Well, it wouldn’t be October without scary movies and an influx of students creating articles on wikiHow! We have a few professors from Michigan universities starting to stagger their assignments at the moment. Their students have to create a new wikiHow article, so you’ll most likely see them as you patrol and boost new articles.
The professors are aware of the prerequisites to create an article and that information should have been passed on to their students. If you see any edits that require some coaching, feel free to do so in our usual friendly way, and if you notice anything unusual that’s widespread, feel free to let me know and I can pass it on to the professors.
I know many of you have worked with students before and know the protocol, but for those who haven’t seen students around the site before, here’s a little more information: [[Same as previous posts - feel free to skip if you’re familiar]]
As students work through their assignment, they will be learning all of the ins and outs of editing and creating a quality article on wikiHow. They should do the majority of the writing, copyediting and formatting to get it to a promotable standard themselves, rather than relying on other editors to do it for them, or pushing for promotion if their articles aren’t ready.
Keeping this in mind, if you come across articles and/or editors that are part of a student group (they should identify themselves on their user pages), there’s a template you can send them to help guide them in the right direction: {{ student
}}. This message will give them all the guidelines they need to be successful with their project on wikiHow.
Know that it’s okay to help and edit if you want to, but you are definitely welcome to say no and direct them to the {{student}} resources if you don’t! For students who are mostly getting things right and just need a bit of editing or personal help to nudge them in the right direction, it might be nice to send them a note with a personal touch. They should also keep an {{inuse}} tag on their article until the article is totally ready to go, so feel free to add that for them if they don’t already have it.
There is also a second student template {{ student2
}}, which most won’t need. It’s basically a checklist of issues that might exist if an article hasn’t been published. If someone has been sent the basic resources from the {{student}} message, but responds in ways that show they perhaps haven’t done the work to understand the guidelines, you could send {{student2}}. For example, if someone asks “Why hasn’t my article passed review” or says “I need my article live by x date”, but there are still significant issues with the article, this message will give them a clear checklist of potential issues they can look out for.
You can also remind them that their grade is not
dependent on their article being fully published, so it does not need to be reviewed before the due date.
Finally, sometimes the extra influx of new articles can cause some NAB backlog, but I’m confident that working together our group of Boosters will handle the extra - because when all is said and done, the result can be some great new articles!
