Ttrimm
1
Every year, we acquire articles through various schools using wikiHow as a forum for writing, which is great. However, quite often, there are ‘issues’. I was thinking that maybe we could design a template with the information and direct them to that particular article and see if that helps with the submitted articles.
Ttrimm
3
Right. Some find and use it. Others don’t. I just thought it would be an easier way to let them know when they don’t.
VC
4
Well, I’m with creating a talk page template aimed at school accounts that points to the article mentioned by Dave. Something in the lines of: "Hi there, thanks for writing new articles at wikiHow. I noticed that many articles had been created around the same time from this/IP account. Those articles seem to indicate that the account/IP is actually a school/college account. The articles look promising, however, there are some ties and knots that need to be taken care of. You can find out more about how to use wikiHow in the class room here
. Ii I am wrong and this is not a school or college account, please reply to this message to clarify any misunderstanding that might have occurred. If I’m right, I’d recommend creating an account with the name of the school and allowing students to use when necessary … " @Ttrimm
: is that what you meant? What do you think?
system
6
I’ve seen this situation come up once in a while, but I’m not quite sure a template will be able to address the variations. The first thing I like to do is ask: “I’ve noticed there are a lot of similar articles being published lately, is this a school assignment or something?” If they say yes, then I ask the person to show the classroom article to their teacher. Sometimes I ask if they can get their teacher to get in touch with me. The majority of the time, though, nothing ever comes of it, probably because the students are in that last minute rush to get a good grade
Also, I’m not sure if we want all the students to use a single account? In some cases this makes sense, but in other cases, it can be nice for students to have individual accounts…They might actually become contributors!
Why only a template? We’ve all seen the myriads of duplicate, worthless articles that tend to come out of these assignments. We could create a school login process that would allow us to protect the youth and let them have an account. The logins would be created by the TEACHER (who would be required to have a confirmed school email address). The student accounts would have names like: CarterC:suchandsuch jr high school . No photos would be allowed unless the child was over 13. These articles would not be directly accessible, but could be found by accessing articles from such and such school (maybe set up as a catagory). All student work from that school would be automatically placed in that catagory. Only the teacher would be able to submit student articles to the main site (by recommendation). Only properly edited articles meeting wikihow standards would be accepted; the article should be able to meet the standard for a rising star. This shifts the duty of managing these articles to the teacher. The articles that have are not selected would only be edited by the student, teacher or an admin. Inactive students would have their non-submitted articles deleted after 6 months of inactivity. We might even charge the school or school district a nominal charge (a dollar a student?) for the use of our disk space. We could have a “student” featured article. Before seeing this in the forum, I worked in the NFD guardian. Almost all of those deletions were articles written by young people. This suggestion would give them a place for their articles, and would remove the burden of these articles from the rest of us. We could even put in our templates about student articles being a place they can write those articles.
Nope. We’re not going to charge anyone for disk space. We’ve got plenty of that anyway. And why should the article be RS quality? The majority of our articles aren’t RS quality, but that doesn’t make them bad, and we still accept them. As for the whole part about only certain people being able to edit the articles, not only is that an unnecessary hassle to implement, we’re a wiki, so that probably won’t happen. As for teachers registering accounts for students, and the part about no Avatars unless they are over 13, they have to be over 13 anyway, or the teacher can’t make them an account. Why? Because the COPPA compliance form requires it to be authorized by someone En loco parentis
of the child. Anyways. Just saying my thoughts.
system
9
Although there is some benefit to knowing an article or group of articles begins as a school project, the article itself becomes an integral part of the site when it is published, per the ‘‘Terms of Use’’, if I am not mistaken, so the idea of charging for diskspace seems rather odd and completely out of line, and the notion of teachers being allowed to create an account for a student opens a double problem, first to the teachers, since they would incur liability (in Florida, at least, there are very strict limits about what content and use students can have online), and we, as mentioned, would be in violation of COPPA unless the parent completes the required consent forms and files them with wikiHaus. The article may merit special consideration during the intended assignment, but every single one of them has the same potential to become something great if they remain onsite and have a viable topic. To assume that they are low quality, or inversely, higher than average quality is somewhat unreasonable, as they are unique, individual creations.
You are missing the point. We are constantly getting articles (and having to delete them) from student writers. We don’t have to charge anything; that was something we might do. We don’t have to give any special information out or even monitor them. The idea is that the school would have a place for articles, and could nominate some to be placed on the site. The reasons that such an article should be able to qualify as a rising star (I don’t mean give one to it) is that the teacher should ALREADY have made sure that the article is correctly formatted, and is not a duplicate. It shouldn’t need heavy editing. We can make sure that we don’t violate any laws doing this. To answer about charging for diskspace, it boils down to this: the articles that are not promoted to full status would very likely qualify for NFD|DUP or NFD|NOT, etc. I understand that is has to be set up to comply with laws and different things, but can we talk about solutions? Can we talk about how to make something work? Four years ago, I nominated an article for NFD|DUP, and a teacher asked me not to do so because it was an assignment. We waste a lot of time on articles like that. It’s why I am not as active as I use to be. How many different “How to get your parents (or teacher) to do this” articles have we seen? How many different "Be a ‘Character of the week’ " articles have we seen? How many “Be a ______ Girl” articles have we seen? How many “Get a boy/girl in the ___th grade” have we seen? How many different “Act Like _____” articles have we seen? Personally, many of these articles I would like to nominate NFD|STU(pid). I can’t do that, and I don’t won’t to discourage others. My original suggestion boils down to this: "Here is a place for you to do your projects. The teacher/school is responsible for monitoring the content (which will not be searchable on our website). If you think one of your student’s articles merits being on our website, then we have the method for nomination for inclusion. We expect you to only nominate articles that meet our standards. The article does not need to be perfect. We will not divulge a student’s likeness or profile. We need you to contribute a very small amount to pay for the diskspace, bandwidth and programming that this program requires. " This suggestion is intended to save something far more valuable than money: our time. My original suggestion above was just that, a suggestion. It wasn’t meant to be a definative action plan to carry it out. My suggestion to charge one dollar a student was a suggestion, not a statement that we had to do so. Instead of saying why it cannot work, tell me what we need to MAKE IT WORK.
Ttrimm
11
By student articles, I don’t mean how to be a teen heart throb. There are some good articles we have gotten out of them too.
system
12
The examples made are typically also done by an ordinary person, even someone bored out of their mind at home; nothing to do with school work/assignments whatsoever. On the other hand, these same ‘kids’ that create these articles also make some pretty decent different ones as well. “The teacher/school is responsible for monitoring the content (which will not be searchable on our website)”
So if a student were to create something at school, it wouldn’t be searchable, yet, if they jumped online at home and did the same thing, or even had their own account and edited wikiHow from home, it’d be searchable. I don’t get this. This would only work if the student had no way possible to connect to wikiHow at home – in other words, it would only work as if it was a computer program specifically for use at the school. “We expect you to only nominate articles that meet our standards.”
What’s the “standards”? The wikiHow format page?
system
13
The idea that ‘‘we waste a lot of time’’ is offensive to me. I spend a lot of time at wikiHow, and I do not feel like it is wasted. If you are wasting yours, it is because you don’t believe what you are doing is worth as much as what you could be doing somewhere else? Stupid, selfish, or both?
My exact thoughts. Couldn’t have said it any better.
system
15
Y’know, this really has to be the best response in this thread so far.
system
16
I think all of us have gone through variants of the “Why do we accept this crap?!?” stage. Some of us have developed higher tolerance levels than others, but let’s at least acknowledge the urge to purge as universal. Our entire site is an experiment in crowd sourcing. wikiHow editors don’t get paid. We don’t have a supervisor or boss threatening to fire us. We are, in a word, VOLUNTEERS. The notion of “controlling” an all volunteer workforce is a bit dicey. You can ENTICE editors with kudos, exposure to audience, encouragement, etc… but you can never CONTROL them/us. We simply do not have the leverage to control our editors. We have only carrots. No sticks. Furthermore, we have a major issue with heavy handed approaches because they are work intensive. Bringing down the hammer on marginally useful edits is a fruitless, frustrating, angst ridden work that is difficult to find or induce a volunteer to do. So… to make a long rant short(er)… given our all-volunteer staffing issues… we’re better off using the soft core approach which assumes that each editor (school based or no) comes in good faith until proven otherwise. We had multiple duplicates before we had teachers assigning articles… so blaming school assignments isn’t the whole answer. I think @VC
and @Ttrimm
have a good idea going in the template. It can be a nice way to communicate with our new editor(s) about how to do stuff here. Perhaps we should think through our options for educating the educators. Perhaps something in the initial welcome which invites educators to visit our tutorial on how to use our site in their classroom? That would “catch” more of them BEFORE they’ve done the assignment. Just an idea.
Charge for disk space because it’s really expensive, and in related news it is totally 1974 here
. You’re adorable! HINT: the 70+ gigabytes of photographs I have on my hard drive cost me less than £5 to store at 2010 prices. The few kilobytes taken up by an article is really really really
not an issue. I don’t see any reason to treat bad articles from a school project differently than bad articles from anywhere else.
