Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-12-31/Op-ed

Chris has been a great volunteer, and one who has done tremendous work with students and staff. I agree with Chris that in-person support makes Wikipedia editing more approachable and understandable. And I agree that in an ideal world, classes would function like the ones Chris has supported so well, where an active Campus Ambassador engages the instructor and student editors, and Wikipedia gets more good content in areas where we have content gaps. As my colleague wrote in the email she sent to Chris alerting him to the shift we're making to the support structure for Wiki Ed-supported classes,"If we could copy and paste you into every university, there would be no need for the changes."

The problem is the ideal world isn't reality; we supported 98 classes last term, and only a handful had active Ambassadors like Chris. Community members rightly objected when course pages weren't filled out and when students edited medical topics without understanding WP:MEDRS. Both of these objections are things Wiki Ed staff should have been able to head off, but we didn't, because our processes didn't work well. Thus we need to make structural changes to ensure courses follow our best practices, which are based on our experience of working with more than 600 classes over the last four and a half years.

The old model was a one-size-fits-all "Ambassador" role, where the volunteer was supposed to have a variety of skills, from onboarding instructors to teaching students how to edit, to giving feedback on student work, to wikifying and adding images to articles, to serving as the liaison between the editing community and the class. While some volunteers, like Chris, were great at all of these roles, few had the interest to do all of them, and most were really interested in Wikipedia's content. That meant courses fell through the cracks, weren't following our best practices, and led to problematic student edits on Wikipedia — and the Ambassador unfairly became the recipient of blame for what went wrong. At the end of the day, that's not okay: Wiki Ed's goal is to improve content on Wikipedia, and we need to make sure our structure and processes work toward making sure all courses are having a positive impact on Wikipedia.

The new model makes Wiki Ed staff accountable for the non-content pieces. We will be onboarding instructors, so we can be sure that all assignments meet our current understanding of best practices. We will be responsible for sending students through our online training, so we know students are getting an overview of how to edit and important policies. We will be in contact with instructors so we can alert them quickly if there are problems. We will be the ones the community holds accountable for fixing problems, so volunteers don't feel blamed when things go wrong. Structural problems are ours to fix, and one way we can do that is to take responsibility for ensuring volunteers, then, are free to do the specific content-related task they like most: copyediting, wikifying, checking sources, giving feedback, etc. (although staff will be also helping out with the tasks as well). You can see these task-based categories here: Education program/Tasks. This also means any Wikipedia editor — not just those approved "Ambassadors" — can help out with student articles, making the entire process more Wikipedia-like.

That doesn't mean, though, that the Ambassador Program is going away. For several years, Ambassador applications have been processed by community members on the Education noticeboard; they will continue to be. The discussion about the userright seems to be leading to enacting what was initially planned, to enable the Education Program Extension (and thus the userright) to be used for a variety of purposes. And, as we communicated to Chris and the other still-active Ambassadors, we encourage them to continue supporting classes as they have in the past; the major change here is that we want Wiki Ed staff to oversee the non-content elements to the class, so we can ensure the course is following our best practices, and we are held accountable for any problems. We believe this will result in a better experience for everyone: instructors, volunteers, student editors, and the general Wikipedia editing community.

The suggestion that Wiki Ed will be restricting course participation, banning students or instructors, or mass-reverting their edits, is simply not true. Our goal isn't to ban student editors; on the contrary, our goal is to make sure what students are asked to do will actually help Wikipedia, and that the student editors are taught enough about Wikipedia policies to understand how to contribute effectively. Do we want to discourage 1,000-student classes? Yes. Do we want to discourage instructors who want students to write analytical essays on Wikipedia? Yes. And we can do that best by being responsible for onboarding those classes, when we can call a professor and say, "As a Wiki Education Foundation staff member with experience supporting 600 classes, your assignment will harm Wikipedia. But here's an alternative you could consider that would still achieve your learning objectives and actually help Wikipedia." In no way do we want to end the program; instead, we want to make sure the classes that are editing are filling Wikipedia's content gaps with high-quality content. And we think the best way to do that is through this process change. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:12, 2 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks very much for commenting and providing an alternate perspective, LiAnna. --Pine✉ 22:15, 2 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the op-ed and the reply. I am a Wikimedian in Taiwan. My observation on the open source community's effort to the campus has similar situation as above. The rate of good Wikimedian transfer into a good liason is not 100 percent. The discussion makes us can reflect on our strategy deeper. --shangkuanlc (talk) 15:28, 3 January 2015 (UTC)


 * I read the above with much interest (as an active Wikipedian, instructor, and ambassador). I guess WEF did not announce its plans very well - I suggest you work more on communication. The few active and valuable ambassadors (more or less the few that will read this article) are a treasure you don't want to lose by looking like you don't care about them. At the same time, I agree that it's high time that a more professional and accountable force takes over - too often I've seen Campus Ambassadors who had next to no edits on Wikipedia, who hardly knew anything more than the students they were supposed to help, and who became inactive and unreachable as soon as the class ended, creating a false impression that there were volunteers to support a given (regional) area. The system needs a reform, but I'll stress once again - don't break what's not broken, i.e. try not to loose the few really active and dedicated Campus Ambassadors. Recruit them, hire them, make them part of the process. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 17:01, 5 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks I have been an "ambassador" in the education program since 2011 and I follow the education noticeboard. I support classes which do medicine. I have a different perspective on what you say.
 * My criticism of the WEF has been that it never made an effort to manage those volunteer ambassadors
 * I regret that there is no process for managing volunteer ambassadors. It is true that WEF made almost no effort to manage them. I would like them managed. I do not agree that WEF should manage them, and rather wish that a community process could.
 * I think that the WEF never managed ambassadors because managing Wikipedians is difficult, and in hindsight, I think it is a bad idea for any organization to propose to manage a distributed network of online volunteers to do in-person outreach on behalf of the larger community. If WEF would have tried to manage volunteers, then personally I would have been fearful of the powergrab, and I think many others in the Wikimedia community are hesitant to support the granting of on-wiki authority by anything other than the Wikimedia community. The low-level support that the WEF used to give was, in my opinion, the limit of what the Wikimedia community would tolerate from an off-wiki authority. I expect that if the Wikimedia community had developed its own education program ambassador training, then the WEF would have supported that program and the WMF would have funded anyone who wanted to develop it. I still think the WMF would fund such a program at meta:Grants:IdeaLab, especially if it could be tied to Wikimedia movement affiliates. Considering the cost of trying to wrangle general volunteers, and considering that after years of education program only a few people volunteered for this role, I do not recognize how the WEF could have spent resources to increase the impact of ambassadors or scale up their recruitment to justify the cost.
 * I still would like to see "ambassadors" managed and there is discussion about the userright on the education noticeboard. I just do not want the authority and prestige of the userright to come from the WEF, and I think it empowers the Wikimedia community to give this userright authority in another way.
 * Unless a Wikimedia chapter subsidized these activities no money was being allocated to support ambassador activity
 * I personally would love to see university outreach managed by local geographic groups. I live in New York City and all ambassadors which I know here are affiliated with the local chapter, Wikimedia New York City. There is funding available for ambassadors, particularly in the form of travel and training support, and I would like to see more individuals request aid from any chapter if they want to participate in the education program or any other outreach program. Again, I hesitate to encourage people to seek this kind of funding from groups like the WEF, because that is not a community-managed group, and I fear empowering anything other than community groups within Wikimedia projects. For people who want grants and funding, the most common process is to discuss it with a chapter, and if the chapter likes the proposal, they endorse the proposal. They request WMF funding, pay the community member, and send the community members receipts and project report back to the WMF as part of their annual reporting. I would be fearful to hear that community members are taken out of oversight of the funding process.
 * What is the community's remaining education program in the US and Canada after all of its functions had been subsumed into the WEF?
 * The Wikimedia community has hardly had an education program. In my opinion, now that the WEF has abandoned the ambassador program, now there are more tools available for the community to manage itself. I would like for "ambassador" designation to be something that the community regulates itself without oversight from an off-wiki group. I like that the WEF does not give pretense to organizing community volunteer ambassadors to manage classes, because previously when things went wrong in classes, some people assumed that the Wikimedia community was supposed to clean the mess. This is at odds with the WEF which encourages professors to have their classes contribute content, because any time students come their contributions are often troublesome. In the new model, the WEF staff personally contact every United States and Canadian professor coming to Wikipedia and they take more responsibility for clean up, leaving no responsibility to any ambassador. If anyone in the community wants to help, then great, but with paid staff off-wiki being at hand to talk to professors on phone and by email, now the WEF is more obligated to have good outcomes any time they bring a professor into Wikimedia and encourage their class to contribute. The standardized training and consistent communication by phone and the rest is not something which the Wikimedia community has historically been able to manage well.
 * I do not want to obligate the WEF to take more responsibility for ambassador oversight than they have had in the past. They used to claim some oversight, but the ambassador program never was well established. Now instead of them promising almost negligible support for ambassadors, they have abandoned the userright entirely and it can become anything. I would love to talk with anyone about opportunities to regulate "ambassadors" for all kinds of outreach, including to universities, nonprofit organizations, government offices, and coffeehouse meetups, because I still worry about people representing the Wikimedia community when they do public relations, and would like for anyone who is doing outreach and public relations to have all the support that they want. There are some interesting software and social tools here with a history of use and it would be great to see the community use some of these.  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  17:48, 5 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Chris (and Blue, and some others) were really effective ambassadors, but I think the general view is that they  were in the minority. In my personal view, the solution for inadequately trained and supervised ambassadors the WEF has adopted (apparently without outside consultation)  seems to be having people act as ambassadors without any training and any support, which does not seem likely to provide more effective work.  Opening criticism of student edits to the general community without screening will quite possibly have the same effect it did at AfCs, where eventually screening of those approving AfCs was introduced--though it seems possible that the requirements for this should have been set considerably higher.  It is not clear to me if the proposed drafts will be on Wikipedia, and in what space they will be. If on enWP, where to put them and how to work on them needs to be discussed on-wiki and decided by consensus-- the community controls its own WP.  And if they are on enWP, the community can then if necessary form a consensus to exert its role when confronted with bad editing, and require qualification for editing in that space using its own procedures. No matter where they are put, at least the accepted material will need to be put on enWP and undergo its usual criteria for improvement or deletion, just as at present.


 * There is after all perhaps an advantage in having the WEF separate--although they are not under the control of enWP or even the WMF, they are also no longer in any sense the owners of material on enWP or the supervisors of its editing. Their role will be threefold: providing advice and training and dissemination; providing some degree of organization for those courses that wish to use their system; and, apparently, indicating problems with articles--which I understand will in particular include checking for copyvio--an area where certainly help is needed.


 * If the material is on enWP, the WEP staff will at present have the same right to add tags that any editor will have, and of course any other editor may do so also, or remove them, in the usual manner. If they do this well, and I think they will, then we are the gainers. If they do not, the same possibilities for community control exist as for other editors.


 * And any WP chapter can play whatever role its people wish, as in the past. I hope they will coordinate with the WEF, but they can work independently of them if needed, as some of them have been doing.  Perhaps the most useful thing the current effective ambassadors could do is to organize active chapters at their locations.  DGG ( talk ) 19:33, 9 January 2015 (UTC)