Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

Welcome to the education noticeboard

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This page is for discussion related to student assignments and the Wikipedia Education Program. Please feel free to post, whether you're from a class, a potential class, or if you're a Wikipedia editor. Topics for this board might include: Content issues created by real or potential student assignments Improving student assignment output quality per the RfC Questions about the trainings or any question from instructors or students Discussion of the Wiki Education Foundation or the Wikipedia Education Program. Students who have done great work and need {{The Excellent New Editor's Barnstar}} Of course, we should remain civil towards all participants and assume good faith. There are other pages more appropriate for dealing with certain specific issues: An issue requiring immediate administrator attention → Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents Vandalism by non-participating students from schools → administrator intervention against vandalism. Cut-and-paste moves/history merge → the cut-and-paste move repair holding pen. Students revealing sensitive personal information → requests for oversight. Please DO NOT make such requests here; reports here are visible to everyone. Course announcements from dashboard.wikiedu.org / outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org → /Wiki Ed course submissions Issues related to dashboard.wikedu.org / outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org → meta:Talk:Programs & Events Dashboard For a list of topics that students should avoid editing → Wikipedia:General sanctions#Active sanctions			Shortcuts WP:EDUNWP:EDUN WP:ENBWP:ENB "Start a new discussion thread". Use an informative title: ==Informative title==. If a thread is related to an ongoing discussion, consider placing it under a level-3 heading within that existing discussion. You should generally notify any user who is the subject of a discussion. You may use {{ping}} to do so, or simply link their username when you post your comment. It is not required to contact students when their edits are only being discussed in the context of a class-wide problem. If no comments have been made within 30 days, your post and any responses will be automatically archived. Please sign all contributions, using four tilde characters "~~~~". If discussion is already ongoing elsewhere or if there is a more natural location for a discussion, please continue the discussion there, and put a short note with a link to the relevant location on this page. If you cannot edit this page because it is protected, please place your comments on this page and they will be addressed. Managing threads If you'd like to make sure a thread does not get archived automatically after 30 days, use {{Do not archive until}} at the top of the section. Use {{User:ClueBot III/ArchiveNow}} within a section to have it archived (more or less) immediately. A brief Archives page lists them with the years in which those now inactive discussions took place. If you encounter new editors who appear to be students in a class project, but they have not identified their class, you can place Template:Welcome student (or, where appropriate, Template:Welcome medical student) on their user talk pages. Wiki Education Foundation only supports classes in Canada and the US. Classes in all other countries are supported by other organizations.

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I don't think there is any problem here, but I just wanted to give a heads-up about the welcoming of new users who also happen to be Wiki Ed students. They may receive two welcome messages: one from Wiki Ed, and one from volunteer mentors.

Some of you may be aware of the Growth Team's Mentorship program (see also the FAQ), which is enabled on English Wikipedia (and numerous others). As part of this program, all brand new users at en-wiki are assigned a volunteer mentor to answer questions and provide other support. We often welcome our new mentees using templates available for the purpose.

I am a volunteer mentor, and I regularly welcome new users using Template:Welcome mentee. Sometimes this occurs before they receive the standard Wiki Ed welcome. I am not sure if template {{Dashboard.wikiedu.org welcome}} gets placed automatically or not, but I have noticed a few cases of students having two welcomes (examples: 1, 2, 3). I think this is fine (great, even) but I wanted to raise it just in case anybody sees an issue with dual welcomes, or wanted to comment.

In the cases where a mentee of mine already has a Wiki Ed welcome on their page, I switch to using {{Welcome mentee brief}} instead; (see example). The main {{Welcome mentee}} template automatically recognizes when a mentee is also a Wiki Ed student and customizes the welcome message, linking the student's Wiki Ed expert, their course, and the training modules (example). In addition, {{Welcome mentee}} has an optional |project= param which can be used to link a WikiProject related to their enrolled class; this example shows a student enrolled in U. Hawaii/Marine Biology, and the welcome message links WP:WikiProject Biology, where a student may find editors with specialized knowledge of biology, a useful resource to answer their more domain-specific questions. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 18:56, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Here's an example in the wild: User talk:Brookethiry6, welcomed by both Ian and me, and there are about 50 others like it. I don't think this is necessarily an issue, but wanted to air it just in case. Mathglot (talk) 02:24, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I know I've been critical in the past of various AI topics so I wanted to give credit where it was due: I thought the writeup today on findings throughout 2025 with AI and WikiEdu was really well put together -- a lot of good data here and it explains the distinction between hallucinated sources and sources failing verification for laypeople very well. It sounds like there's a lot of research on the horizon as well.

(also, there being articles with almost every sentence failing verification is kind of crazy, that's beyond what I've seen when spot checking. to be clear I believe it but, wow.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 04:46, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for pointing this out, I also really enjoyed and appreciated the report! Sadly, I was not surprised that so much failed verification, but I appreciated seeing the results of a substantial investigation rather than my own guy. In general I have appreciated WikiEd's approach to AI; I read their training modules on AI at the start of term and thought they were excellent. ~ le 🌸 valyn (talk) 07:04, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you both, I'm glad it was useful. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:40, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ditto. A very informative piece. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 20:34, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I'll say what I've said elsewhere: I was always told that if I submitted work I didn't write and presented it as my own, I'd get a zero on the assignment and possibly get an automatic failure in the class (or even kicked out of school with scholarships revoked in university). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 18:00, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There's a class assignment incident under discussion at WP:VPM#"Grid architecture" pages. If anybody knows how to get in touch with the instructor, or figure out who that might be, your assistance would be appreciated. I don't see any real harm to the project being done, so I think all that should happen is the instructor needs to be made aware of WP:ASSIGN, but without any response from any of the students, I don't see any way to do that. I'd really like to avoid this getting escalated to pages being deleted. RoySmith (talk) 16:53, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I pinged one of the staff of the group in India (since it sounds like that's where these students are) that does a lot of education work to see if they can help. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:01, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

They've just restarted posting, FYI LiAnna (Wiki Ed). Sarsenet•he/they•(talk) 13:24, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Nitesh (OKI) and Pavan Santhosh (OKI): can you see if you can help these students? --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:49, 18 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@LiAnna (Wiki Ed) Thank you for tagging us.

@Nitesh (OKI), since we don’t yet have clarity on the instructor, students, or their college, could you please check with the Tamil Wikimedians to see whether this might be part of any of their engagements? or if they know these students on-ground? For instance, this page uses several Tamil Nadu–based places and organizations as examples in the code and TN community is active in Wiki-Edu programs. Pavan Santhosh (OKI) (talk) 04:54, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@LiAnna (Wiki Ed): and @Nitesh (OKI) and Pavan Santhosh (OKI):, sorry I am just now seeing this thread; I had opened up an SPI inquiry at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Jhsgdugiusdh not realizing that this was also being discussed here. There appears to be continued new creations of additional accounts and pages over the last several days; the SPI link has a list of all the accounts and pages that I encountered. Best, Spencer^T•C 06:44, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed one of my mentorship program mentees editing this userspace draft, a copy of the article Wetzikon-Robenhausen (created 2015; 8kb). There are now 30 edits to the userspace draft by two students in their course. Besides the possible problems with edit conflicts should someone edit the main article, there is also a possible issue with history merger, if they attempt to replace the live article with the draft using a copy-paste merge.

I don't see an issue with students trying out edits on a draft copy of an article just to see how their changes look in context, or to hone their editing skills, but it should be clear that when they are done with it, then the draft is dead. Changes to an existing article should be made to the article (or in an WP:Edit request on the Talk page). To the extent that they can copy snippets out of the draft into the article (along with proper attribution to all authors per Wikipedia's licensing requirement, if the snippet contains the work of more than one author), that's fine; that's an edit directly to the article. But imho, they should not attempt to paste the draft or large chunks of it involving many separate edits over content in the live article in a single edit where the original draft edit summary justifications would be lost.

What is current Wiki Ed guidance on this? Mathglot (talk) 19:46, 25 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Our guidance is in this training slide. Most articles don't have any intervening edits between the sandbox move and their move back to mainspace, but they do occasionally crop up, and typically the student will reach out to their Wiki Expert for support in these cases. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 23:21, 3 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, LiAnna and thanks for linking that training slide. This user is violating the guidance on that slide in two major respects. The guidance calls for:

1. "copying a small portion of the article that you want to change"

   – but the editor copied the entire 8kb article to the sandbox;

2. "Do not try to overhaul an entire article from the sandbox."

   – since copying it over, two student editors have been editing the sandbox and it is now up from 8 to 22kb.

Even if there have been no intervening edits at the article, they should not attempt to copy the sandbox back on top of the article without first consulting their Wiki Ed Expert, who can coordinate with an admin or someone with the capacity to do a HISTMERGE. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 04:14, 4 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This is a broader comment than what Mathglot said (and I agree with Mathglot). The training slide correctly says to work with a small portion of the existing page, and not to use the sandbox to change large parts of the page. That's important advice, and I support that. But in my experience, it's still all too common for student editors to do big sandbox dumps in a single edit, leaving other editors in the position of just having to revert, because it often isn't worth the time and effort to cull the good parts of the dump from the bad. --Tryptofish (talk) 01:14, 5 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Giving the community a heads-up. I am teaching a climatology course this term at University of Toronto. My students will be making small editing improvements to meteorology and climatology-related pages (e.g. missing key concepts, parts that are written too technical to understand, erroneous or contradictory statement, updating outdated information/source). I'll be vetting their page selections before approval. If any of my students' editing causes issues, please drop me a message. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 22:02, 3 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]