User talk:Midd Intro Neuro

Comment to SandyGeorgia
Hi Sandy, we want to allay your concerns about the structure of the course.

Current Course Goals and Structure: Our goal was to improve Wikipedia neuroscience content consistent with the objectives for the Society for Neuroscience. We anticipated that this project and improving Wikipedia content would be a significant long-term undertaking and, we assure you, that we are not taking it lightly. There are two professors teaching this course and we did follow a previously established course page: User:NeuroJoe/BI481 Fall 2012. We also very closely followed a publication from the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, by the same author, that can be easily downloaded at: http://www.funjournal.org/images/stories/downloads/2012_Volume_11_Issue_1/burdo_11_1_a1-a5.pdf

All our students were required to take the same online tutorials provided at the NeuroJoe/BI481 course page as well as the Training/For students and the Training/For students/Resources tutorials. NeuroJoe’s requirements are listed below. In addition, two class periods were dedicated to library training sessions with our Wikipedia experts at the college. Students also utilized our experts, engaged several Wikipedia editors’ help, and utilized the Wikipedia Help Center throughout the project. There were multiple submissions required (as per the B1481 course page) to ensure that a quality product would go live at the final submission.

Future Courses: Unfortunately, we  did not register the course or create a course page. This was due to being novices and we apologize for that oversight. At the time, it seemed like a suggestion more so than a requirement. However, in hindsight, we see how beneficial both could have been to us, our students and the editors at Wikipedia. We would not attempt this again without a course page or registering with the appropriate education portals. If we were to undertake this assignment again, we would require students to work with an editor or ambassador in their sandboxes. Finally, we would not plan for all pages to go live—only those approved by the editors—and, their grades would be somewhat tied to that determination.

Managing Current Issues: To manage any concerns about the current pages, we have several suggestions:

1) We feel that many of our students did create pages that are significant positive research contributions to Wikipedia community. We believe that many students invested in their projects and are quite proud of their work.  While we cannot require them to pursue edits beyond the course, we suspect that several students may want to continue to work on their pages, in cooperation with kindly editors, to produce fine pages that meet all Wikipedia standards.  We are happy to find out which students/topics wish to proceed and share a list of those topics.

2) For the students who do not wish to maintain a relationship with Wikipedia, or if the first option does not seem viable for some topics, we can simply revert/delete all the changes made by our students--provided a) that they were not in conjunction with another editor;  and, b) no changes were made after our submissions.  If changes were made following our students’ submission, reverting those changes will take longer.    Our librarian will assist us in this endeavor and she will describe the process in more detail in her own response.  This second option should take the responsibility of editing our students’ posts  out of the hands of the Wikipedia and alleviate your workload.

3) Finally, since it seems that some editors feel that peer review comments are problematic on the talk page for the topic, in addition to the above, we are willing to remove all peer review comments from the topics’ talk pages and move them to our students’ talk pages.  We would appreciate more guidance on whether we should do this.

Our students have excellent research skills and our intention was to help the Wikipedia content. We did not intend to create problems for anyone. If we have acted counter to our original intention of helping, then we can certainly undo all changes.

Both of us feel that, as our course winds up, we now know how valuable this experience was on several fronts. It taught students how to research and write, and despite some flaws, we think they did a quite good job on both. It provided the Wiki community with updated information that was consistently based on cited work, not student opinion. It taught all of us the value of Wikipedia as not only a static source of factual information but as a dynamic resource for the scientific and broader community.

Please let us know which option you would like for us to pursue moving forward. (Talk) Midd Intro Neuro (talk) 22:53, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

The pages that our students have taken on are:
 * 1) Species-typical behavior
 * 2) Alexia
 * 3) Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
 * 4) Neuroethics
 * 5) Hypergraphia
 * 6) Olfactory Bulb
 * 7) Amenorrhoea
 * 8) Agraphia
 * 9) Akathisia
 * 10) Alcohol myopia
 * 11) Amorphosynthesis
 * 12) Environmental enrichment (neural)
 * 13) Posterior cortical atrophy
 * 14) Temporoparietal junction
 * 15) Hypokinesia
 * 16) Neural Masculinization
 * 17) McGill Picture Anomaly Test
 * 18) Caudate nucleus
 * 19) Inferior temporal gyrus
 * 20) Posterior cingulate gyrus
 * 21) Lateral inhibition

List of resources students were required to complete

 * 1) What Wikipedia is not, which summarizes what Wikipedia is, and what it is not;
 * 2) Neutral point of view, which describes Wikipedia's core approach to neutral, unbiased article-writing;
 * 3) No original research, which explains what is, and is not, valid encyclopedic information;
 * 4) Verifiability, which explains what counts as a verifiable source and how a source can be verified;
 * 5) Citing sources, which describes what kinds of sources should be cited and the manner of doing so; and
 * 6) Manual of Style, which offers a style guide.


 * Hi again! Would you mind if I copied this over to the thread at WP:ENI, to keep everything together?  I'm swamped today and might not get to respond soon, but by putting it there, others are more likely to weigh in, and we avoid having a fractured conversation.  Best, Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 22:57, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm willing to copy this comment to the incident page if the rest of the content goes there. But I wanted to jump in now to say that I will be glad to continue to work with this class if I am called upon. I know the students have been grateful for the interactions they’ve had with other Wikipedia editors, and I suspect that some of them will want to continue to work on their articles even after the semester is over. In workshops and one-on-one meetings, I saw students enthusiastically engage with research and technology in new ways. In at least one case, because an editor suggested the addition of an image, the students really wanted to dig in to policies and procedures to learn how to make it happen. I also saw eyes light up when wikitext was changed to italics, section headings, etc. As an educator who works with technology both as an end-user and as a content-provider, it made me happy to see students excited to learn what goes on behind the scenes. I can only hope that some of those students, now that they have felt the satisfaction of creating web-based content, will continue to develop their skills.

If it is recommended that we undo the revisions made by any students who aren’t able to continue to work on articles after the semester is over, here is what I will do. I will look at each article. I will first revert the articles that have been edited only by the students. Then, for articles that have subsequently been edited by others, I will work collaboratively as much as I can to get any necessary changes made.

I would like to reiterate that these students have learned a lot from this project, and I think they have contributed to the knowledge of others too. I am excited to see the progress and I hope other editors can feel the same.Carriemacfar (talk) 00:59, 12 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Hi Sandy and Jami  and Victoria, We are hoping to try to follow the WikiGuidelines for the incident page and pursue options for resolutions on our talk page.  In our comment above, we state several options for resolution with our topics but it doesn't seem that options were seen.  I'll restate those options again here to see if they are viable for managing the current content of the pages:

Managing Current Issues: To manage any concerns about the current pages, we have several suggestions:

1) We feel that many of our students did create pages that are significant positive research contributions to Wikipedia community. We believe that many students invested in their projects and are quite proud of their work.  While we cannot require them to pursue edits beyond the course, we suspect that several students may want to continue to work on their pages, in cooperation with kindly editors, to produce fine pages that meet all Wikipedia standards.  We are happy to find out which students/topics wish to proceed and share a list of those topics.

2) For the students who do not wish to maintain a relationship with Wikipedia, or if the first option does not seem viable for some topics, we can simply revert/delete all the changes made by our students--provided a) that they were not in conjunction with another editor;  and, b) no changes were made after our submissions.  If changes were made following our students’ submission, reverting those changes will take longer.    Our librarian will assist us in this endeavor and she will describe the process in more detail in her own response.  This second option should take the responsibility of editing our students’ posts  out of the hands of the Wikipedia and alleviate your workload.

3) Finally, since it seems that some editors feel that peer review comments are problematic on the talk page for the topic, in addition to the above, we are willing to remove all peer review comments from the topics’ talk pages and move them to our students’ talk pages.  We would appreciate more guidance on whether we should do this.

Please let us know if these options are viable and if we should proceed with them.

Thanks! (Talk) Midd Intro Neuro (talk)

Following up here, as per above. Thank you for your continued assistance,. Regarding the Neural masculinization entry: As stated above, if any entry needs attention after the course is over and the students are not able to maintain a relationship with Wikipedia, I can simply undo their changes provided that no changes were made after their submissions. If changes were made following our students’ submissions, reverting will take longer of course.Carriemacfar (talk) 21:59, 13 December 2013 (UTC)