Learning patterns/Make it easy to identify student editors

A learning pattern forEducation

Learning Pattern Library

Keep students visible

problemStudent contributions are being reverted or deleted, or student accounts have been blocked.

solutionUse templates and course pages to make sure that the community can identify users who are contributing content as part of an education program.

creator• KHarold (WMF)

created on19 December, 2014

What problem does this solve?

Wikimedians are a community of volunteers who work hard to maintain the quality of Wikimedia projects. They use a number of tools to monitor edits and contributions so that they can quickly remove vandalism, which are edits that are intentionally made to interfere with the quality of Wikimedia content. Sometimes student work can look like vandalism, either due to normal mistakes or because of a lack of understanding of rules and norms for editing.

What is the solution?

One of the best ways educators and program leaders can maintain positive relationships with the community when contributing content to Wikimedia projects as part of an education program is to make sure that it is easy to identify users who are students. This can be done using course pages and templates.

Educators who ask students to contribute to Wikimedia projects as part of an education program should create a course page.

Most new editors make mistakes. Being able to look at work from multiple users who are learning as a group can show whether the issues have to do with one or two students, or whether the whole group may not understand something. This will help educators and program leaders improve the way they teach students to contribute to Wikimedia projects. A course page is an important tool that will help the community identify a group of users.

• Create a course page
• The education extension is an even better way to make a classroom project more visible to the community. Using the education extension will automatically start a course page and apply a template to student user pages with important details about the course.

Add templates to talk pages of student articles or user pages to identify students and their work.

Templates are an efficient way to help community members identify student work and determine where to go to resolve problems if neccessary. Adding a template to student user pages or the talk pages of articles will generate a colored info box at the top of the page it is applied to and can include text, images and links.

Templates should include:

• The start and finish dates of the course.
• A link to the course page.
• Learn more about how to use templates for education projects.

When to use

• Any time an educator or program leader instructs students to contribute content to or edit Wikimedia projects as part of a course, club or other extracurricular activity.

See also

Education Toolkit Learning Pattern This learning pattern is part of the Education Program Toolkit. Go to the toolkit.