 Hi everyone, thanks for watching our talk. Today we're going to talk a little bit about some of the common challenges made by student editors and some of the ways that we help them avoid these problems. I'm Ian Ramchon, I've been a Wikipedia since 2004, and I've been working as a Wikipedia expert at Wiki Education since 2014. Hello everyone, my name is Brianda Felix. My Wikipedia journey has been a bit unique because I first edited Wikipedia as a college student in the Wiki Education Program in 2013. I was an editor for that quarter and then didn't really edit until I was reintroduced to Wiki Education in September 2022 when I became a Wikipedia expert. So just a little bit about Wiki Education and where we're coming from. Since 2010, the program has supported 120,000 student editors who make contributions to Wikipedia as part of class assignments. We support about 6,000 students term. And we've, so this is just to say that we've supported an awful lot of students and we've seen just about every mistake a new editor can make. So I'll start us off on the common challenges that first-time editors make. So the first two that I'll cover are reference formatting and quality of sources. So if we take a look here, you can see the arrows pointing to different kinds of errors in reference formatting, right? So many times first-time editors sometimes use URLs as references without providing any additional information, right? Or sometimes they'll use the link that they get through library proxy servers, which don't take you to this, the right, the piece of information directly. And so those kind of reference links can are actually pretty useless, right? For a reader that's trying to find out more information. And in certain cases, they just skip the site tool completely and manually input these references, right? So in addressing this specific challenge, right? I think it presents a good opportunity to have a conversation with the student, right? And I think that this provides a good opportunity to have a conversation with the reader about their viability and why it's so important, right? That the reader has as much information about the sources themselves so that the reader can then access these sources and check the facts, right? This, and specifically college students, right? This provides a really great opportunity to discuss, right, the unique position that they're in with access to pay walled information and just like their campus libraries and such where they can get that information, right? And share it with the global community. So I think it's really important to connect these ideas, which then kind of serve as motivation to the students to fix these references or add more information, right? Once they understand how important it is to have that kind of, or to have that access of information available on Wikipedia for their contributions and for the readers, right? So that's reference and reference formatting. And then when it comes to quality of sources, I see this a lot where critical media literacy, literacy doesn't seem to be something that a lot of our first time editors are trained in, right? Or have really learned about in their education studies. So oftentimes this is the first time that they're faced with a task of critically evaluating sources, right? Sources of information. And so many of the editors don't know really where to begin when they're evaluating these sources, right? They don't know what questions to ask. So I always find that talking to these editors, right, engaging in discussion, right, of literally asking them, right, the questions that they should be thinking about, like, for example, if you look at this, the screenshot below, right? Asking the kind of questions like, what kind of podcast is this? Does it have an editorial team? Or is it one person that's behind the project, right? If they're using a magazine, like, is this magazine known for fact checking or is it an opinion piece, right? Is it an opinion piece or is it a written editorial contribution, right? How easy can you find the about me page so we know what's going on behind this, right? This project, be it a magazine, newspaper, whatever. So usually at the end of that exercise, students get an idea of the kind of questions they're supposed to be asking when evaluating sources, you know? In my experience speaking to instructors and such, right, they've said annotated bibliographies, right, which is where you would be asking these questions and where students would be going through the process of critically evaluating their sources, right? So these kinds of annotated bibliographies usually aren't done until about grad school. So it's, I find that this exercise of finding quality sources to support their contributions tends to be a very prominent challenge that they face as they're writing up their work. Yeah. The next three that I found to be very important or common challenges that really affect the any contributions to Wikipedia are these three that usually go hand in hand when you're looking at first time editors work, right? So those three are essay-like, right? Essay-like issues, tone issues, and then unsourced statements, right? So in this, I chose this example to share with you all because it really encompasses all three, right? So students or first time editors, right, will be accustomed to writing persuasive essays. And so when we ask them to write neutral, fact-based contributions, they kind of don't have, right, past experience to go off of. And so this is one of the areas where they really get, like, stuck on is like, ooh, like, what are you asking me to do, you know? And so, for example, right, you'll see a lot of situations where the student will start off there or they'll add this header where they're asking a question, right? Why temples were created, you know? And then, which is typical of a college research paper, right? But it's not what we're looking for in a Wikipedia article. Or then, right, when you address tone, you'll see, you'll find examples. For example, this underlying sentence that starts off as everyone believes, right? Making these over, right, grand statements. And then, of course, the favorite, or they're not favorite error of Wikipedia is that they don't provide a single source for whatever it is they wrote, right? So we have no idea what to check. And so, in addressing these errors, I feel like what I find myself telling a lot of student editors to address, like, all three of these is I ask them to cite, right? This is where I ask them to cite each sentence. I'm like, look over your texts that you added or that you're drafting. And I ask them to cite each sentence, right? If you are able to trace the information that you have in each text to a reliable source, then you're going to be good, right? If you can't find the information that you wrote, right, in that reliable source, then it shouldn't be on Wikipedia kind of thing. So I think it's a lot more work for them to add a citation to each sentence, but at least it helps them see what can stay and what is fluff or original research. And I think they're off better doing that extra work rather than not providing any citations to their texts. So, and that exercise I feel addresses all three of these common challenges because then they're able to see like, does my source say that everyone believed in that, that the gods controlled the sun and water? If it doesn't, then they probably have to rewrite their work, you know? And so that's the exercise that I like to use to address these common challenges. So getting a little further into the weeds, one of the hard parts about learning to edit collaboratively, which is something that's going to be new for just what every new Wikipedia contributor is how you communicate with other editors. So sometimes we tell students, sign your comments so they stick a signature in the middle of the text they've added to an article, we tell, or they include a note because footnotes really are almost fairly inaccessible to new Wikipedia editors. Or they add a comment in, I added this here, I want this to one of their collaborators to communicate with them or something like that. And so the challenge here is, where do you communicate with your other editors? How do you follow up? And obviously, that's what the top page is for. But top pages tend to be difficult to find and a little bit unintuitive to people who aren't familiar with Wikipedia. Well, at the same time, if you've been a Wikipedia for a while, top pages are so completely natural that you forget that everybody doesn't know about this. So it's important as part of the overall orientation program to Wikipedia, to explain to people where they need to communicate what the top page is for that they should check the top page, and all these sort of aspects of communication. And not to stick their comments or communication attempts in the article text. A lot of new editors create new articles. In the student program we try to direct a lot of participants towards existing articles, but there are missing articles, there are gaps to fill, especially when you talk about things like the gender gap. And a lot of new editors are creating brand new articles. And where are you doing this? Very often it's in your sandbox. If you create a new article in your sandbox and try to move it to main space, you're faced with a very unintuitive interface where you have to specify name space. You have to name the article, but the default that fits in there is your username slash the name of your sandbox. Lots of stuff like that. So new editors, students and non-students often will take a sandbox and send it on a wild goose chase through user space, Wikipedia name space, and all over the place. As somebody who's supporting new students, obviously the first place to try and get this is up front with your training materials. And I'd like to plug an upcoming video that Brian has been working on to do this, to explain how to do this in video. But if you're monitoring, you need a way to follow up with what they're doing. And in the English Wikipedia, there is a feed where if you go to recent changes, you can filter by new users moving out of user space. If you're supporting new editors, watch this feed, create a link somewhere, and keep this handy. The final thing I want to talk about is manual style edits, whether it's something like sticking a reference before punctuation, or the terrible crime of using title capitalization in a section header instead of sentence capitalization, or sticking a set of weird references off at the end and creating a pile of site errors. Manual style errors are very common for new editors. And it serves, it's sort of a double edged sword. On one hand, this is a good way for a new page patroller or recent changes patroller to recognize work that's been done by a new editor. And, you know, this is sort of a sign saying take a closer look at this, because they're likely to be errors here. The downside of this is human nature being what it is, people will take a look at it and find the editor find the errors, whether they're there or not. So, if you can help new editors avoid a lot of these problems. They're more likely to sort of not be immediately like reverted by somebody who's looking at far too much, just trying to, you know, deal with the flood of recent changes or something like that. So, getting people to fix to abide by at least the basics of the manual style is a fairly good way to train new editors to avoid the dispiriting experience of having your whole contribution removed because, you know, you put a piece of you put punctuation in the wrong spot. Finally, I'd like to say that while we focused on a lot of errors, new editors and student editors in particular who have gone through a process of training who get the support that we give them often do remarkably great work. I continually really impressed by what they do. You know, not to harp too much on the negatives, but these are some of the common errors that we find and that other people run into. So, thanks for joining us on this talk. And if you have any questions feel free to email us. You can see our emails are up on the presentation, and we'll happily answer them. Thank you.