Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Education Program extension

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Taking each of these in turn:

• Section 1: intro - nothing to determine
• Section 2: Turning the extension on - This has consensus, though not an overwhelming strong one. While there are more "votes" in support, the subsequent discussion noted questions and concerns from editors who did not "vote", but which should be taken into account as (as we all know) consensus is not a vote. The comments in the subsequent section 3 were taken into account as well. So there is consensus to "turn on", but with restrictions/reservations.
• Section 3: Configuring the extension
  • 3.1: Configure for exclusive Wikipedia Education Program use - No consensus - There is general consensus to restrict in "some" way, but not necessarily in the way presented in 3.1
  • 3.2: Configure for any use by anyone, subject to approval by an admin or other trusted user - Consensus.
  • 3.3: Configure for use by any autoconfirmed user - No consensus
  • 3.4: Configure the administrative roles to be managed by bureaucrats - Opposed. (And it may or may not be worth noting that the only bureaucrat who commented, opposed this.)
  • 3.5: Configure some other way - no comments
  • 3.6: Discussion - There are suggestions for what requirements/crieria the user-rights noted in 3.2 should have prior to granting, but that can be discussed/determined in subsequent discussions, and this rfc closure should not be considered to restrict how that should be done.

To sum up: There is consensus to "turn on", and strong consensus to implement the user-rights system as noted in 3.2. And subsequent discussion is recommended concerning what should be required for the granting of the user-rights in question. - jc37 19:29, 27 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

---

This page in a nutshell: Wikimedia Foundation has built the Education Program extension to make it easier to keep track of classes where students are assigned to edit Wikipedia. Should this be enabled on English Wikipedia? If so, who should be able to use it?

This request for comment is asking whether to turn on the Education Program extension that the Wikimedia Foundation has been developing to make the activity of Wikipedia Education Program courses—and potentially other educational assignments as well—more transparent and easier for the community to track.

The request for comment is scheduled to run from 22 August 2012 until 22 September 2012.

Turning on the extension will make it easier to see what courses are going on and what students are doing, and provides a software starting point for developing better ways of supporting and regulating Wikipedia assignments. If it is enabled, developer support is available to make improvements that the community wants for the next several weeks. A secondary benefit is that the extension makes it easier for Wikimedia Foundation to collect and analyze data about student contributions, although if necessary Wikimedia staff can manually compile lists of participating students as they have in the past. The extension could also potentially be used in other ways, such as for organizing participation in edit-a-thon events.

It is designed to have minimal impact on the rest of Wikipedia, for those who don't want to use it. The new "Education Program:" namespace doesn't overwrite any existing Wikipedia articles (sorry, Course: Oblivion (Star Trek: Voyager), for the first version!), although obviously it would prevent the creation of articles with titles beginning "Education Program:".

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)[reply]
2. --Guerillero | My Talk 18:49, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. Drmies (talk) 18:11, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:39, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
5. Ok. Protonk (talk) 21:34, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
6. Go for it. the wub "?!" 22:43, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
8. Go for it - David Gerard (talk) 23:57, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
11. What MER-C said. —Ruud 15:27, 29 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
12. yes! --Open Research (talk) 20:58, 9 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. For wikiversity. ~~Ebe123~~ → report 01:08, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]

   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)[reply]

   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)[reply]

   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)[reply]

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

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

• 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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    • 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)[reply]
      • 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)[reply]

The configuration and naming of user rights for this extension is easy to change based on the how the community wants to use it. Bigger changes and feature requests are out of the scope of this request for comment. The basic functions that can be controlled by user rights include:

• Assigning and removing user rights related to the extension
• Creating new course pages
• Creating new institution pages
• Listing a user as an instructor for a course
• Listing a user as an online ambassador for a course
• Listing a user as a campus ambassador for a course
• Deleting and mass-deleting course pages
• Viewing or changing the 'enrollment token' for a course
• Removing a student from a course

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.

1. restrict it --Guerillero | My Talk 18:46, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 18:39, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. Simplest. If the workload gets too high, then we can look at broadening access. the wub "?!" 22:47, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. I can support either this approach, or the one directly below, in which administrators decide who gets the permissions. I oppose the third option, in which any autoconfirmed user can get it. Please note that there needs to be some quality control in giving these permissions, because we don't want instructors simply to use Wikipedia as an easy place to dump students, as has started to happen recently. Anyone can, of course, come here and teach a class by having students work on pages, and they don't need anyone's permission to do so. But if we are going to give them extra tools to facilitate the project, we are entitled to expect them to show a willingness to work within Wikipedia's ways of editing (much as we require for someone who wants the rollbacker permission). I think there should be a basic requirement of having received a series of links in the general manner of a welcome template, and the person requesting the permission saying (their saying so should be enough, per AGF) that they have read it. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:01, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
5. I agree with Tryptofish. :) Banaticus (talk) 01:02, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
6. Deryck C. 12:14, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. Why should we restrict other people than those officially permitted by the Ed Program from using it? However that program is eventually set up, and we can expect several different arrangements during a period of transition. there will be other ways to run courses. Some of them will probably be as good as the official way. Had we in the past been limited to what the education program of the time did, we would have lost many good courses. I am reasonably confident that the new program, under the control of its own organization and benefitting from several terms of experience, will be substantially better than what the Foundation has been doing, but it won't be perfect. I am reasonably confident, but I am not certain; there's at least a potential that it might not be satisfactory--for example, that it might have requirements at odds with what the others at enWP think productive. At present, the plans are to have it entirely separate both from us and the Foundation. If we do this, we are setting up something to be run on the enWP that will not be under the control of the enWP. It's absurd at this stage to be this inflexible.

   Here's a real examples of why it will be wrong to limit: in the coming year, the Program knows it will not be able to accommodate all the requests for courses. Indeed, any new requests coming in now, however well prepared, will not even be considered due to the short time available. But some of these courses may be reasonably well structured. Some may even be better structured than most of the official courses. Most of them could benefit from this extension, if it is done right. This proposal prevents them from it. And for those that might not be very well set up, being able to use the extension will help them do it better. We cannot prevent anyone who pleases from running a course to write on WP--it's part of the basic rule that anyone can edit. Using this extension gives us a possibility of giving them some help and some control. DGG ( talk ) 04:51, 25 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

2. The WEP does not represent all classes on Wikipedia, therefore it should not exclusively benefit from this extension. As the IEP has demonstrated, the WMF cannot be trusted to hand out these permissions. MER-C 07:12, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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.

1. This. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 21:57, 20 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. restrict it --Guerillero | My Talk 18:42, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. If this extension is used, the community should be able to control it like any other user rights.--Jasper Deng (talk) 22:50, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. I can support either this approach, or the one directly above, in which trusted members of the Education Project decide who gets the permissions. I oppose the third option, in which any autoconfirmed user can get it. Please note that in an earlier trial of Pending Changes, some administrators were careful about who was given the Reviewer permission, but other administrators unfortunately gave it out like candy. Here, we need to be more careful than that. There need to be clearly defined criteria, agreed to in advance of enabling the extension, about which users may or may not be granted permissions. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:06, 23 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
5. Option 1 lacks the possibility of general community access. — This, that, and the other (talk) 00:29, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

   Also I think it is vital that a formal requests process be set up to request EP-related permissions, not just letting them be dished out by admins as they feel like it. — This, that, and the other (talk) 00:47, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

6. If this extension is to be enabled on the community project, the functionality provided by this extension should be entirely community managed. No special WMF or chapter roles. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 00:51, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
7. The less WMF in this, the better. MER-C 13:56, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
8. This is probably the best way to start out. It won't be the WMF in control at first exactly, it will be some hybrid between the WMF and the new Program, but we do not yet know what it will be. It doesn't make sense for us to hand over something we do not yet understand to a group that we do not yet understand, and that will furthermore will be changing progressively over the next year. The principle should remain that anything to run on enWP should be under the control of enWP, not of someone else.. We may prove not to even need that much control, but this is probably the most realistic way to start out. We have learned what happens by having outside programs run things for us. I am not convinced the foundation's proposal for a fully independent structure will actually be the best--after all, their track record for organizing things of this sort has been rather discouraging. I hope the new group will decide not to be wholly independent of enWP--how much independence it should have will necessarily be a matter of experimentation, and the whole point of experimentation is that the planned experiment might not work. We need this as a backup DGG ( talk ) 05:02, 25 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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.

1. Or this, no real preference for now. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 21:57, 20 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. Like Piotr, I think this is quite possible. I am not altogether sure it will be the best thing to do immediately, but I think it safe. The reason I think it safe is that no real harm can be done--we do have the ultimate control where it belongs. , of deleting articles by AfD , and other pages--including course pages if necessary, by MfD. By appearing open, we will best fulfill the general philosophy of Wikipedia, We may have programs in conjunction with schools, but we can ahardly pretend we know the only way of doing it right. I would be willing to try this immediately, but I can understand that others might not yet feel totally confident about it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs) 05:06, August 25, 2012‎

1. Oppose. We need more community control than this. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:05, 25 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. Deryck C. 12:15, 27 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. Nouniquenames (talk)
4. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:34, 29 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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

• 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.

1. John Vandenberg ^(chat) 01:03, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. All courses, regardless of whether they are part of the WEP, should be vetted by the community. MER-C 14:05, 24 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

1. If I understand this correctly, that there would have to be an RfA-like discussion for every class project, then I would oppose it as being way-too time consuming for the community. However, I could support an RfA-like process for anyone not already an administrator on the English Wikipedia who wants to be able to give out the permissions to use the extension. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:08, 25 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
2. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 22:03, 25 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
3. Agree with Tryptofish. --Nouniquenames (talk) 15:58, 29 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
4. Far too restrictive. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:37, 29 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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

• ...

• 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    • 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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.