any of the students, I don't see any way to do that. I'd really like to avoid this getting escalated to pages being deleted. RoySmith (talk) 16:53, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

I pinged one of the staff of the group in India (since it sounds like that's where these students are) that does a lot of education work to see if they can help. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:01, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

They've just restarted posting, FYI LiAnna (Wiki Ed). Sarsenet•he/they•(talk) 13:24, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

@Nitesh (OKI) and Pavan Santhosh (OKI): can you see if you can help these students? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:49, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

@LiAnna (Wiki Ed) Thank you for tagging us.

@Nitesh (OKI), since we don’t yet have clarity on the instructor, students, or their college, could you please check with the Tamil Wikimedians to see whether this might be part of any of their engagements? or if they know these students on-ground? For instance, this page uses several Tamil Nadu–based places and organizations as examples in the code and TN community is active in Wiki-Edu programs. Pavan Santhosh (OKI) (talk) 04:54, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

@LiAnna (Wiki Ed): and @Nitesh (OKI) and Pavan Santhosh (OKI):, sorry I am just now seeing this thread; I had opened up an SPI inquiry at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Jhsgdugiusdh not realizing that this was also being discussed here. There appears to be continued new creations of additional accounts and pages over the last several days; the SPI link has a list of all the accounts and pages that I encountered. Best, Spencer^T•C 06:44, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

I noticed one of my mentorship program mentees editing this userspace draft, a copy of the article Wetzikon-Robenhausen (created 2015; 8kb). There are now 30 edits to the userspace draft by two students in their course. Besides the possible problems with edit conflicts should someone edit the main article, there is also a possible issue with history merger, if they attempt to replace the live article with the draft using a copy-paste merge.

I don't see an issue with students trying out edits on a draft copy of an article just to see how their changes look in context, or to hone their editing skills, but it should be clear that when they are done with it, then the draft is dead. Changes to an existing article should be made to the article (or in an WP:Edit request on the Talk page). To the extent that they can copy snippets out of the draft into the article (along with proper attribution to all authors per Wikipedia's licensing requirement, if the snippet contains the work of more than one author), that's fine; that's an edit directly to the article. But imho, they should not attempt to paste the draft or large chunks of it involving many separate edits over content in the live article in a single edit where the original draft edit summary justifications would be lost.

What is current Wiki Ed guidance on this? Mathglot (talk) 19:46, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Our guidance is in this training slide. Most articles don't have any intervening edits between the sandbox move and their move back to mainspace, but they do occasionally crop up, and typically the student will reach out to their Wiki Expert for support in these cases. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:21, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi, LiAnna and thanks for linking that training slide. This user is violating the guidance on that slide in two major respects. The guidance calls for:

1. "copying a small portion of the article that you want to change"

   – but the editor copied the entire 8kb article to the sandbox;

2. "Do not try to overhaul an entire article from the sandbox."

   – since copying it over, two student editors have been editing the sandbox and it is now up from 8 to 22kb.

Even if there have been no intervening edits at the article, they should not attempt to copy the sandbox back on top of the article without first consulting their Wiki Ed Expert, who can coordinate with an admin or someone with the capacity to do a HISTMERGE. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:14, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

This is a broader comment than what Mathglot said (and I agree with Mathglot). The training slide correctly says to work with a small portion of the existing page, and not to use the sandbox to change large parts of the page. That's important advice, and I support that. But in my experience, it's still all too common for student editors to do big sandbox dumps in a single edit, leaving other editors in the position of just having to revert, because it often isn't worth the time and effort to cull the good parts of the dump from the bad. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:14, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

Giving the community a heads-up. I am teaching a climatology course this term at University of Toronto. My students will be making small editing improvements to meteorology and climatology-related pages (e.g. missing key concepts, parts that are written too technical to understand, erroneous or contradictory statement, updating outdated information/source). I'll be vetting their page selections before approval. If any of my students' editing causes issues, please drop me a message. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 22:02, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

I was about to tag this page for speedy deletion but I saw that it was created by a student in this class. I'd rather it just be moved to their user space rather than it be deleted but it was already moved to draft and back again. I'm not entirely sure of what you guys do with these kinds of things. Thanks. --Seawolf35 ^T--C 21:49, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Seawolf35, Thanks for the ping. I've reached out to the student and asked them to keep their work in their sandbox. A lot of improvements need to be made for this to be even considered for mainspace. I moved their work before I saw your message. Whenever this happens feel free to ping me or @Ian (Wiki Ed) and we'll handle it. Brianda (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:12, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! --Seawolf35 ^T--C 22:27, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

I asked a question on Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Student edits and was told to ask it here. So here I am. Thanks Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:08, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

I think you'll get pretty much the same answers here, as you got there. Yes, there are problems with student edits, but it's very unlikely that they will be restricted that much, and I'm pretty sure that the WMF wants to allow such edits. See also WP:NOTTA (especially the third paragraph), if that helps. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:15, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Well, then all that can be said is: C'est la vie. Thanks anyway. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:43, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

It occurs to me to add: whenever you run into a particular problem with a class project, this noticeboard is the right place to report it. Editors here will try to help come up with a solution. Also, never hesitate to revert something that isn't an improvement – we don't owe it to students to keep their edits out of courtesy. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:48, 12 March 2026 (UTC)