User talk:LiAnna (Wiki Ed)/Psychology handout

Thanks for providing input! I've created some specific section headers here to make it easier for me to act on the feedback. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 01:27, 4 July 2014 (UTC)

General feedback

 * Good things about this draft
 * I like the overall approach and tone, and I think it's a very strong draft. I've made a few suggestions below. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:20, 7 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Things that still need work


 * Things that should be covered that aren't

Page 1: About editing psychology articles

 * General concepts to cover
 * In the warning about plagiarism, another concern is that the online record of the plagiarism will be permanent, and that can come back to haunt you later in life. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:12, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Page 2: Getting started

 * Advice for choosing an article
 * Students should avoid controversial topics, such as fringe or pseudoscience topics, and anti-psychology movements. Also, it's worthwhile to spend some time looking around to make sure that the topic you choose isn't already covered somewhere else on Wikipedia; getting advice from experienced editors (perhaps at WP:PSYCH or WP:MED) can help. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:18, 7 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Outline of a typical psychology article

Page 3: References

 * What sources are okay to use


 * Don’t use these sources


 * Citing sources

Page 4: Writing your article

 * General tone for psychology articles
 * Maybe also point out how, unlike typical school assignments, WP does not permit original research; this goes to what Sage said on the page about it not being an essay. It's about what secondary sources say, and not about the student's own thesis. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:09, 7 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Final thoughts
 * I know that you don't want too many blue links, but you might, perhaps, consider WP:STUDENTS and/or WP:ASSIGN. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:09, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Martin Poulter
You should ask User:MartinPoulter - academic psychologist & in the UK Education programme. Johnbod (talk) 23:47, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

version 2, July 16
Thanks for the feedback so far! It's all been incredibly useful. I've made some edits to the text and created a version of the page that is actual text, rather than bullet points. I welcome any feedback on this draft. Ideally, I'd get any feedback by July 23. A few notes:
 * 1) It seems from what I see that VisualEditor isn't yet equipped to handle citations for PMIDs. Is that true? How can we include help guidelines for psychology students who are using VisualEditor, or should we tell them not to until there is a citation format that works for psychology?
 * LiAnna: It can handle PMIDs at present. DOIs are one of the fields that is available in the basic VE cite journal tool, and then can click "add more information" at the bottom of the list of standard fields, and then click another "more" linke to show the full list of the 81(!) additional fields supported by cite journal. It's not as accessible as the "cite journal" tool in source mode, but it's definitely possible. I'm not sure why it's hidden that far away, but I think it's something that can be configured on-wiki. I'll see about making it appear as one of the handful of fields that show up when you first click "add more information", instead of part of the massive "all the rest" list. In any case, I think it's time to start expecting some classes to use VE, and to sure our new help materials can accommodate that.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:41, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I talked with James F and one of the developers currently working on the new citation tool, Citoid, which is currently available in gadget form, but James says it will be in production for VE in 2-3 months. With that, users should be able to just paste in the URL for a journal article (including anything from PubMed) and get a fully-filled citation. If that works well enough to provide fully-populated cite templates (as well as the current standard of the citation template filling tool), then that's probably actually going to be a better option than wikitext for newcomers. (Although, hopefully the same thing can be ported to en.wiki's reftoolbar.)--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:22, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Great!, can you add a section to the copy with directions for how students would add a citation with VE? I'd definitely say 2-3 months is challenging, as if it's on the early side, we'd be ok including it, but if it's on the late, we'd be giving students instructions that didn't work. The timeline is this brochure will be printed mid-August for distribution the first week of September. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:52, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, 3 months would still be before the vast majority of students get to the point of writing and citing. But the bigger issue is, what if even 3 months turns out to be overly optimistic. Maybe we should come up with two versions of the copy and delay the decision of which to print until near the deadline.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:19, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅ I added some prose that is hopefully vague enough to work for both now and later.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:20, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks again! --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 04:14, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * 1) I expanded the information on the sections for a disease based on WP:MEDSECTIONS, but it would be great if someone who knows more about editing psychology articles can also provide descriptions for the section headers for articles on psychologists and theories.
 * 2) A few people closely reading the text would be really helpful, as it will be sent to our designer soon, and after that, text changes are super difficult to do.
 * Hello!
 * I am not up-to-date on VisualEditor but last time I checked I was unable to do citations. If I am representative of others, I would expect that students who have questions about using VisualEditor will have difficulty finding experienced Wikipedians to help them with it. I would be uncomfortable telling students that as a default, they should use VisualEditor, just because I feel like doing so would create barriers between them and the Wikipedia community.
 * Blue Rasberry: Try it again. Today was the first time I played with citations in VE in a few months, and it's come a long way.--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:41, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * It seems good enough.
 * I have a crazy idea for a side project. I do not know how to get support for a psychology handout, but this handout appears to be almost verbatim what would be useful as a handout for medicine. Anything good for medicine would also cover psychology, nursing, biochemistry, nutrition, alternative health practices, environmental concerns, and any other topic in which someone is talking about the impact of anything on human health. How would you feel about me forking this project to be a "medicine handout". I would get feedback on that, then bring that back here. Whatever differences there are on that version can be applied to this version, or not if it is not relevant. Then it would be nice if the designer could format both versions, if they seem good enough. The people at medicine would have one version to distribute and start using, then the psychology paper, which is probably going to be off to a slower start, can benefit from the general use that the more general paper has. Would this be encroaching on the design funds you have allocated only to benefit psychology?
 *  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  13:37, 17 July 2014 (UTC)


 * , the idea with these is they're a series, based on the number of students we have editing in that area. I started with psychology, but I'll be doing more of them throughout the next year (I think next up will be sociology). I'd love to see a medicine article version, too, especially if we get more med classes editing (then I can certainly justify design time for it!). Please feel free to make some suggested revisions (maybe just grab this copy once it's more final and edit directly in a different sandbox), and I can see about getting a medicine one. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:52, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I posted it at WikiProject_Medicine/Education_program_handout. I will share it with WikiProject Medicine. There was nothing in this handout about psychology at all, except for the link to the good articles in psychology, so I just changed ever instance of the word "psychology" to "medicine". In my opinion this is as ready to go as the psychology handout, because they are the same. Watch it and see if anyone has comments on it.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  16:36, 18 July 2014 (UTC)
 * See Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  16:55, 18 July 2014 (UTC)


 * I've looked carefully through the new version, and I like it a lot! I made an edit about avoiding pseudoscience; you can see whether or not you agree with that. I can't think of anything else. Thanks! --Tryptofish (talk) 20:35, 21 July 2014 (UTC)

article sections
I think would be very useful to have a callout giving more detail about Intro sections (which I suggest calling "Lead section"). The callout would explain summary style and that the ideal Wikipedia lead section is a capsule summary of the whole topic in 1-4 paragraphs, with the first sentence serving as an even briefer summary / definition of the topic.

That's especially important, because after talking with Jami, I think we're going to experiment with recommending to some courses a modified "outline" milestone (instead of posting a standard outline to the talk page) where the student editor plans their work by actually writing the lead section, so they can both create an overview of what they will write and get a chance to start writing in encyclopedic style early on. (I came up with this while talking through the assignment plan for this course, and the professor thought it went really well for setting the students up for good work later.)--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:54, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. Can you suggest some copy? :) --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:52, 17 July 2014 (UTC)
 * ✅--Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 15:19, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

Version 3 (Designed version)
Available here: File:Editing Wikipedia articles on psychology.pdf. I welcome any final feedback on this talk page before we print it. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 08:52, 10 August 2014 (UTC)


 * I gave it a very careful read, and it looks great! I found three nits to pick, but all three are sufficiently minor that you don't necessarily need to address them unless you want to.
 * The typography for links to shortcuts looks a little strange to me, especially for new users to understand. I don't know if it is standard for WMF brochures, but it just looks a little odd to me.
 * Page 3, left column: The header font colors are different for "Use these sources" and "Don't use these sources". Instead of making the latter a sub-section of the former, it might look better to format them as two comparable sections of equal weight.
 * Page 4, top left: It might be crisper to change "Don't appear to offer..." to "Don't offer...".
 * As I said, those are very picky comments, and overall I think it looks great. Thanks. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:15, 10 August 2014 (UTC)
 * PS: I just remembered a fourth thing. You show the students how to use PMID and DOI for citations. Lately, the citation bot has been malfunctioning when it is asked to expand those kinds of citations. Hopefully, it is getting fixed, but students may run into that problem in the near future. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:31, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

A few nits from me as well: --Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:41, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
 * The two-column layout on the first page is a little confusing to me. At the top right is the special section explaining what the brochure is about, "Editing Wikipedia can be daunting for newbies...", but the normal place to start reading is the top left, then all the way down the column and back up to the top of the right column. If a reader does this, they may read that 'daunting for newbies' segment in the middle of the column-crossing "Engaging with editors" section.
 * Although the meaning is clear, the ill-tempered grammarian inside me doesn't like on page 2, right column, where "those editors" only implicitly references "the editors of the related GA you found".
 * Page 3, left column: In the Secondary sources section, it refers specifically to "medical topic", which might be misleading in this context. Remove the word medical, or maybe replace with scientific?
 * Page 3, left column: In the Primary sources section, the bullet points are repeated from Secondary sources, instead of the single bullet point in the text draft, "nearly all papers (aside from review articles) published in scholarly journals". The other entries from "Don't use these sources" ( Popular press articles, Blogs, Any other non-peer-reviewed source ) are missing.
 * To add an extra wrinkle in the timing of this brochure, the upcoming cite-by-url tool for VE, which these instructions are written for, may also be available for wikitext editing by the time this brochure is in use. Then again, maybe not. I think we can leave it as-is, but we should remember to review this carefully and revise if necessary before the spring 2015 term.
 * Page 4, left column: "respected literature" seems like the wrong word. Maybe replace with "reliable literature" or "scientific literature", or simply "literature"? (Or maybe "respective" was the intention?)
 * I agree about the potentially confusing format of the shortcuts, which this brochure doesn't explain like Editing Wikipedia does.