Wikipedia talk:Education program

New hub for US/CA Wikipedia Education Program
We have a lot of disconnected pages about the Wikipedia Education Program in the US and Canada, and some of them have outdated information. I'd like to use this page as a hub for the program—current participants and potential participants—so volunteers can more easily direct folks to one-stop related to the program. This page is super preliminary and in draft form, and of course I'd like if we could prettify it some. For now, it can at least link to relevant pages, especially regarding Fall 2013 and giving those educators the best chance possible to create positive assignments. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 00:47, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Pages redirected here

 * United States Education Program, redirected to this new central hub for US/CA. Please see the link for the page history. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 19:32, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Canada Education Program/Leaderboard. Please see the link for page history. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 14 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Canada Education Program/Updates. Please see the link for page history. JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Out of scale
At the scale in which I keep my monitor this page does not display properly. The word "Canada" runs off screen because of text and banners being too big. I am not sure what style guides exist but perhaps this page should be altered to meet some standard. I cannot recall anywhere else on Wikipedia where I have had problems viewing a page.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)   16:01, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Edits under the Education Program
I had a look at the Education program page and see that it recommends expansion of stub articles. This appears to be the source of some problems in recent article edits. Stub articles are often that way because there is little information available through secondary sources. Copying and pasting information from the subject's website isn't the recommended way to expand them, and this should be pointed out in the guidelines to these education projects. It often results in plagiarism and the introduction of promotional language. The obvious solution to this issue is just to revert the changes. Who's in charge of the way this page is written? Pkeets (talk) 00:26, 20 April 2014 (UTC)


 * It's two years later and this is still an issue. There have been recent copy-and-paste copyvios, inaccurate info from unusable sources, and even a stated intention to "expand the article" at a redirect. Please see the discussion happening here for some recent issues involving editors in this program. - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 16:14, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

Advice on this page's format
I like the professional look of this page, but think you need a concise description in some sort of "Lede". I suggest something like the table to the right, but in a more polished format. I'm not much of a reader and just like the bare facts.

Also this program needs a name. "Wikipedia:Education" is to vague and complicated. Some people call it the "Educational extension". I like WikiEd. I hope this project really thrives--Guy vandegrift (talk) 16:42, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Newsletter
Did you really intend to send out a 31,000 byte size newsletter? It's a quick way to get me to unsubscribe. Liz Read! Talk! 23:14, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

New barnstar coming, about this program
Please see: User talk:Kevin Gorman. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:02, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

New relevant page on Nations and Wikipedia
Nations and Wikipedia is a meta page to accumulate and help organize ways nations/governments and Wikipedia interact and for the Wikipedia community to establish relevant policies, guidelines, information and help. Education programs can be one such interaction. I thought you might be interested in this page. Please share your thoughts on it on its talk page.

--Fixuture (talk) 13:54, 26 June 2017 (UTC)

Volunteers link on Project page
The link 'Volunteers' on the main project page Education_program currently (rev 818622811) goes to Student assignments. This violates principle of least astonishment. Either someone needs to actually create a Education_program/Volunteers page, or else the anchor needs to change to what it actually points to. While waiting for the former, I've boldly implemented the latter. The anchor now reads Info about student assignments. That Info sounds informal and doesn't match the other lines, which is a weakness; however, there isn't enough space for the highly indented line to contain the full version. Suggest that all lines be moved left 12em or so, then you can restore it to Information and have everything line up again. Mathglot (talk) 01:21, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

Move this page to meta?
Maybe it's better of you move this page to Meta? -- Magioladitis (talk) 00:03, 10 November 2018 (UTC)
 * Magioladitis, there's already this there: Wiki Education Foundation. The point of this page on WP isn't clear to me anyway, and I wonder if anyone cares about it. Maybe we should nominate it for deletion, and see if anyone speaks up. OTOH, WP:ENB is useful. Mathglot (talk) 03:55, 24 April 2019 (UTC)
 * I agree. I would suggest a soft redirect. -- Magioladitis (talk) 07:19, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

It's ultimately up to the community how to arrange these pages, but I just want to clarify something. Wiki Education Foundation (typically shortened to "Wiki Education") supports institutions in the United States and Canada through its Student Program, which is more or less the Education Program as it exists in those countries. Institutions throughout the rest of the world can still teach with Wikipedia and thus operate under the heading of the Education Program, however, but will not be affiliated with Wiki Education. The support for those institutions is primarily organized by the Wikimedia Foundation, with additional support provided by certain chapters/organizations. On the English Wikipedia, Wiki Education classes comprise a significant majority of all such courses such that some people assume the programs are synonymous, but there are also institutions in the UK, Australia, and elsewhere in the world that are with the Education Program but not Wiki Education. All of this is to say that if the purpose is to show people where they can get help, redirecting to a page only about Wiki Education would only serve people from the US and Canada. --Ryan (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:19, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Gender pay gap
As you can see on Talk:Gender pay gap, that article seems to get much more frequent attention than others from WikiEd program classes. Is this because of student choices, or is it assigned as such? If the latter, how can I get in touch with the person assigning it so that I might suggest a wider variety of articles on the same theme that need a lot more help instead?

Please reply on my talk page as I've been missing pings now and then. EllenCT (talk) 21:53, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * - Hi! I suspect that it's likely chosen because it's such an ongoing focus of discussion in classes. It's mostly chosen by students, but occasionally an instructor may choose it. I would absolutely love some suggestions on other articles, as I do try to have students steer clear of the topic since it's so heavily edited. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:42, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * great! I'll have a list for you soon. EllenCT (talk) 20:57, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * - Thank you so much! This will be of tremendous help! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:12, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Suggestion list
here are some related articles with some longstanding issues (IHMO left over from early editors' rather strong libertarian biases) which have not yet had any Wiki Ed program student work declared on their talk pages: I'm also going to add some climate change articles that need help, on the theory that a lot of students would like to help with them but might not know what these are, let alone that we have issue-laden articles on them: I will look for some more over the coming weeks and ping you here if I find some. EllenCT (talk) 23:49, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Capability approach
 * Earned income tax credit
 * Tuition payments
 * Class size reduction
 * College tuition in the United States
 * Telecommuting
 * Workweek and weekend
 * Economic inequality
 * Austerity
 * Income inequality in the United States
 * Wealth inequality in the United States
 * Distribution of wealth
 * Corporate tax in the United States
 * Wage share
 * Labor unions in the United States
 * Economic progressivism
 * Consequentialism
 * Gender mainstreaming (this had one class assignment in 2015, but it's still in need of help and a closer alternative for students who want to do the pay gap.)
 * Unpaid work (same for this one, but it's in somewhat better shape.)
 * Growth of photovoltaics
 * Power to gas
 * Carbon-neutral fuel
 * Thank you! This is all fantastic! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:34, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * you are welcome; happy to help. EllenCT (talk) 00:54, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Articles for deletion/Meridian Bioscience
Courtesy ping as this was created in partnership with the education program per the article's talk. StarM 16:22, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Featured articles
Should we make it an official policy of Wikipedia Education program that students should not be assigned to work on Featured Articles? Inexperienced student editors could add in text that harms an article's FA standards as in this case. As I see it, there's no need to edit FAs since there are plenty of important articles that need work. LittleJerry (talk) 01:44, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Can someone please advise this good faith editor?
User talk:Sankshine. They don't understand Wikipedia and have been reverted twice. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 08:41, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Adding Ian, the Wikipedia Education content expert for the Queen's U. Wiki Ed course on Understanding Diversity, in which Sankshine is enrolled. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 09:41, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Doug, this is a slow-moving page (fifth discussion above this one was in 2019). Next time, try the Education noticeboard (WP:ENB) where you'll get more eyeballs and faster response. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 09:46, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Oops, thanks. Do you think I need to do it with this one? I hate to see this new editor wasting their time. Doug Weller  talk 09:55, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The copyright violation is also a problem. I've rev/deleted it. Doug Weller  talk 10:23, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I see that this has been handled. Ian, if you end up here, see Talk:White defensiveness. Thx, Mathglot (talk) 10:52, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

Request
Virtually every time Special:WantedCategories runs an update (which it does every two or three days) to look for redlinked (i.e. non-existent) categories that have been improperly added to pages, there's almost inevitably at least one or two new redlinks for new "Dashboard.wikiedu.org courses" categories each time. There are entirely too many redlinked categories (at least 150-200 per run) to be cleaned up as it is without having to deal with several of these per week, however — so it really shouldn't become my job to create them on this project's behalf, it should be the project's job to make sure they get created before even landing at WantedCategories in the first place. Is there anything that this project can do to make sure that any new, not-already-existing dashboard categories that get generated by this project's content get created right away so that I don't even have to see or deal with them at all? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 21:51, 17 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... that comes from Dashboard.wikiedu.org_course_header. There's no automation for creating the categories. The simplest option would be to simply remove the institution-specific categories from the template. I have no objection to that. -- Sage (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:55, 20 June 2023 (UTC)
 * This project is also creating a lot of pages in category redirects - see Category:Wikipedia non-empty soft redirected categories - that can't be fixed because the page automatically imports text from Dashboard.wikiedu and in turn uses a template to generate to category instead of editable text. Most of the problem seems to be rooted in multiple names for institutions. Can the project please fix this? Timrollpickering (talk) 08:34, 18 August 2023 (UTC)
 * The category redirect problem was caused by double category redirects, which are automatically fixed by a bot. For the redlinked categories problem I'm inclined to modify the template to use Category:Dashboard.wikiedu.org courses, unknown institution instead if the category it would populate is red, and let the people who care about this scheme (possibly only ?) sort through that instead of foisting it upon the wanted categories patrollers. * Pppery * it has begun... 12:36, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * I have no objection to either change: completely removing the institution from the template, or having it populate the unknown institution cat if the institution-specific cat does not exist. My only involvement was to ensure that we did not have the same institution represented by multiple populated categories, each having minor spelling/abbreviation/punctuation differences.  To @Timrollpickering's comment, note that the maintenance cat only has the redirects in it temporarily ahead of database updates.  Best, UnitedStatesian (talk) 22:18, 21 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Done the unknown institution category. * Pppery * it has begun... 00:59, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * For the record the redirect bot cannot fix categories generated by templates, especially those taking elements from page titles. Historically these have created a lot of problems because of the lack of a simple resolution. Timrollpickering (talk) 16:03, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Another junk student article
Please see STEM in tennis and Articles for deletion/STEM in tennis. I could not find a dedicated course page for this but there were several student accounts that had reviewed each other's articles. This article was created in the student's user sandbox before they moved it to mainspace themself and subsequently returned it to mainspace when an experienced reviewer draftified it. Not sure what we can do about it if the teacher is not even using a dashboard or course page, but I continue to be highly disappointed by forced student contributions like this disjointed and poorly sourced essay. Students should never be putting new articles in mainspace without AFC review. Reywas92Talk 20:03, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Projects in contentious topics area
Today I found an editor posting to Talk:Ram Mandir which is an ECP only article. I've given the poster User talk:Dil chahal a welcome teacher message and a CT warning. Most students haven't chosen articles but one has in fact chosen Ram Mandir which they won't be able to edit. I also found two recent projects square in the middle of the gender topic area and posted to them. I'm concerned because not only can students not edit if they need ECP (except maybe in rare situations where they are already an editor} but I worry that newbies might have a particularly hard time in those areas. I'm not sure what can be done about this. I've mentioned this to User:Ian (Wiki Ed) also.  Doug Weller  talk 13:31, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I assume there are instructions or some sort of welcome pack that is given to instructors. Perhaps an explanation of article protections and a "students must not choose articles that are ECP or fully protected" injunction added to it if it is not already there?RegentsPark (comment) 18:02, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

College student asking for help at University of Minnesota
A student at the University of Minnesota who is being required to edit an article for a class is asking for help in the Talk page for the article about the university. ElKevbo (talk) 22:00, 28 February 2024 (UTC)


 * Thanks! We'll reach out to the instructor. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 00:37, 29 February 2024 (UTC)