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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Bots and gadgets/User Script to Guide Students

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User Script to Guide Students

  • Problem: Students struggle with the same issues class after class. Often it is simple stuff:
    • They place references before punctuation
    • They use a LOT of capital letters in headings
    • They link to the inside net of their university library (1,300 instance yet to be cleaned up) -> we have an abuse filter that now stops these
    • They use books but do not provide page numbers
  • Who would benefit: Those involved with educational efforts on Wikipedia.
  • Proposed solution: Build a user script that those involved with teaching classes can opt to install on their students accounts. When the student hits "Publish page" the script will analyse their edit for basic concerns and provide direct feedback for the issues it finds. The student will than have the chance to make the correction and hit save again or hit ignore and publish anyway. If no issues are detected than the edit will publish normally. Each issue to be analysed should be a module within the tool so that projects and languages can easily customize for the issues they most commonly deal with.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: [1] (a first draft)

Discussion

How can this be made more versatile to allow {{sisterprojects}} (and sister languages) to develop similar wizards for their article creations? Gryllida 22:17, 30 October 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

You build it out of modules. People than select which modules they want in the version of the script they wish to activate. In Japanese the punctuation goes after the reference for example so they would have a module that would request people to do the opposite. Modules would also be potentially different for classes working on different topic areas. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 01:31, 31 October 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Doc James are you a JavaScript programmer or do you know of any? Help:Dialog may suit the need, it is rather modular. Gryllida 05:22, 31 October 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Nope not a programmer. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:26, 31 October 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Hi Doc James. This is an interesting idea and I can see it being useful. Thanks for proposing it. I have a concern about the modules you mention above. Since different languages have different rules about punctuations and different wikis may have different rules about what text is allowed and what isn't etc - the only good way to make this work would be to allow people to define their modules and define what the module checks and how. We don't have a database of punctuation issues across languages - we're quite far from having anything like that. :) This then turns into a much bigger project because user scripts are not as flexible. Do you have ideas on how to go about this? -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 02:21, 1 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Technically not really. The idea would be to start with a couple of functions and test them on a small group. And if useful expand from there. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:50, 1 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I like the idea. I had something similar at #13 of Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Editing/Flag edits by new editors (editor retention tool), but in the form of an opt-out new-editor mentorbot. If constructive criticism retains editors, maybe constructive auto-criticism will? HLHJ (talk) 06:57, 14 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • For the 'references before punctuation', User:Magioladitis had Yobot cover this functionality with Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Yobot_34. His bots are currently inactive as a result of admin/arbcom proceedings, but reimplementing this functionality with another bot should be possible, and may well be a better use of time than developing a guidance bot which serves only a small subset of editors.Dialectric (talk) 20:00, 21 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • Dialectric I can run my bot on this task to be honest but due to arbcom proceedings this has become too bureaucratic for my habbits. -- Magioladitis (talk) 20:04, 21 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I imagine this could look something akin to GuidedTours: a framework that handles the UI and editing integration, and provides hook points for Javascript callbacks which contain the actual logic of parsing the wikitext, proposing a modified version, and providing text for explaining the changes. --Tgr (talk) 05:49, 25 November 2018 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Voting

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