User:Rhododendrites/sa

This page is for instructors planning to have students contribute to Wikipedia as part of a class assignment. There are many resources for such projects, some of which are mentioned/linked below. This page is intended to provide only some key best practices. For more information, see Student assignments.

Please keep in mind that these best practices serve two important and interrelated purposes: ensuring that you and your students have the best possible experience contributing to Wikipedia, and avoiding problematic student edits that sap the time and energy of our volunteer community.

Do: Get support
Use the support systems in place to help you! If you work at a college/university in the United States or Canada, the Wiki Education Foundation has resources and paid staff to help you. Reach out to them ASAP and use their resources. In fact, many of their resources are available regardless of where you live. If you're outside the US/Canada, find your country here to see if there are volunteers in your area. You can also post to the Education Noticeboard here on Wikipedia, a general purpose discussion board regarding student assignments, to ask for help about anything you see here.

If you are working with Wiki Education, be sure to use their Dashboard tool. If you aren't, use the Programs & Events Dashboard. This not only gives you useful information about what your students are working on, but provides a central place for other editors to learn about your project.

Other do's
For brevity, long explanations are omitted, but feel free to ask on the talk page.
 * Do allow enough time for the assignment. Learning to edit and writing a whole new article is something the Wiki Education Foundation recommends at least 6 weeks for. If you don't have enough time, consider a shorter assignment like adding a citation to a page.
 * Do take time to ensure your students understand fundamental policies like verifiability and how we evaluate source reliability. Beyond being essential to the editing process, these rules are important for students to understand this resource they likely use every day.
 * Do encourage students to communicate with other editors in a timely manner, and prepare them for how to use a talk page. As a collaborative project, communication between contributors is very important, and people who routinely do not respond to messages may be blocked from editing.
 * Do encourage students to look at other similar articles before writing to get a feel for structure and tone. This page provides some helpful information about "encyclopedic tone".
 * Do be present on Wikipedia yourself. You are not required to be an expert, but it's important that the instructor be on Wikipedia and clearly connected to the course. This is mainly for communication reasons.
 * Do monitor the changes your students are making. The Dashboard tools linked above help with this.

Assignment don'ts
For brevity, long explanations are omitted, but feel free to ask on the talk page.
 * 'Don't grade based on what "sticks" in an article. Everything contributed to Wikipedia can be changed by someone else, and anything your student contributes will always be visible in the history of an article, regardless of whether it was removed.
 * Don't require word counts. Writing should be as good as possible, and numeric goals don't encourage that.
 * Don't have very large classes contribute to Wikipedia.
 * Don't have multiple students use a group account. All accounts on Wikipedia must belong to an individual.
 * Don't require that students go through formalized review processes like Articles for Creation (AfC), Peer Review, Good Article Nominations, Featured Article Nominations, Did You Know, In The News, etc. If you have a stand-out article in your class, you may want to encourage the student to explore Did You Know or Good Article Nominations on their own afterwards.
 * Don't have students work on articles that are already very good. If they're marked with a or