Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 18:53, 17 April 2017

Use of talk pages

I have tagged two talk pages for deletion as they had no matching articles. Both appeared to be related to your course. May I suggest that work in progress is managed in user sandboxes and then drawn on as neccesary during article editing. Your sandbox is at User:EJustice/sandbox. Thanks  Velella    03:23, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Misplaced Pages Neutrality Guidelines

Namaste. I would like to remind you of our policies regarding neutrality of content, and request if your pupils are contributing to this project that California1990, GAA8423 and yourself ensure pupils' contributions also adhere to neutrality guidelines before publishing Drafts in Main article namespace -- such as this one -- and further be reminded that Misplaced Pages is not a platform for advocacy, point-of-view pushing or a repository of opinionated essays -- rather than saying such unwanted contributions are a "great job" on the talk page.

Language on the Wiki Edu course page itself raises serious concerns about instructors' ability to conduct yourselves in a neutral manner. If one desires to malign others, do so elsewhere. Otherwise it may negatively affect pupils', your own and the institution's participation in the project going forward. -- dsprc  21:17, 8 April 2017 (UTC)

Your input above strikes me as gratuitous, meaning unsupported by fact. Feel free to point to actual text that represents non-neutrality or maligning of others. Please also reflect on how much you are violating Misplaced Pages's own expressed guidelines for avoiding systemic bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#What_you_can_do). --EJustice (talk) 18:44, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

One is of course free to ignore sage advice to their own detriment. WikiEd page violated WP:BLP -- some offending material has been removed by other contributors before ultimately being resolved upstream. WP:COI also applies, as you've a financial-stake: after UCB riots, Trump questioned Federal funding for UCB. WP:Systemic bias is an essay written by fellow contributors, not a policy page (although it is something we should collectively address with outreach and understanding). Before waving that about, one may wish to check their own privilege, Professor. -- dsprc  23:43, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

April 2017

Hello. This is a message to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions, such as the edit you made to Misplaced Pages:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents, did not appear constructive and has been reverted. Please take some time to familiarise yourself with our policies and guidelines. You can find information about these at our welcome page which also provides further information about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. If you only meant to make test edits, please use the sandbox for that. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you may leave a message on my talk page. Thank you. Black Kite (talk) 23:30, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Your ANI post was reverted

You seem to have accidentally copy/pasted a large swath of text from the archives in order to reply to it. I have made the necessary adjustments and reposed it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Re:_POV_Forks --Tarage (talk) 23:39, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

the POV thing

I don't want to tell you how to run your class, but I think that creating new articles is harder then existing editing ones. One of the guidelines for naming articles is that the names should be "natural" as in names that other editors would link to "naturally" in the course of their editing. Another issue is new articles should be categorized and not orphan articles. There are some WikiProject pages where you can find existing Start/Stub class articles that need expansion like Superfunds/Assessment and a number of others you can find through Portal:Environment Also, I am not sure if you are aware, and this is not a formal DS warning, but any articles that are about American Politics post-1932 should technically be in the ARBAP2 area and subject to discretionary sanctions and AE - especially POV-forking Trump-related articles will be difficult. Systemic bias is an essay, so it may help to familiarize yourself with wikipedia policies if you are interested in this area. Seraphim System 04:34, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions...I'd love your advice on the tension our students face between subsuming their work under an existing article and creating a new one. I understand why the former is easier than the latter, but how can we increase the odds that people who need the information can find it? for example, if the students are writing about environmental justice in a particular coal-mining area of the US, there are insights for coal mining communities around the world. So should they put their work under Appalachia/#CoalMining or Coal Mining? Strikes me, as a relative novice, that the likelihood of being found is higher if the page stands alone...something like Social and Economic Impacts of Coal Mining. There's a tension between ease of editorial acceptance and find-ability/use-ability? no? I think your insight about categorization can help with that as well.

On Systemic Bias...I now understand the point about it being an essay. Are there any policies to address it or has it remained a "thought piece"?

Thanks again! --EJustice (talk) 16:03, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

My opinion on systemic bias is that the essay is about editorial diversity. There are a number of things that can make editing Misplaced Pages very frustrating. As a consequence, we have noticed there are fewer female editors then men, for example. We are concerned that the relatively lower numbers of female editors may create biases in certain areas of Misplaced Pages - like women's history. But individual editors will still have to discuss their edits on talk pages applying policy - the policies that are discussed most often are WP:RS WP:V WP:OR and WP:DUE.

As for Coal mining, what I recommended on the AfD was to rename the page to "Coal Mining in Appalachia" - a quick google search brings up numerous sources that are about coal mining in this specific region. These sources are not only about environmental justice - they include technical information on surface mining techniques, women's history about female miners, economics, etc. The page should not be limited to environmental justice issues.

The best way for pages to be found is for them to be linked to from other pages. I have noticed a number of the student created pages at issue are also WP:ORPHAN pages - this would actually decrease the likelihood of being found. Seraphim System 16:55, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you! I've passed this advice onto our students. --EJustice (talk) 18:16, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

For dealing with systemic bias, we've many ongoing outreach and user retention efforts. For example, the page layout of WP:Teahouse has proven statistically significant at retention of females and new contributors. Likewise The Misplaced Pages Adventure and (often controversial) VisualEditor. Coordination is conducted on META, where one can also find information about global Wikimedia affiliate organizations, user groups and so on. -- dsprc  21:02, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Threading comments

You have opened a thread at ANI, and discussions there get pretty complicated.

There are two essential things people need to do in discussions so that others can make sense of the discussion as they read it. One of them is signing comments, which you already are doing.

The other is indenting. In Talk page discussions, we "thread" comments by indenting - when you reply to someone, you put a colon ":" in front of your comment, and the WP software converts that into an indent; if the other person has indented once, then you indent twice by putting two colons "::" which the WP software converts into two indents, and when that gets ridiculous you reset back to the margin (or "outdent") by putting this {{od}} in front of your comment.

If someone else has already responded to a comment, and you want to respond to that comment as well, you put your comment under the already-existing response, and indent the same amount as the first responder (same level of indenting).

I hope that all makes sense. I know this is insanely archaic and unwieldy, but this is the software environment we have to work on.Jytdog (talk) 20:53, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Additional information and examples can be found at WP:Indentation. -- dsprc  21:00, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Notice of discretionary sanctions

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding all edits about, and all pages related to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Template:Z33 Jytdog (talk) 20:55, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Copy/paste

Putting this here so as not to disturb Diannaa that much more: yes, I don't think there was any malicious plagiarism involved, but I remember having a conversation with one of my grad student friends at a peer institution to Berkley about how easy it is even for PhD students to unintentionally do a close paraphrase or think a footnote was all that was needed when quotes would also be required. Basically the two students I pointed out did a copy/paste from government sources and thought a footnote would suffice. For the FDA one, it matters a lot less on Misplaced Pages for copyright because it was the federal government. The San Francisco Public Lands (or parks, don't remember exactly now) I couldn't tell if they were governmental or not, but it didn't really matter because they had a copyright logo on their website, and to be honest, it would have been very awkward writing stylistically if they had quoted it since it was a direct pull.

I'm also about to reply to a student from your class on the Trump policy article. Sorry that that one had to have so many revision deletions, but we caught it very late in the game. Anyway, the main reason I noted it to you was because of the "teaching moment" part on how easy it is to plagiarize in an academic setting in case any of your students wanted to move beyond a BA. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:29, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for this note and for your examination of the pages you've looked at. Do you think it's a good rate that only 2-3 copyright violations occurred out of 180 new editors? Or is that still too high a fail rate? (trying to give ourselves a grade (:-)

Also, I understand from your comment above that the 2 copyright violations on the Environmental Policy of Trump page were a) from the FDA and b) from San Francisco Public Lands/Parks. Is that correct, or were the copyright violations from other sources? Thanks again!--EJustice (talk) 03:39, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Copyright violations on Trump were from the Washington Post and National Geographic. They were citing figures if I recall (I can't see the text because I am not an administrator), but the wording was so similar in terms of word order and syntax that when I queried Diannaa about it she thought it worth revision deleting as a copyright violation, and she is the expert on this type of stuff.

At Open Space Accessibility in California Aylapeters copied word for word from a flier about a program that San Francisco Parks had going on with only a footnote. The website had a copyright symbol on it, so we treat it as a copyright violation.

At Environmental impacts of animal husbandry in the United States Sgberkeley19 copied two sentence from the FDA. Typically this is not a copyright violation, because United States Federal Government works are in the public domain. Where I've done my academic work, it would be considered unintentional plagiarism, however, because it was a word for word from the FDA with only a footnote. If it hadn't been a federal government work, it would likely have constituted a copyright violation.

In terms of grading, this is the first WikiEd class I've checked for copying on, so I can't really grade it. As an aside, I did find a political candidate plagiarizing from Misplaced Pages while doing the cleanup on this, so that might make you feel better :-) TonyBallioni (talk) 04:05, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Thank you!EJustice (talk) 05:39, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

TonyBallioni Slept on this issue, and trying to be able to explain this to the students. You're saying that the students paraphrased the Washington Post and National Geographic? That may be a form of plagiarism, but unless it was more than a few dozen words it easily meets criteria for fair use and generally not considered a copyright issue, particularly when for a non-profit/educational purpose (Misplaced Pages:Non-free content). Wish I could see the history here, but did you try to flag the issue for the students? Did they respond? From the perspective of having good content and the marginal nature of a potential copyright violation if in fact paraphrasing was involved, I think it would make more sense to ask for editorial revisions, no? EJustice (talk) 18:17, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

EJustice, if I remember correctly, the Washington Post example had some additional words, but there was word for word copying involved. National Geographic also had additional words, but copying throughout. I called it close paraphrasing when asking Diannaa about it because I like to assume good faith and give as much credit to someone where it is due, but her view of it was that it was that there was 4-6 total sentences copied, and I trust her judgement on this implicitly. My post here was intended as a courtesy to let you as an instructor of an academic class know where there were issues with attribution and copying that had to be corrected and in some cases redacted. The reason the revisions cannot be restored is because by clicking "save changes" you are releasing the text under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL (you can see that in the edit window). By making the content available publicly, Misplaced Pages would be claiming all the text in the article was free text. That makes displaying any revision with copyrighted text in it against our policies. I am not an administrator, so I can't restore the text for you, but that explanation is along the lines that most admins familiar with our copyright policy would give. TonyBallioni (talk) 18:41, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

The key thing

I don't know if you saw this, but I posted it over at ENI and at one of the AfDs. The key thing your class is getting wrong about what we do in WP. It is not long, would you please read it? Misplaced Pages:Beware of the tigers Jytdog (talk) 06:53, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Read it when you first mentioned it...I'm being careful about what I respond to because editors are threatening WikiEdu's legitimacy over this class, and they are great and needed. Who better to summarize well-sourced information than college students? They're trained in a discipline, have access to limitless research material, and have interest and time. All they need is some support to meet WP's editorial standards and WikiEdu is providing that in spades...I'm sorry that all the assets students bring to the table appear to upset so many editors.

My thoughts on "tigers" 1) The topic of environmental racism for example elicits strong views as does President Trump's environmental policy for example. The facts are the facts, peer reviewed or journalistically reported. We may not be able to agree on this, but I think the key thing that editors are getting wrong is their inability to separate topics that are particularly triggering in today's political environment from good neutral content about things like environmental racism. We have worked hard to have the students eschew strong views and present neutral facts. They're learning from some of the feedback. But the inability of critics to separate their feelings about the topic from the facts makes some of the feedback less than useful. 2) In my view, the "strong views" being expressed here are those of editors' reactions to the topic of environmental justice as well, I'm sure, of some students. On the student front, they are trying to focus on their knitting and to get neutral material up that conforms to WP standards. But they are dealing with a lot of incoming tiger-related material from editors. 3) from our perspective, writing on Misplaced Pages is about a dead and stuffed tiger. We're just describing the stripes, color, physiognomy so that people out in the world can recognize one when it's stalking them. Make sense? And thanks again for your engagement...EJustice (talk) 18:53, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

PS: here's a partial quote of my response to a request that we warn people to stay away from controversial topics on Ryan's page: Discussing race and class is always controversial so we might as well say new editors shouldn't write about that at all, even if there's a fairly non-controversial 30+ year history of peer-reviewed research about environmental justice that sees virtually no coverage on Misplaced Pages. It's a big deal and has a lot to do with understanding and solving environmental problems. So it's educational content the world needs, provided by people trained to create it. In the spirit of being direct, do you think it would be acceptable for WikiEdu or Misplaced Pages guidance more generally to say up front, "don't write about race or class at all, newbies"? Thankfully the community's own guidelines are kind of the opposite of this (WP:BOLD). My frustration with the editors who have engaged negatively is their blindness to their own blindness on this front...their unwillingness to see how hard it is to get this stuff discussed neutrally and to engage positively in the effort to do so. Every time I read WP's guidelines, I am fortified that the intent is to be positive and engaged, so I'm sticking with that. EJustice (talk) 18:53, 17 April 2017 (UTC)