Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Education Program extension

Support — the extension should be turned on

1. I don't even see the need to discuss anything here. What grounds could anyone have for opposing this? --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 21:55, 20 August 2012 (UTC)
2. --Guerillero | My Talk 18:49, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
3. Drmies (talk) 18:11, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
4. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:39, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
5. Ok. Protonk (talk) 21:34, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
6. Go for it. the wub "?!" 22:43, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
7. The extension itself appears to me to be entirely a good thing. However, I feel that there needs to be greater clarity as to who decides who can be granted use of the extension. (I realize that this issue is discussed below.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:52, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
8. Go for it - David Gerard (talk) 23:57, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
9. An immense help in courses run in the formal way under the Education Program , and very useful for anyone running a WP related course of any sort. We've been making do it with improvisations, but this is the right way to do. Does not compromise in the slightest any basic WP princiiple or policy. DGG ( talk ) 01:33, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
10. This is better than the status quo, as I found out the hard way during the WP:IEP cleanup. MER-C 14:01, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
11. What MER-C said. —Ruud 15:27, 29 August 2012 (UTC)
12. yes! --Open Research (talk) 20:58, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Oppose — the extension should not be turned on

1. For wikiversity. ~~Ebe123~~ → report 01:08, 23 August 2012 (UTC)
2. This should go on the Wikimedia Outreach wiki itself. Makes no sense to put it on this wiki. Wikiversity is another option.--Jasper Deng (talk) 22:48, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

   Note that the extension is designed to track users' edits on the same wiki where it is installed, so it wouldn't be possible to put it on Outreach or Wikiversity for use with classes editing Wikipedia. That would also defeat the purpose of making it easier for the community to keep track of what these classes are doing.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 00:16, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

   I disagree. With CentralAuth/unified accounts that would be a trivial matter, especially if a dedicated wiki is used.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:30, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

   I can't speak to the technical side of rewriting the extension to monitor work on a different wiki, but that's not possible with the current version and since there wouldn't be much point in running it from a separate wiki anyway, that's not something being considered for development.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 02:37, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

3. Terrible design; explanation on talk. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:45, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

   I would counter with "better this than nothing". --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 16:02, 11 September 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

• I don't have any issue with turning on the extension as it seems to address some of the concerns that the community had about other education programs. It seems benefical as it would keep certain accidents out of Wikipedia's main article space and it's helpful for those coordinating the program. 64.40.54.147 (talk) 13:10, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

• I don't see why this extension exists since it just duplicates what's already out here. It's like coming into a lit room and asking, "Hey, should I bring in a lamp?" Well, sure, but the room is already lit. By the way, what's this browsing interface? I do like the analysis feature. Currently page/article analysis is buried on the toolserver and is sort of a pain to get to. However, let's look at every item in the Feature Overview (note, the name of features is all the information we have as there are no screenshots and no further information on the page). Let's look at each item:
  • "Browsing interfaces" What's that? Is that simply a different skin? Is it different functionality? This is my only real problem with the extension. Is this a back-handed attempt to slip in a new WYSIWYG Wiki editor that won't be able to handle tables or templates and thus will spectacularly fail on almost every wikipedia page (given that an infobox, navigation template, or table are on virtually every page). We need more information. Ok, let's go back to saying that everything else is something that we already have.
  • "Pages with summaries and linked items for all institutions, courses and terms." What is this? Linked items? Is that a fancy way of saying, "Templates and Categories"?
  • "Edit page for institutions, courses and terms." They all already have one (or should if they don't).
  • "History pages for institutions, courses and terms." Every wiki page already has one.
  • "Enrollment page for students with optional token requirement (and associated disenroll page)." There's already an enrollment section for every class. I don't see why we'd need a separate disenroll page, just [edit] the page and put people's name in <s> tags or something. If you drop out of a class, you don't usually get credit for what you did before you dropped, so I don't see why we're bothering to go through a lot of effort to specially track people that dropped out. They're gone, they essentially have Retired. If they come back next semester, great, they can come back with no prior baggage. They can use the same username if they want, but we don't need to specially call out that they already failed once (for whatever reason).
  • "Sortable and filterable list of students." In the table of students, add this: class="wikitable sortable" Done.
  • "Personal courses overview at Special:ManageCourses for students, ambassadors and instructors." I presume that shows the classes that a student is in? Students might be in more than one Wikipedia-related class at the same time? Ambassadors should be making a list of who/what they're managing. Any Wikipedian with a modicum of edits should be able to make a new page and drop some links on it while blindfolded. That's Wiki 101, how to make a page and to link to pages. If Ambassadors can't manage making a page and putting links on it, then let me humbly submit that those editors aren't anywhere close to experienced enough to really work as Wikipedia Ambassadors, who should be capable enough to be able to teach people about Wikipedia and how to do basic things here (like making a new page and linking to other pages). Adding links to a page so that they can easily see what's happening should be one of the first steps in Wiki 101.
  • "Personal course activity overview at Special:MyCourses." Still have no idea what this is. Would people not be able to go to the talk page for whatever they're working on or otherwise see where they left off three months ago when they looked at their article at the beginning of class then didn't look at it until one week before the final? If people delayed that long and forgot everything, can't find anything, and don't know where to even start looking for whatever their article was supposed to be, well you reap what you sow.
  • "Overview of the program status on Special:EducationProgram." Don't see why people would need to see the status of everyone else in the class, that seems sort of personal.
  • "Overview of student activity on Special:StudentActivity." Usually, on the student tables, people use a user template that has a contribs link. Then you can just click through each one, then click through to see what the person has been working on, diffs, seeing whether each edit is the top edit or has been supplanted/rolled back or whatever. Template:Userv is a good one for that.
  • "Online Ambassador and Campus Ambassador profiles." Those already exist. People make them when they join the program and when they put something up that says, "Hey, I'm available, choose me as your person." or "Hi, I'm the person that's going to be doing these things here..." People even add pictures. This isn't a new thing. Take a look at Wikipedia:Online_Ambassadors/Mentors.
  • "Lists of Online Ambassadors and Campus Ambassadors." There already are. Again, Wikipedia:Online_Ambassadors/Mentors.
  • "Logging of all special education events, such as enrollment and courses association." Please don't tell me that nobody has been logging any of this already. Professors do know the enrollment for their own courses and they haven't been shy about communicating that, right?

I don't really see the point of this extension. As far as I can tell, it's comprised of things that're either already in place or could be put together in less than an hour, except the "analysis" maybe. I have no idea what sort of analysis it is, though. Why are you asking permission for this, what's new that you're worried might upset people? If this is the first step in apologizing for thumping out the review boxes without any community involvement first, then I forgive you. (The "What do you think of the content on this page, trustworthy, complete, etc.?" boxes) Just get it done. Good luck, and I am looking forward to easier page use/edit analysis. Except for that browsing interface, what's that?

Banaticus (talk) 00:59, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

During the WP:IEP cleanup, I quickly realized that the on-wiki class lists provided were hopelessly wrong and incomplete. I had to ask the WMF staff twice to obtain a complete list. MER-C 14:14, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Parallel to MER-C's observation, doing these things in pure wiki fashion basically ensures that different people and different groups will do things differently. Often that's fine, but it's not good enough for purposes of keeping track of many courses at once, especially as the number of people involved grows. Some classes will have their students sign up on-wiki and list the articles they work on, some won't. The extension creates a baseline that both removes a lot of organizational burden and creates the opportunity for better monitoring and analysis of class activity. The problem MER-C noted with incomplete or incorrect student lists with the IEP also crops up in other courses, and even then, it took a lot of busy work on the part of both volunteers and WMF staff to make sure student lists (and the list of active ambassadors) was complete and current enough to be useful. With the extension, students can create an account and then enroll in a course and be recognizable to the community *before* they learn enough basic wiki skills to do things like sign up on a pure wiki list of students.

I'm hopeful that future iterations of the extension will add tools to help students communicate with the experienced Wikipedians; figuring out who to talk to and how to reach them is something that we've seen a high proportion of students get tripped up on, leading to frustrations on the part of both students and experienced Wikipedians about the lack of communication.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 14:55, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

• Are we at risk of confusing the hell out of the other admins, who won't be using this extension at all? Deryck C. 12:13, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
  • How so? The only things that will change, for an admin who isn't using the new pages, is that (1) (if admins are the control point for the rights) there would some new rights options they would notice if they were using Special:UserRights to assign rollback or the like to someone, and (2) there would be new log entries for events related to the course pages. I trust that admins will be able to figure out the purpose and proper uses of these things, if they get confused initially.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:30, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
• How will this affect current processes? Will we have a new namespace open up only to have it fill with spam, cv, and other unacceptable material, or will there be some built-in set of checks involved? Will current systems such as new page patrol, speedy deletion, proposed deletion, and XfD work in this namespace out of the box, or are we looking at reinventing a round, friction-reducing rotating oobject? --Nouniquenames (talk) 15:53, 29 August 2012 (UTC)
  • I haven't checked out how the extension interacts with new page patrol feeds—I'll look into that—but deletion works just like for any other page. Because the course pages themselves are not strictly wiki pages, we'd probably need to use the talk pages (which work like any other talk page) for tagging pages for deletion. Other than that, the extension pages should be compatible out-of-the-box with existing deletion processes.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 20:29, 29 August 2012 (UTC)
    • I'm concerned about that, and am looking forward to hearing how the NPP interface will work. I am also concerned about the potential lag between deployment and implementation for Twinkle, Stiki, et all to make neccessary updates so that the tools we now use to fight spam and vandalism can be used with the extension. Is there a plan to reach out to these tool creators in advance so that such updates (if needed, I don't know as I don't maintain any of them) can be deployed and tested before we see a need in the new pages? --Nouniquenames (talk) 05:46, 31 August 2012 (UTC)
      • The course pages themselves show up in recent changes as log entries when they are created, while the talk pages show up in the basic new pages feed (Special:Newpages) like other new talk pages. Given that it looks like course page creation (and the editing of course descriptions) will be limited to admins and trusted users (at most), there shouldn't be any significant spam/vandalism concerns there, and monitoring the talk pages should work fine with existing tools. (The pages won't show up in Special:NewPagesFeed, because that's only configured for user and article space.)--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Configure for exclusive Wikipedia Education Program use

This configuration would involve limited risk of misuse, and have extremely little impact on existing community process. The current design of the extension matches with "online ambassador" and "campus ambassador" roles used in the United States and Canada Education Programs. However this would limit opportunities for involvement of community members not formally affiliated with the Wikipedia Education Program, since it wouldn't be used beyond the limited number of classes that will officially be participating in the United States and Canada Education Programs in the Fall 2012 (August to December) term, and additional programs that develop in English-speaking countries in the future.

Configure for any use by anyone, subject to approval by an admin or other trusted user

This configuration would give us a chance to better manage and monitor classes both within and outside of the Wikipedia Education Program. Depending on how it's used, it also provides an opportunity for interaction with and vetting of classes and assignment design before they get started from community members not already affiliated with the Wikipedia Education Program. (As an example, the community could create a process similar to Articles for Creation to make sure instructors have a basic understanding of what is acceptable and feasible before allowing them to create course pages; note that all instructors affiliated with the Wikipedia Education Program will need to go through an online orientation before receiving the instructor user right.) Opening it up more does increase the potential for misuse, such as fake courses clogging the system. It also adds the burden of reviewing course and assignment design for editors not affiliated with the Wikipedia Education Program, although it potentially decreases the cleanup burden for badly done assignments that are only discovered after the fact.

Configure for use by any autoconfirmed user

This type of setup would be the most accessible and the most likely to draw in more classes that would otherwise attempt Wikipedia assignments without community involvement or on-wiki documentation, but it would also have most potential for misuse and would limit opportunities for requiring community interaction and vetting of classes before they get started. A community process would need to be developed for how the "course coordinator" right should be assigned, although in the meantime admins would be able to handle administrative tasks such as distributing the "course instructor" right and deleting unused course pages.

Configure the administrative roles to be managed by bureaucrats

• Permission to set up institutions and courses within the community project should require a community discussion, and a 'crat conferring the permission based on the input from the community.

Configure some other way

If you would like to suggest some other configuration of the rights for the extension not listed above, do so here.

• ...

Discussion

• Comment. However the user rights are configured, I think that it's important to set some requirements for instructors, in return for being granted the rights. In the past year or so, I've seen instances where instructors seemed to be using Wikipedia as a place where they could dump students in a way that would make the course easy for them to teach, but where the students were left with inadequate guidance about how to navigate editing Wikipedia. That ends up being disruptive for the community, and terribly unfair to the students, whom we should see as potential new members of the editing community. If a faculty member would like to be able to make use of special features, then we should require them to provide students with good guidance about the correct ways to edit. --Tryptofish (talk) 14:27, 22 August 2012 (UTC)
  • One thing the Wikipedia Education Program is now starting to do is having new professors go through this wiki orientation before they begin. (We've got similar ones for Ambassadors and students as well, which we'll try out this term for the first time.) This could be easily be adapted as an orientation for other instructors as well.--Sage Ross (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
    • Thanks, those are exactly the kinds of things I would want to see. In my opinion, although the one for students should simply be communicated to all students as a helpful aid, without strings attached, I believe that anyone who wants to be either an instructor for a class, and wants to be able to use the extension, or anyone who wants to be an ambassador, must indicate that they have read the appropriate training orientation before they can be admitted to that role. Required, not optional. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
• I do not like the word must for this or anything at WP except the basic principles. Too many of the people who have gone through the past training programs have not actually done that well, and many people have done well without formal training--including every one of the first successful people, and including essentially everyone here in this discussions. The people who had inadequate guidance had inadequate guidance under the then official program and under the then official training. I am fairly sure the new program will do better, but I do not yet know how qualified we are to teach how to run courses. I naturally thing that I am, and in my experience so does everyone teaching a course at a college. They are not all right, and I may not be either. Education for things like WP is not a settled science.

As Sage says (and I think he has as much experience here as any of us, and it is his views I most trust in this) we are doing most of this for the first time. It stands to reason we will be doing this only partially right. There are only a handful of people who have run a course well, and I do not know if any of them , including most certainly myself , are really all that able to teach experienced faculty how to teach WP. We are many of us qualified to teach people how to write for WP, but that's not the same thing. We have experience in that: we can tell faculty our experience. We know some of the things that can go wrong: we can explain them to faculty. But that's just the beginning. Effectively teaching people how to teach is extremely difficult--there are some general rules, and some obvious pitfalls, but much of it is very personal and idiosyncratic. At this point in the development of the program, I would discourage no one who wanted to try something different. Even two or three years from now, when we will have a few people who we know can consistently teach faculty how to teach WP, they will still not have a monopoly. WP lives by individual initiative and by encouraging anyone to edit. If I had wanted to do things the way I had been doing them, according to conventional wisdom, I would have stayed in the conventional system. I didn't come here to establish a replica. DGG ( talk ) 05:19, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the WEP orientation should not be compulsory for instructors -- the only compulsory bit should be a community discussion (for user rights) where instructors demonstrate that they have the required clue (including understanding of Wikipedia and its goals) to guide a group of students around WP. We can also quiz the instructors on other things like the chosen subject area and the English language competency of their students. MER-C 06:49, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

These comments make me see ways in which what I said earlier was unclear, so please let me elaborate on where I do, and do not, favor a "must". I actually agree entirely with DGG that we shouldn't tell instructors how to teach their classes. It's none of our business. But that wasn't what I was trying to say. Sage provided links to pages where we have instructive material on how to edit as instructors and ambassadors (and students). These are, in my opinion, helpful things to read. It's not about "how to teach your class", so much as "how to navigate Wikipedia". As I said above, I'm against any "must" about this for students, although I'd love to see all of them get a link to the page for students, by way of a helpful pointer to use as they wish. For instructors, and ambassadors, I am, indeed, arguing for a "must", but only to the extent that they be given a link to the appropriate guide page, and say (and we'll just AGF their saying so) that they read it. That's it!! The extension doesn't get turned on for their accounts until they say that they read it. They can always teach a class on Wikipedia with no string attached, no "musts". The "must" only comes into effect if they want to have the extension turned on for their account for them to use. If they do not want to bother with the extension, they are free to edit just as anyone else. It's really no different, at all, from what we require before an editor has the rollback permission turned on for their account, just a simple demonstration that they are unlikely to break the Wiki.

Here's why I feel this way. Most of the class projects with which I crossed paths have been terrific, really positive all around. But (as a former college professor myself) I'm aware of the pressures within the profession to find easy ways to teach classes (don't get me started on that!). This past year, a class worked on some pages on my watchlist, and the students thought, among other misperceptions, that they had to sign everything they put on the page, the way we sign comments on talk pages. I and other editors fixed their edits and tried to explain to them what we did. The students, however, edit warred over it and were upset that they wouldn't get "credit" for their edits. I went to the instructor's talk page and tried to explain, and got politely blown-off. I then asked the ambassador for the project, who left a brief note to the students, which the students ignored. Aside from anything else, I believe it was a bad experience for the students, which is exactly what we shouldn't want! They are potential new members of the editing community. I think they felt that their instructor was telling them to do one thing, and Wikipedia was telling them to do something else. And this wasn't about "how to teach the class", just about "how to edit Wikipedia". I agree with DGG that there is no guarantee that someone who says they read the guide will actually do better than someone who didn't, but at least this simple, unobtrusive "must" will improve the odds. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:38, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

Maybe we should have a bot or abusefilter that reverts/prevents users from adding signatures to article space (can't think of a case where that is necessary) OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 23:27, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

I've never seen it happen except in this case, so I guess an argument could be made that a bot isn't needed. But for me, that's not really the issue. I could imagine that those particular students would have felt just as "bitten" by a bot as by living editors, maybe even more so. The erroneous editing can be fixed. What cannot be as easily fixed is a bad student experience. But the bad experience can be prevented, which is what I want to do. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:34, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.