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Gratis being italicised
Guideline proposal
Advice for students about bad assignments from instructors?
Guidance for moving drafts into mainspace
"content that promotes social change"?

Wikipedia talk:Student assignments

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WT:ASSIGN

Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3
To discuss assignment issues not directly relevant to this information page, please
see the education noticeboard.
Gratis being italicised

Hi User:Tryptofish,

I'm glad that you approved of my second edit, but I'm wondering why you italicised
the word gratis – while I'm not sure how much use it gets, I'm fairly certain that
it's a legitimate word in English (albeit borrowed, of course). For instance,
Wiktionary says that it was used in Shakespeare: wikt:gratis. If you think it
doesn't have enough use in English to not be italicised though, then fair enough,
but I just wanted to check to see what your reasoning here is. Thanks,
DesertPipeline (talk) 03:56, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi, and thanks for asking. It's not a big deal to me either way, but I just
feel as though it's, to some degree, a foreign word, and, to some degree, being
used here in a technical sense. It just looks better to me to put it in italics.
But as issues on Wikipedia go, this is a very minor one. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:05,
16 March 2021 (UTC)

User:Tryptofish: I don't really mind either way to be honest. We can leave it

as it is if you think it should be that way, because I'm not sure about this
myself. I'm just happy that this wording is fine, because the word "open" is one I
always find quite frustrating to see, and seeing how Wikipedia itself says "The
Free Encyclopedia", it feels wrong to me when I see a page talking about Wikipedia
where somebody has written "open". Regards, DesertPipeline (talk) 03:29, 17 March
2021 (UTC)

Guideline proposal

There is a proposal to change this page from an information page to a guideline at

Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Converting Wikipedia:Student assignments into an
actual guideline. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:27, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

The archived discussion on the proposal is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_167#Convertin
g_Wikipedia%3AStudent_assignments_into_an_actual_guideline Clayoquot (talk |
contribs) 22:38, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

Advice for students about bad assignments from instructors?

While having infrastructure set up to help instructors use editing Wikipedia for
education purposes is great, it's inevitable that some teachers are going to give
their students assignments which, likely unknowingly, require their students to
break some rule of the site. For example, what if a well-meaning teacher were to
ask their students to make a Wikipedia article for themselves, not knowing this
violates WP:NOTE and WP:ORIGINAL? It seems wrong to bend the rules and have the
site clogged up with junk articles, but it also seems wrong to fail an entire
classroom of kids for something out of their control. Is this just an unfortunate
circumstance we shouldn't be responsible for, or should we provide some guidance on
this page for students in this sort of situation? --Ithinkiplaygames (talk) 05:34,
8 November 2021 (UTC)

Via IRC Help I was informed about a student assignment from a political science
class: Students were to deliberately inject false information into articles about
living politicians and then observe if and how Wikipedia "healed" from this attack.
Of course, this is a terrible way to learn about how our anti-abuse policies
work and I think we were able to convince this student to pass on the message to
his professor. As far as we know this particular assignment never happened, but I
am sure many like it have. Salimfadhley (talk) 09:45, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't think we should give advice to students about that here, because it
would involve telling them to disobey their instructor's requirements. Instead, the
way to handle these situations as soon as they become apparent is to report them at
WP:Education noticeboard. In my experience, this typically resolves the problem
pretty efficiently. --Tryptofish (talk) 15:02, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

Guidance for moving drafts into mainspace

The current advice to students says to "have your instructor review and approve the
text" before adding material to existing articles, but it doesn't explicitly say
anything about doing so before creating new articles. This seems something of an
oversight. XOR'easter (talk) 21:35, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

That's a good point, thanks. I'd be happy to add something, but first, I'd
appreciate a few pointers on what to say about New Page Patrol and Articles for
Creation in this regard (especially as students typically work on a shorter time
scale than our reviewers do). --Tryptofish (talk) 22:40, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

I don't actually know much about RPP or AfC; I tend to hang out at AfD (which
perhaps speaks to a mean streak in my personality, though I think I'm happiest when
we can save a page). It does seem like asking students to wait on a Wikipedia
backlog would be rather unfair. XOR'easter (talk) 00:23, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

That's OK. I want to think about it for a while, and maybe I'll ask at those
two projects. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:02, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I decided to go ahead and do this. How does that look? --Tryptofish (talk)
22:05, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

I like it. Thanks. XOR'easter (talk) 18:04, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

"content that promotes social change"?

A ton of content that is neutrally presented and backed up by RS promotes social

change. We don't disallow that. I think Sj's edit makes more sense, being clear
that it's not about the nature of the subject but rather the relationship between
that content and RS/DUE. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 20:40, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

I strongly disagree. Our content describes social change, but we do not allow
content whose purpose is to use Wikipedia to advance an agenda. (See the principle
adopted by ArbCom here: [1].) An RS can promote social change, and we report that
the RS does that, but that is not the same thing as Wikipedia promoting it
ourselves. After all, there isn't much difference between using Wikipedia to "right
great wrongs" or to use it to "promote" any kind of "change". The wording came
about following the discussion here: [2]. A professor had assigned a class to
create new pages, many of which got deleted at AfD. The problems with those pages
that were identified by AfD editors centered on containing original research that
promoted a particular POV. "Righting great wrongs" is well-understood internally
here as a Wikipedia term of art, but it is less accessible to the target audience
(academics with little WP editing experience) than "promoting social change". Also
"righting great wrongs" has the sound of doing something big, whereas an academic
who misunderstands how we do things might reasonably think "I'm just trying to get
Wikipedia to cover this cutting-edge idea that I've been thinking about" (but that
isn't yet published in RS). --Tryptofish (talk) 20:55, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Content that describes social change and content that promotes social change
are not mutually exclusive. Having a solid article about feminism promotes social
change. Increasing access to free knowledge in general promotes social change. The
meaning of "promote" as a form of activity on Wikipedia that conflicts with NPOV is
itself wikijargon like "righting great wrongs" and ideally we wouldn't assume
knowledge of either one. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 21:00, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, I guess it's good to discuss things. ;-) I now understand better the
distinction you are making, between content whose purpose for being added to the
page is to promote change, and content that, when read, will make readers more
aware of and receptive to change. I made this edit: [3]. Does that help? --
Tryptofish (talk) 21:07, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. It seems awkward to attribute an agenda to the content itself IMO. I'd
probably go with something like: "When assigning topics to students, please
understand that Wikipedia does not allow content which prioritizes social change
over Wikipedia policies like neutral point of view and using reliable sources, even
if the course itself is about promoting social change." (The connection between
social change/justice and course content is, in my experience, more likely to be
relevant than the professor's personal research, which isn't to say it's always the
case). — Rhododendrites talk \\ 21:18, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, attributing to the content sounded wrong to me too. I like your

points about social change being associated with justice, and about it being better
to focus on what the course is about, than on the instructor's research. The other
WP policies get a lot of coverage elsewhere on the page, so I wanted to keep that
part more succinct. I did this: [4], and I think this discussion has improved the
page a lot. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:30, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It's better, but I feel like the contrast with policies is needed to avoid
confusing jargon with off-wiki terms. I'll leave it at that and let others opine,
though. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 21:38, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

Thanks. I went ahead and made another change, making it explicit that this
comes from policies: [5]. The sentence immediately before this one refers to all
those policies, so I don't see a need to repeat them again. --Tryptofish (talk)
21:45, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It might also be useful to add an explanation that a Wikipedia article never

expresses an opinion. It reports, with attribution, the existence of opinions, but
neither supports or disapproves of any such opinions. (Avoid unsourced/unattributed
adjectives!) Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 21:49, 1 February 2022 (UTC)

It does discuss NOR and NPOV – a lot. Can you suggest a place where an addition
would be useful? --Tryptofish (talk) 21:52, 1 February 2022 (UTC)