User:Bluerasberry/CAprogram

University of Michigan chemistry articles
User:UMChemProfessor is a chemistry professor at the University of Michigan who since 2008 has had graduate students contribute to Wikipedia articles. This professor understands Wikipedia well and the students have made fantastic contributions to the field by improving articles.

The professor's own userpage given above gives a work history of the accomplishments showing how the pages were before intervention and how they were after. This is exactly what the intent of the campus ambassador program is - students should summarize a topic using academic literature and put their work on Wikipedia. The students learn and share the results of their labor with everyone to use forever.

The talk page even shows that there were problems which were fixed immediately. In this thread a student has plagiarized a diagram and made a statement that the work was his own. This is remarkable for these reasons:
 * even graduate students often do not understand the concept of plagiarism and need a review
 * the Wikipedia community quickly reviews all content and can almost instantly detect plagiarism, and inform users of it
 * despite this being a serious legal and academic offense, everyone stays calm about it because it was an innocent mistake made only in ignorance
 * Without Wikipedia, this student either would not have learned the meaning of plagiarism or would have learned in a much more serious context

Latin American literature project
User:Jbmurray is a professor at the University of British Columbia who thoroughly detailed his experience bringing Wikipedia into the classroom. The project was great for the class and produced excellent content on Wikipedia. His essay is here: WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem

Project summary
Wikipedia has a class of articles called featured articles. These are supposed to be the best articles Wikipedia has to offer and provide full coverage, are completely referenced, and must be checked multiple times over a period of time. Typically 20-30 experienced editors will give approval before granting this status.

The professor offhandedly told his class that they would make featured articles, not knowing how difficult this was by Wikipedia standards. After the class found out, they tried their hardest to achieve this and produced three featured articles and even more "good" articles, which is another admirable peer-reviewed article rank.

Problems
A disappointment about the project is that the class was in 2008, and as of January 2012 it seems that none of the students who were so deeply involved for that class ever returned to edit again.

1500 students in a psychology class
A professor of an introductory psychology class at the University of Toronto asked his 1500 students to all make an edit on course-related articles for Wikipedia. The project was not well-liked by the class. Their contributions were almost entirely problematic and they created a huge mess which volunteer Wikipedians cleaned.

Project summary
The professor was teaching a large lecture which included mostly incoming university freshmen. As part of the course he instructed the students to incorporate a few facts into any Wikipedia article. They were supposed to use a reference when they added their facts.

Common problems included the students' inability to distinguish between good sources of information and poor sources. Many students used a summary of the class published for casual use by their university department as their source for information; this was not a scholarly source for basic information. Other students cited almost anything online without much care about the source.

Reaction
It seems to be the case that none of the students in the course became Wikipedia users as a result of this project. Some people have called this project a failure in every way except as a learning experience demonstrating what campus outreach projects should not do; it might be the case that no Wikipedian has ever said anything good about this attempt. Almost all of the content which the class added was bad, and it took a long time to fix the damage they caused.

Here are some explanations of what happened:
 * A large scale student assignment – what could possibly go wrong?
 * result analysis
 * class page
 * Doc James is a medical doctor, university professor, and avid Wikipedian who works with Wikiproject Medicine to improve the quality of health articles. He personally did a lot of the cleanup from the psychology project.

Misunderstanding of the meaning of "encyclopedia"
A common problem is that too often neither professors nor students understand the concept of an encyclopedia. This has been a surprise to many Wikipedians, but Wikipedians have found that students and professors often do not inherently understand that all statements need references and one may not insert opinions into the encyclopedia. The following account gives some explanation of a typical problematic exchange.

Typical case
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias host factual content, not essays. Typical college writing assignments, including those with research, are essays. Wikipedia does not host essays because essays are original research wherein the writer synthesizes multiple sources into a thesis, and a thesis is original thought and not verifiable content from a reliable published source.

In the first term of the campus ambassador program I talked with a professor who was extremely upset because the Wikipedia community was deleting and heavily criticizing his students' contributions to Wikipedia. The situation was that his students did typical college essays wherein they took information from journals, mixed facts from various sources, then drew their own conclusions into a thesis and had the professor grade their essays. The essays were good, and the professor had them integrate their ideas into Wikipedia, which is a practice entirely contrary to the notion of an encyclopedia. This assignment was at the end of the term and immediate before winter holidays, so in addition to the shock of blunt peer review (people online are straightforward in naming problems without in-person social graces like saying what is good about the work), the community asked the students to revise their work or expect the community to delete it.

Here is what the professor said. I have heard this from other professors also.

Here is a excerpt from a typical letter written by a student:

As a Wikipedian, I find this student's perspective extremely upsetting for the following reasons: It shows an "us and them" mentality by stating "they did not make it easy for us". Wikipedia is a community and contributors to Wikipedia ideally join the community as participants. The reality is that literally dozens of Wikipedia volunteers reviewed the large number of papers posted by this class and gave constructive feedback on them. What is unfortunate is that the most typical feedback was that the class obviously did not comprehend that an encyclopedia, in contrast to the debate and argument training of the college experience, is not the place for sharing one's hypotheses, and definitely is not the place for using rhetorical devices to make them more persuasive. Saying "they are the beneficiary" is most outsiders' perspective of Wikipedia, but the community considers Wikipedia to be an "open access" benefit as content on Wikipedia is not owned by Wikipedia. The desired perception would be that people see Wikipedia as beneficial to themselves and the world community.

Wikipedian response
Saying "they are the beneficiary" really made me feel bad. It seemed to me like a charity collection for clothing for the poor, wherein someone rich donated clothing but it was all unwashed and torn and they expected the charity to either process it or distribute it as is, despite the rich donor having the means and almost no barriers at all to fixing the clothes themselves and despite the huge trouble it would take for the charity to do so. The professor criticized the "people without credibility (who) make decisions on whether (the students') work should be deleted". These people making the decisions could see very well that the content was not encyclopedic. Several people commented on each student's work, which I fell is an amazing benefit for each student and the class considering that most people go through university without ever getting review from the general public, and even less so members of the general public unknown to them who care particularly about their work enough to volunteer to review it.

It would take a huge amount of time for a randomly approaching Wikipedian to familiarize themselves with the structure of an essay to adapt it for Wikipedia use, and this is not something which the volunteer base of Wikipedia has time to do. It would have only taken a little time for the students themselves to adapt the work to Wikipedia. The letter above from the student was written two days before the winter break. None of the students returned to Wikipedia to even respond to feedback as of January 2012. It is very disheartening for Wikipedia volunteers to take time to read papers and give feedback and not have the person who requested the feedback respond.

What happened in this class happens in many classes who try to incorporate Wikipedia. The reason for this is that Wikipedia trains "campus ambassadors" to act as technical support for professors who want to incorporate Wikipedia contributions into their course assignments. The ambassadors are volunteers and there is a hierarchy at play; the professors teach the class in their own way because they are volunteering for this program also, so ambassadors do not order them but rather support them. "My students' sense of self-worth and intellectual credibility is much more important than the Wikipedia community culture." I hear this often, but my perception is that people who cannot take feedback especially from volunteers who are working to serve them are going to be perceived as arrogant from ignorance and that in such cases if there is no time or will to accept the criticism then it might be better not to participate as a Wikipedia contributor at all.

Wikipedia in Academe – and vice versa

 * Mike Christie's November 2011 Signpost essay "Wikipedia in Academe – and vice versa".

In this opinion article User:Mike Christie says that Wikipedia should decrease the barriers for university professors to become Wikipedians, and that the university outreach programs should try more to recruit professors than students because converted professors will then manage their students.