User talk:Colin/Archive 9

Hi Colin. I hope you're doing OK. I just wanted to say how much I appreciate all you've done here at Wikipedia. Your work on autism has been stirling and I believe your contribution to WP:MEDRS has been a significant step forward in the evolution of Wikipedia. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 17:07, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to add my voice in thanks for your efforts. Your comments are always worth reading, and I fervently hope they'll return soon. More importantly, I hope you're well. -- Scray (talk) 17:53, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks guys. Colin°^Talk 11:15, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Big sigh of relief! Welcome back! -- Scray (talk) 11:26, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I scanned your contribs, hoping to find that the Education Project issues with medical articles have come under better control this term (the spring 2012 term certainly made editing here unbearably unbearable); alas and alack, I came across this, and worse, saw that the same issues persisted in that article after you cleaned it up once (I started to clean it up, and decided it was too much work). From reviewing the talk page, we don't seem to have made any progress at all on this front, and we seem to have another problematic class. Has there been any progress in what you're seeing this term? It seems that whenever the Foundation gets its personnel on board behind something, it goes all to heck since they are invested and defend the faulty edits, so I worry about these other medicine ventures that are cropping up, and I'm aware of the WMF using donor money in ways that will further problematic editing in other areas-- most discouraging. I hope some medical editors have seen some improvement somewhere; I'm done with my summer busy-ness, but if the medical situation has continued to deteriorate, I should consider unwatching all of medicine-- we seem to have lost MastCell, and I wonder where we go from here. I hope you are well, and I hope you've got some good news, best, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 06:32, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes looks like big issues. I have more or less limited my editing to 80 articles. Keeping an eye on more is simple too much. While see if we can attract some more positive contributors. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 06:51, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Sandy. I kept meaning to mail you over the summer but neglected to. Sorry. Will catch up later. The class editing that epilepsy article is here. Actually their list of tasks and assignments look quite well thought out and much more promising than the "Add a sentence to Wikipedia" assignment we were hit with last year. There were three issues:

• The student didn't have a clue about plagiarism, and it isn't really our job to teach them that. This is one of the problems with doing assigments on the worlds biggest online encyclopaedia: when your ignorance causes you to break the law, or exposes poor knowledge of ethical standards then it has serious consequences for us. In the old days, that copy/paste article would just be sitting in some prof's drawer with a big red line through it.
• Students really need to orient themselves round the hyperlinked collection of articles concerning their topic. Far too much effort is spent writing content Wikipedia already has and in the wrong place. Or effort spent trying to expand a subject that is possibly just a classification artefact into a full article.
• As normal, I wanted to help, didn't have the time, forgot about it. I tried posting for help (as did the student) at WP:MED but got no respose at all. This isn't a complaint about the folk in the project but just emphasises we don't have people qualified to help who have the time. We have a scattering of specialist experts (virologist, A&E, etc) who know Wikipedia well and can write to FA or GA standard, but no neurologists at that level. And I suspect the folk who can help with plagiarism are more literary than science/medicine types. The idea that students will get help from the Wikipedia community is a myth.

The talk page on that article got blanked/replaced so my comments and those from the prof were removed. The prof did support my necessary revert, though and is at least a little bit active on Wikipedia. So I do see some improvement in class design but not enough in other areas. Colin°^Talk 09:41, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi Colin,
I wanted to know if you could reply to my comment on the talk page to merge the Behavior modification article into the Applied behavior analysis article, as ABA is the new term of Behavior mod.
See here: Talk:Applied behavior analysis#Merging_the_articles_Applied_behavior_analysis_and_Behavior_modification.
Thanks!
ATC ^{. Talk} 03:03, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't really have any knowledge of these terms so wouldn't offer any insight. Have you tried WT:MED or Casliber? -- Colin°^Talk 12:39, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to try contacting Casliber first. Thanks for the advice! ATC ^{. Talk} 14:19, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to comment on the article. It is greatly improved due to your input. Cheers! ~ GabeMc ^{(talk|contribs)} 23:19, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

Colin, I have a bit more time now so I wanted to add a little to what I posted on my talk page in reply to your note.

A class's impact on Wikipedia should be looked at in terms of how much it improved the articles it worked on; the cost of that class is how much effort and trouble regular Wikipedia editors had to go to to assist that improvement.

The quality metric you were looking at here does have real value, I think. It's in the area of medical articles that I have most concerns about it, because WP:MEDRS is not something most editors are familiar with, so it's quite possible for an editor like me to assess an article superficially, seeing that it's been expanded with what appear to be reliable sources, and not realize that MEDRS is being violated and that the article has actually been made worse. However, I think the general statement made there, that the majority of articles have been significantly improved by the work of the students, is true. You've probably already found this page, but just in case, here are the reviews on which that 64% was based. You'll see there are several medical articles there; some, such as Brunner syndrome, were assessed as having been much improved; others, such as Heritability of autism, were assessed as not having noticeably improved. It's worth spot-checking a couple of the before and after versions of various articles (not just the medical ones); I think it will reassure you that at least some of the students are doing good work.

At the time that the quality metric was being used for the spring semester, we were unable to think of a good way to measure the burden on the regular editing community, which as far as I can tell has been the most common complaint about student editing. That is, the students may damage an article, but it does get repaired, so the problem is not that we now have worse articles, it's that we wasted time fixing those articles to no benefit to the encyclopedia. That's what led me to the burden analysis, here. That looks at two sample students from every class, and reviews every single edit they did. The page includes a diff for each edit, so you can check to see if you agree with my assessment of the value of the edit. Then I assessed whether, overall, the student was an asset to Wikipedia. For some of the medical or psychology-related edits, I wasn't sure of my ground, so I asked at WP:MED; that conversation is here.

Finally I took the results for each student and made a table to assemble the overall quality contributions and burden of each course, and put a metric on the courses. Though I wouldn't place a lot of faith in the exact ranking, I do think the classes with the worst scores are definitely problematic, and the classes with the best scores are very beneficial to Wikipedia.

For the education program to show it has value, I think it has to perform this kind of analysis, and then it has to do something with the results. We can't forbid a professor from teaching on Wikipedia, but the classes that are clearly problems need to receive feedback to that effect. The education program ought to be a mechanism for finding, fixing, and if necessary discouraging or stopping troublesome courses, as well as a mechanism for encouraging and equipping beneficial courses. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:53, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I'll try to look at your links later. MEDRS is an issue but not the most important one and I think the problems I found with the two medical articles linked from the talk page of the Outreach wiki are surely going to happen with any technical subject:

• Students who are absolute beginners in their subject writing at a level that is beyond their ability. The assignment is, after all, a test of the student's grasp of their subject, or ability to research and write about a subject, and many of them will fail to some degree.
• Students assignments creating articles that contain material that is already better placed elsewhere on Wikipedia. Part of this comes from the lack of groundwork done by the student or prof in choosing articles. Part of this also comes from the choice of stubs or even redirects as the subject on which to expand. There may be a very good reason why the topic is a stub or redirect: expansion to an large article is not a good idea.
• Students still copy/paste or close-paraphrase. This is a significant burden on WP because we are compelled to do something about it.
• Students work for a short time then disappear. Since the work is for marks, there is pressure on other editors to not interfere (either by improving it or deleting it) but also there is no incentive to develop a relationship with someone who's heart never was in the subject and has now gone down the student bar.
• Students do work that isn't repaired. This is especially a problem with the stub/redirect expansion choice: nobody is watchlisting those pages. A redirect will have a watchlist of 1 editor, who probably left long ago.
• There's an assumption there is a WP community who can review/repair the articles, or who think doing such work is a good use of their time. This isn't true. Psychology is very weakly covered by Wikipedians and I'm among several WP:MED editors who have now taken all such articles off their watchlist. It is a wasteland. But even a topic of my own concern: epilepsy has exactly zero experts on Wikipedia. My interest is lay and severely limited by my free time. If students make mistakes in such articles, nobody will fix them.
• You repeat the "Anyone can edit" line with your "We can't forbid a professor from teaching on Wikipedia" comment. Actually we can and we should. We've seen classes so badly designed and run that they constitute an off-wiki-organised attack on Wikipedia. Like some radio presenter asking their listeners to go vandalise some WP article. These bad classes are asking their students to, effectively, make Wikipedia worse. It would be trivial for WP/WMF to formally request the class stop and to enforce it if necessary. Wikipedia is not a homework assignment. It is an encyclopaedia. If someone was running a class like that psychology one did but on an area I care about, like epilepsy say, then I'd be jumping up and down to get them blocked.

I think the analysis metrics are missing a score for accuracy, and this needs to be gauged by a subject expert. They are also missing a score for appropriateness: was this material appropriate here or did we already have it or is it in the wrong place. The two medical articles I discussed had basic mistakes. This isn't some MEDRS fine point. The students just wrote stuff that was wrong. And did those doing the analysis check for plagiarism? Colin°^Talk 10:40, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

You make some good points. I think the analysis that was done addresses some of your points, but not all of them -- I didn't check for plagiarism in either the quality review or the burden review, but in many cases it wasn't possible as they were using offline sources, so yes, some copy-paste may have survived undetected. Your point about unrepaired work is good, though that's something I did try to address in the burden review; I assessed not just the response to the edit but the edit itself. (I think there was only one case out of several hundred where I found something bad enough for me to have to stop and fix it.) You're also right that "anyone can edit" isn't a license to encourage damage to the encyclopedia. However, I do think it's worth separating the education programme from the classwork in this discussion. The education programme is likely to encourage more classes to work on Wikipedia, so if classes are bad, the EP is bad -- I get that. However, if the EP is a resource to find and stop the badly performing classes, and improve the work of the existing classes, isn't that a good thing? Professors were assigning work on Wikipedia before the education programme, and they'll continue to do it if the EP is abandoned. I think we need to manage those classes to stop the problems you've been seeing.

You mention psychology as a problem area; I completely agree. The psychology student work I've seen has been among the weakest, and I agree that oversight from Wikipedia editors is likely to be weak. The one psychology class I've looked at in detail was not editing as a result of education programme outreach; they were part of the APS's Wikipedia initiative. One thing I would like to see the EP do is reach out to the APS and talk to them about the problems with student editing, and come up with a plan for avoiding those problems in future. Outreach from professional societies like that to improve areas of Wikipedia can be very valuable, but we need an organized response to help them avoid problems.

I'll be interested to see what you think of the analyses. It became clear to me after reading a couple of dozen pre/post links to student articles that some classes are well-run, with good outcomes and well-trained students who are cooperative online and stick to Wikipedia's guidelines. There's real value there. I would like to find a way to cut the problems down to a tolerable level, and keep the good classes. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:48, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Just a quick note: I'm very concerned if those statistics don't include any investigation for simple copy/paste or plagiarism. In the infamous psychology class, 8 and 17% of edits were affected by this in the groups looked at by Doc James and myself -- and many of the students used class textbooks for which we didn't have access so the number is likely to be higher. The myoclonic epilepsy example I came across recently, which is a more ambitious assignment, had a 1000-word section that was essentially a reproduction of the source. The impact on the stats is significant as copied text is likely to be correct, sourced and well written, so score highly. What does this say when even a serious analysis of the student work is unable to detect copyright/plagiarism issues because us Wikipedian's don't have access to the sources, nor the time to conduct these sort of investigations. Surely this means that relying on Wikipedian's to review and fix student work is misguided and we should expect the profs and their supervisors to do this job? And how can they do that if they aren't proper Wikipedian's? Colin°^Talk 20:30, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I tried to investigate some of the medical article edits in your analysis and burden reviews. I'm hampered by lack of access to the sources. The Heritability of autism edits which produced a marginal improvement according to the reviewers should have been scored negatively IMO. The very first statement added can be summed up as "The text that was copy/pasted from the source is correct; the few words written by the student have significant issues". The sources used are very much not MEDRS compliant which is a big issue for autism because there's so much research and dead-end hypotheses floating around that picking bits and pieces from the introduction sections of not-particularly-recent research papers is no way to go about making improvements to that article. It is quite likely that all the additions fail our policy on WP:WEIGHT. There is absolutely no shortage of recent reviews on this subject so why these poor sources were chosen is strange. I see Sandy reverted all the additions so that was a waste of time for all concerned.

If you can get hold of the source papers for any of these medical subjects, then I would be prepared to check them. I think the work I've seen from graduate students is of a much higher standard. For the undergrads then the rule seems to be that if the text is of a professional quality then it was plagiarised and if it is confusing and vague then it is original and regardless of these there's a good chance Wikipedia already had that information somewhere else or shouldn't have that "information" at all. Colin°^Talk 22:31, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

(Talk page stalker.) Colin, thanks for taking the time to look into this. Biosthmors (talk) 22:49, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

The section of the burden analysis that looks at the class which worked on Brunner syndrome and Heritability of autism is Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Spring 2012 burden analysis#University of Western Ontario: Genetics of Everyday Life. I scored one of the two students I looked at as a net positive, and the other one as marginal. I'd like to get your take (and any talk page stalkers' takes) on some of the diffs I evaluated, such as this one from that class, on a biochemistry topic, or this one from the same editor, about a model. I was trying to see if the overall set of edits from each student added up to a net positive for the encyclopedia, and I regarded those two edits as positive.

Your points about medical subjects seem reasonable to me. I don't think we can assume that well-written text from students is plagiarized, but I agree that's what plagiarized text would look like. Do you think this problem is likely to be limited to medical articles, and related disciplines such as psychology? Do you think that classes on medical topics should be actively discouraged, or that the professors should be asked to vet sources prior to student edits? I wonder if the relevant campus ambassadors for those courses have any understanding of MEDRS (they should all be clear on the subject of plagiarism).

One class that did very badly was a Kentucky class on psychology. Two edits evaluated, and both were strongly negative. I would like to see the instructor of this class given some feedback about the negative performance of their students; we can't expect instructors to avoid repeating mistakes if they don't hear about them. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library)

Hi. User:Colin/Brain seems to be stable since 2008. What happened with this page? did it ever move to the mainspace? -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:20, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Hi. The ketogenic diet is a featured article now. I just kept that draft page thinking I might use it for the draft for something else. Should I get it deleted or marked with a notice or something? Colin°^Talk 14:48, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

That's great. I never managed to create a FA! It would be better if it gets deleted. If you need to create a new page, use a different subpage name. Edit history is retained anyway. -- Magioladitis (talk) 18:24, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

I saw this[1] and if want me to try and find you an article for Wiki purposes sometime, just let me know. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 13:15, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Should I find the time to do some serious article editing... In the past I've relied on a couple of wiki friends but they aren't so active on WP any more so having someone else to ask is good. Cheers, Colin°^Talk 15:17, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Colin - I'm happy to help you with this as well (I know that having a few people to ask is good, because any of us might disappear intermittently). -- Scray (talk) 16:27, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Me, me, me :) :) To repair a student-edited article, I'd love to have PMID 22807284 ... I am hoping our JSTOR access will come through soon, but am unsure if JSTOR has many medical articles. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:38, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Just downloaded it for you. Send me an email? -- Scray (talk) 16:46, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

Should be in your inbox now. -- Scray (talk) 21:23, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

User:Colin/Brain, a page you substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; please participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Colin/Brain and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:Colin/Brain during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. Magioladitis (talk) 16:19, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm at work, so can't post much, but just wanted to say that the quality analysis you cite in your most recent post at the EN is not my team -- I'm one of the people on the team. That analysis was organized (and analyzed) by the WMF, just like the PPI analysis. (The burden analysis, on the other hand, is entirely my work.) I thought you might want to change your post to that effect. Thanks -- more tonight, and I'll be thinking about your comments on the source analysis. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:30, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry about that. I've tried to fix it. I'm aware that all this analysis is a huge effort and in good faith. Of course my essay is biased itself. One could have noted how the students didn't vandalise articles, or rip high-quality ones to shreds. And they did of course often add worthwhile stuff. But "Are students improving Wikipedia" is a complex question that isn't answered by the "64 percent" figure. I'm not sure that numbers will ever really answer the question.

You may be aware of the problem with comedians performing on TV. In their live show, they can repeat and revise old material and be fairly sure most of the audience won't have heard it before. Once their show is on TV or video, that material is no use any more. I wonder if the same will happen with student essays. Once the classic essay material for undergrad assignments has been done to death on Wikipedia, what topics will they pick? Colin°^Talk 15:27, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I had a conversation about that with Brian Carver, the UC Berkeley law professor who Kevin Gorman cites as an example of a good professor. He told me that it was getting harder for him to find good case studies for him to set the students to work on. Of course that's an excellent outcome for us, since it means that Wikipedia now has good coverage of case law for intellectual property law. I think he has a few more semesters before he runs out, but one thing I suggested to him was to take a curator's approach to the area of Wikipedia he's interested in. We looked at the article on intellectual property, and he immediately noticed that there were subarticles on the history of copyright law and patent law, but not on the history of trademark law. I pointed out that that was an obvious opportunity: if he surveyed the body of articles in that area for gaps, he could work with a sequence of classes, and perhaps some graduate students, to systematically plug holes in Wikipedia's coverage of that area. He didn't say yes! But I think it's a model we should encourage. And if we truly run out, that would mean there were no more articles to write, and Wikipedia is finished. I wouldn't complain, at that point. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:07, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Colin, I don't know if you have access to the sources, but if you're interested in reviewing a student's use of sources, as we discussed at the education noticeboard, here's a diff you might take a look at: [2]. The student added four sources, number 17-20 in this version, and used them to support four statements. If you are able to take a look, and would like to add the analysis here, that would be great; otherwise let me know what the outcome is and I'll add it. Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library)

Actually I think it would be easier, if you are able to do this, to work from here rather than the diffs -- there is another diff ([3]) showing some extra material added, and I think the table layout shows it in the most straightforward way. I did notice they put a same ref in twice in slightly different formats. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:01, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

You might also be interested in this class; I just finished formatting the student refs in the table there. This class finished just about dead last in the burden analysis I did, because I gather from Sandy that much of what was added didn't really belong in this article and had to be ripped out. If you'd like to see whether the student was sourcing correctly, the refs are listed in that table. Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:26, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for this. Will try to look at this some time this week. Colin°^Talk 22:56, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

This old page at WT:MEDRS looks familiar. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:46, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

See here; it's not the first time I've found this. Three FAs need to be checked. I have been remiss of late, but I hope you and yours have a wonderful Christmas. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:34, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Colin, maybe this shouldn't be true, but it is: If I'm not motivated to work on images at a certain rate, I don't. So if I'm being throttled back in nominations, I probably won't make more than the throttled rate. The thing is, making an image, uploading it, and putting it into an article is a completely thankless task, since one can't even be sure anyone has seen your image. At least if they're on FPC, someone's seeing them, and might be encouraged to reuse them, and, as such, FPC provides the needed minor reward that I can use to keep up the rate of work for Wikipedia, and, frankly, a few noms failing isn't a major issue, unless it starts disincentivising categories of restoration work. If "Is your home worth fighting for?" fails, I won't care much. I knew when I did it that it might not interest others as much as it did me. If "Don Quichotte" fails, a nom I consider extremely strong, on a subject I enjoy, and for which I have a similar nom half-done, that would possibly be problematic. (Though I'd likely renominate it a few weeks later before panicking too much) Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 22:57, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I should probably copy this to WT:FPC, leaving out the examples. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:06, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand that when your existing nominations are struggling to attract reviews, you make the problem worse by nominating more images (of a similar category). I do value your contributions to Wikipedia. I worry that if FP is your only motivation then it won't last. People will grow tired if every sixth nomination is a technically excellent restoration, much like lots of folk are already tired of Google art images. Colin°^Talk 23:22, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

That would imply 5/6ths of the nominations would be photos, and noone objects to photos. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:32, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi Colin. I'm thinking of getting back into photography. My last good camera was a Pentax Spotmatic, your basic 35mm slr, some years ago. Do you know enough about dslr's to recommend something that does a good job? Maybe with HD video too? --Anthonyhcole (talk) 06:18, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm having problems receiving email from Wikipedia at the moment. If you post here, I don't get a notification email. If you email me via Wikipedia I don't get the email. Hope the problem fixes itself soon. Colin°^Talk 16:06, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Saw your note at WP:MED suggesting ketogenic diet for the JMIR deal, and wanted to let you know that I'm still around in the event that any copyediting/cleanup is wanted (I looked at it when I returned to WP a few months ago, and made a few small tweaks). I'm not averse to tackling epilepsy too, if it's to be a serious target for improvement. Maralia (talk) 19:50, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your ongoing maintenance of ketogenic diet. It can't be on many folks watchlists so I'm grateful for those who help out. Yes, I should round up some up-to-date sources and see if the article needs some improvement. As for epilepsy, well I've been promising and disappointing folk on that subject for years. But you never know... Would you be interested in doing more than just copyediting? Colin°^Talk 21:15, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm willing to dig into the research and writing with you, sure, but given the scope of the article and the mountain of literature available, without expert guidance I would definitely fall down a bottomless research rabbit-hole. If you're willing to identify some relatively focused aspects I could tackle—like a specific new treatment or research direction that needs to be incorporated, or some particular aspects of the article's coverage that need to be improved—I'll happily put some time in and see what I can accomplish. Maralia (talk) 04:45, 24 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi. Can you offer your opinion in the discussion on whether to include a 1990s photograph of Chris Claremont in his article? Thanks. Nightscream (talk) 22:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

What do you think about Vaccine-induced encephalopathy? Well-sourced and well-written it sould shut down some unnecessary talk page ranting. I've seen this brought up several times over the years. I know nothing about it myself, of course, but would be willing to knock up something based on those sources you just linked to and a PubMed search. --Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:15, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Not sure I want to create a guaranteed battleground article. I wondered about re-creating Dravet syndrome which got turned into a redirect to something that is related but not quite the same thing. Then that article could have a small section covering the syndrome's role in the vaccine controversy. Colin°^Talk 19:43, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi there - I left a note for you on the water fluoridation talk page. Thanks! Tilapidated (talk) 20:14, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

It would help me to keep track of conversations if you could kindly refrain from reverting edits to article talk pages, thanks, Tilapidated (talk) 21:16, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Well that's the last time I try to edit Wikipedia with my mobile. I didn't mean to do that at all. Colin°^Talk 21:26, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Colin - let's chat on the talk page. Thanks Tilapidated (talk) 21:53, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Colin, thanks for your message on my talk page. I do understand that you are passionate about this issue, and its very obvious that you don't want changes to your article. I would encourage you to take a deep breath and look at the changes - they are well sourced corrections to factual errors in the article. Let's focus on the actual science, and try to let go of our personal beliefs around the issue - I think you'll find its not as scary as you think! Tilapidated (talk) 17:10, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Em, it's not my article. I didn't write any of it. I don't have strong views on WF - there are valid arguments surrounding the issue both scientifically and ethically (though most of the vocal anti-F folk are complete nutcases). As for focusing on science rather than personal belief, well you are by far the worst culprit here e.g., "I understand that you don't like the conclusions that the York Review authors came to". I have no opinion on their conclusion at all. Time and again you are misinterpreting both what other people have written, and the studies you are citing or even what the citation is (Worthington is not "a study about topical fluoride"). I can only repeat. Stop editing the article until you gain consensus for the changes. Colin°^Talk 17:28, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

FYI please report problems with mobile editing at WP:VPT and draw the attention of User:Okeyes (WMF) if necessary to relay issues to the mobile team. At least that's my impression of how to provide good feedback. Biosthmors (talk) 17:38, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Colin, I'm trying to understand your motivation in not wanting the conclusions of the original study that's being talked about to appear in the article, and instead wanting to substitute completely different ones, and I'm really unable to come up with any very charitable ones. Please take a serious look at what you're doing, and whether you really want to be distorting the findings of major studies in the way you are. Thanks, Tilapidated (talk) 17:51, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

You can think what you like about me. I sleep at night. Colin°^Talk 17:56, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Hey Colin, thank you very much for the heads up on COI. As you can see, I'm a bit of a newbie and have only create 4 pages with a limited amount of edits - still finding my way around. Trying very hard to write the sandbox article from a neutral point of view; it's a smaller town and the office employs a significant number of people. I beleive the article to be worthy when comparing it to other businesses that are included but find it doubtful someone else would/ would be able to write it. Any advice is appreciated. Regards. Ian Furst (talk) 01:59, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Why was this image removed [4]? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:07, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I see it was yours. I don't think it adds to the article. Lateral tongue biting is more indicative of a seizure than the tip of the tongue, which is common in PNES. Plus many kinds of epilepsy involve no convulsion at all. The reader really doesn't need a picture to know what a bitten tongue might be like. Fear of biting or swallowing a tongue is a common reason for folk to try to put something in the person's mouth -- risking broken teeth or bitten fingers. It isn't a particularly pleasant picture to look at, which will put people off all the lovely prose that Maralia and I are going to write :-). As for the neuron -- well I was a bit uninspired wrt the caption. It is late here so I thought I'd improve it another day. Colin°^Talk 23:22, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Yes the lateral is more common in tonic clonic but the tip can occur [5] Some people think that it is only a seizure if the sides are bitten (thinking of medical students and back to medical school). We do not want people ruling it out because it is the tip. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 23:37, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not denying it can occur - just about any injury could occur - but it is very unspecific and doesn't need a picture to understand what it is like (we've all bitten our tongues). It appears lateral tongue biting is more specific of a tonic clonic seizure but only in combination, of course, with some other paroxysmal event (or unexpected death). If I had free access to a stock image library of pictures to illustrate an article on epilepsy, a picture of someone sticking their tongue out wouldn't be one I'd pick, any more that I'd show some soiled pants for incontinence. Wrt injury, something like this might be more useful as it is very specific to epilepsy. Colin°^Talk 09:28, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Just a quick thank you for your mellow and well spoken contributions in the GFDL discussion. --Dschwen 08:40, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Either you are being ironic or are on the wrong user's talk page :-) Colin°^Talk 10:13, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Haha! Give yourself a little more credit! --Dschwen 22:30, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the great pic of Sjón winning the Nordic Council Literature Prize! CityMorgue (talk) 04:00, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, though I just added it to the article. The credit goes to Magnus Fröderberg, photographer and norden.org for releasing pics for free, and to User:Fæ for uploading them. Colin°^Talk 08:09, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Colin. I will keep looking for better sources. This is a purely academic question so I can contribute better. Does the existence of such a review/research article allow us to mention that researchers are exploring the possibility of meditation being an alternative to managing autism? Traintogain (talk) 15:35, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

WP:WEIGHT is the relevant policy here, along with WP:MEDRS, the guidance for medical sourcing. Ideally, if one were writing the section on the management of autism (or research into that), one would read widely from the best sources on that subject. One would then have a feel for the importance of each therapy type (or potential therapy type) in the literature. That would then guide the weight given to these aspects in the article. For an international-English Wikipedia, we are somewhat biased by English literature but hope to cover therapies in wide use in other parts of the world too. This is all quite hard to do and quite an undertaking. This is why so few articles reach Featured Article status. Many articles are just a collection of factoids jumbled together by random editors with an interest. So the weight ends up all wrong. Worse is where an article is taken over by someone with a particular agenda: so-called "point-of-view pushers". They see the article from their point-of-view rather than a neutral one.

So you need to find out if research into meditation for autism is widely-enough covered by the general literature on research into autism therapies. If it is only covered by a few articles in journals with a bias towards meditation, say, then that's not promising. There are lots of speculated therapies for autism, including some downright dangerous ones, and lots of so-called-therapies that exist to exploit parents and extract money from vulnerable people desperately seeking a cure. So this is one area where we need to be quite careful about getting the weight right. The existence of one or a few articles on an aspect of some subject might be enough weight for a subject with very little literature or research, but for something like autism, where thousands of papers and dozens of reviews are published each year, it probably doesn't amount to much.

-- Colin°^Talk 16:04, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

	The Original Barnstar
	For your outstanding working keeping Wikipedia's medical article of high quality. Yes I know it is an uphill struggle. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:52, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Also I hereby award you a PhD in Wikipediology from the school of WP:WikiProject Medicine. Hope it comes in use for your upcoming conference. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:53, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Colin, I've watchlisted User:Colin/Introduction to Psychology, 2013 and will help with the assessments if I have time. Can I suggest you update the second table with an instruction at the top to sign the comments, in case that's of interest later? Or you could add a column for assessing editor. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:38, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

It struck me reading your critique of edit retention that it would be helpful if we could find something that does correlate with quality. I can see why professors want to use a data-based evaluation rather than a subjective assessment of every single student edit. I don't think it suffices for us to say that it's hopeless to look for non-subjective metrics; we should try to give these professors something they can use.

The first step back from reviewing every edit is to review just a sample, and have multiple reviewers -- that's what the PPI assessment did, for example. There were at least two problems with that approach: there is no easy way to measure burden, and certain kinds of error (plagiarism, technical subject-matter errors) are easily missed. Is there some quality evaluation approach we can recommend that we think will detect problems sufficiently well? And can you think of any automatable analysis that would provide any useful information about quality?

If we can come up with such a method, I think it would be beneficial to try to get a statistical study done to validate it, particularly if it can be compared with the other methods suggested such as edit-retention. If we're going to discredit the edit-retention as a metric, we should try to do it in a citable forum. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 00:27, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes objective measures would be great but I struggle to think of one that is of high quality. Plagiarism if usually fairly cut and dry but is easy to miss. Whether the edit was removed is another measure but it often reflect the prominence of the topic being edited rather than the quality of the edit. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 09:59, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

It will be interesting to see how many of Joordens students edits are reverted by the "community" and how many by those reviewing the edits now. The 2011 review was limited by the fact that many students cited their class textbook, and we were unable to check for plagiarism. I will think some more about the metrics but my ability here is limited by my lack of stats education. My critique of edit retention is essentially as a lay person, so I may get things wrong, but it seems to me quite easy to spot that the wrong things are being measured and assumptions being made that are untested and likely to be wrong. Colin°^Talk 10:30, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Colin, I'm about to split the student assessment table so there's a separate section for the ones I'm assessing; that way my edits assessments won't collide with anyone else's. I'll reassemble the table when I'm done. If you think this is the wrong thing to do, let me know and I'll reverse it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:46, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, edit sections are a good way of keeping out of conflict. We can merge later if it helps but maybe there's no need. Colin°^Talk 16:43, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I looked at what you're doing with the plagiarism section at the bottom. It's useful, but I am not sure we need to do that much work. What if we add two columns to the big table, with one titled "Plagiarism/Copyvio" and the other "Useful material added"? The reviewers can just put a yes or no in each column, since they have already done the work. Anyone who wants to see the exact copyvio or plagiarism can find it very easily from the links in the table.

I think that would be enough, because what we want to do with this table is use it to show unambiguously that Steve Joordens' class is harmful to Wikipedia. What we need for that is the bottom line numbers from that table: 173 of 250 students plagiarized, and only 26 added useful material" or something like that. So long as the table links to the underlying proof that those numbers are right I think that's good enough. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:30, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. Yes it may not be something I can/want to do a lot of and might not be the most efficient. The other assessments are overall and include plagiarism where it can be detected. But ultimately that plagiarism figure will be lower than reality because there is so much we can't check. I'm just looking specifically at plagiarism where we can read the source. And I know people can click links to see the closeness but there's nothing like seeing it in front of you compared to basically taking our words for it.

As I commented in the 2011 review, the actual task given the students is almost guaranteed to have high levels of plagiarism. They have to write a few sentences from a single source in a subject they really don't understand yet. You can see what happens when they genuinely try to put it into their own words: incoherent and often ungrammatical.

The Schacter, Gilbert, Wegner. Psychology 2011 book seems to be their class textbook. Lots of them cite it. I see Amazon.com let you search inside, to a limited extent. That might be worth considering. Colin°^Talk 20:46, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I've found a couple of things in there via Google Books. I'll add the columns to the tables. I think the plagiarism ratio might be meaningful, actually, because if we only put "No" for the ones we can check the source, we can just look at the ratio of yes to no. So far it's absolutely disastrous. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:56, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree it is worth distinguishing between "don't know" and "no". But beware that Google Books and Amazon only let you see part of the book, so it may be a "probably no" if you can't find the cited page. I've only done a few edits/students so far and I'm still on 100% plagiarism. If the numbers really are very high for plagiarism, what should wikipedia do about the text that's been added. There's also the previous years' stuff too. Colin°^Talk 21:01, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'm only marking "no" if I'm confident I've found the text and it is clearly not the same. I've found a couple of decent attempts at paraphrase so far, but more copyvio, plus some plain useless material. As for what to do -- if it's 75% copyvio it really is something like vandalism. I think I'd like to ask a few professors who edit Wikipedia what they think an appropriate response would be -- they know better than I would what will and won't work in an academic environment, and what will just be ignored. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:06, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

This has been an interesting exercise in finding plagiarism. As Colin mentioned while the YESes are definitive the NOes are not. I found one bit of plagiarism from a student (as it was from an abstract of a journal). Only when I looked at the full copy of the journal in question which sat behind a pay-wall was I able to determine that much of the rest of what they added was also plagiarism. It came up on neither a google nor a google scholar search. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 21:10, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm also finding it hard to be fair on the "useful material added?" column I just added. For example, this edit is still there, and is probably OK, but it's not exactly a valuable edit. Still, since Joordens' theory is that a thousand tiny edits add up to valuable additions, I suppose it counts. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:14, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Also, if I put "can't tell" for plagiarism, I am sometimes putting "yes" for added useful material, but if the edit turns out to be plagiarism those will have to be revisited. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 21:22, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

It isn't a valuable edit because various speech problems are already listed and this looks very much like a lay attempt to add one without even checking for duplication. Plus gibberish has a specific meaning (deliberately unintelligible yet sounding like real words) that I think is unlikely here.

Adding text that appears superficially helpful is actually another insidious way of destroying Wikipedia. These articles fill up with the bleeding obvious or the same thing said different ways or lots of random factoids. Proper writing involves researching the topic, not picking a fact out of a hat and trying to insert it somewhere. I know Joordens theories make no sense to any one who understand what Wikipedia is, but I also think we should consider the possibility that they are pure marketing bullshit. His purpose of using Wikipedia is clearly as a free classroom assistant for student essays. If he had Wikipedia's best interest in mind, he'd be working with us, not "flying under the radar".

For a good laugh, have a look at The Personality Test and its history. The article is currently completely borked. Colin°^Talk 21:36, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for poking my nose in here. That's embarrassing - it should be nominated for deletion IMHO. Graham. Graham Colm (talk) 22:27, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Why deletion? The Radio show seems notable enough? Colin°^Talk 22:32, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes the article in question now covers two completely different things. The students are just dropping stuff into articles without even reading them much of the time. Obvious cases are when they drop stuff into disambig pages. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:43, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I've fixed the article now. What is interesting is that some of the early psych student edits did actually edit the article knowing it was a BBC radio show -- quite how a radio show fits with their assignment to edit two psychology articles I don't know. The article has been reverted before so we have several seasons of students all making the same mistake. Colin°^Talk 09:21, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Favourites:

• 142.1.81.79 (talk · contribs) (University of Toronto IP) "Learning will increase brain knowledge" -- added to the lead paragraph of Learning citing the student textbook. Was reverted in less than a minute.
• Alberto198 (talk · contribs) "Without memory, people will forget many things" -- added to the lead of Memory citing Sperling, G (1963). "A Model for Visual Memory Tasks". This lasted 2 minutes before being reverted.

One thing I can be sure of is that neither of these have plagiarised the source text. Colin°^Talk 22:32, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm done for today. I've checked 13 edits with online sources. Only two of them rephrase sufficiently and both times they make a mess of it. Colin°^Talk 22:50, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Another amusing edit describes the problems of developing new drugs. It cites "Can Fam Physician. 1969 March" and quotes a "recent survey" by Sir Derick Dunlop. He died in 1980. Colin°^Talk 15:26, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Joordens' initial response on the education noticeboard was that we had only noted three or four mistakes so far. I think there's enough data now to post a note on his talk page saying "Of 19 students whose work we have been able to assess against the source, 16 have contributed either plagiarism or copyright violations", and asking him to stop on the basis that this is enough to indicate a serious problem. He may disagree, in which case we can assess more and try again. Any reason for me not to post a note like that to his talk page? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:27, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Excellent good idea. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 14:05, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

OK, done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:20, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

The students have already stopped. The class appears to be finished. So I doubt he will need to do anything right now. The issue is who is going to fix Wikipedia and how to we persuade him never to do that again. Colin°^Talk 14:36, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I didn't realize the class was over. Oh, well. Let's see if he responds; the data is sufficiently negative that I think he will find it hard to argue that the course should continue next year. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 14:44, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

On the basis of this edit I'm not sure his appreciation of reality is as strong as you think. We listed lots of simple things the students did wrong in 2011 that were really easy to fix with a little more training, and the evidence shows this class is worse than 2011. Also the students are making mistakes in 2013 that the same students did in 2012 so it is quite clear these students aren't being assessed and given useful feedback. The big picture that Joordens is fond of is: The vast majority of students simply plagiarised their sources; a small minority tried to use their own words but failed to communicate accurately or coherently; a handful wrote something that was useful. The assignment is ill-conceived and incapable of benefiting Wikipedia. Rather than writing up his next academic paper, what is Joordens going to do about the damage he has inflicted? Colin°^Talk 15:02, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Do you think that Wikipedia:Education noticeboard#U of T courses in Psychology should be posted at ANI or elsewhere? I think we need to get a Community reaction to this rather than just a handful of editors that have that noticeboard in their watchlist. Colin°^Talk 17:51, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I think we should give Joordens a little longer to respond to the note I posted. If the class is over, as you say, then there's no harm in waiting a day or two. I have to say I am not at all sure what would be an effective response if Joordens decides to run the class again. I think he's telling the truth when he says this is a good faith effort to improve the encyclopedia; he's misguided, of course, as anyone who understands Wikipedia (or who has gone through the edits) will know, but I don't think he wants to hurt Wikipedia. If we treat him as though he's acting in good faith, and provide convincing data that he's wrong, then we've done all we can and it will be time to go to ANI if he refuses to stop. Though I don't know what ANI will produce. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:04, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I think it is reasonable to give him a bit of time. I will continue to try my best to assume good faith. It however feels so much like he is simply trying to use Wikipedia to teach his massive classes. If this was successful it would of course be a huge financial benefit to his school. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 18:08, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Based on his peerScholar work, and previous comments about using Wikipedia reverts to automark his students, I think his mind is firmly focussed on cheaply and easily setting assignments for his students. I'm afraid I don't think he gives Wikipedia a second thought and I agree he's completely misguided as to how an encyclopaedia gets written. We'll see what he says, but if he continues to claim his class is doing good, or to ask us to wait till he published his data before commenting, then I won't have patience: the next publication bearing his name and Wikipedia will not be one he wants to add to his CV. Colin°^Talk 18:30, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

"I think his mind is firmly focussed on cheaply and easily setting assignments for his students." You know, in many ways I don't blame him... If I had a class of 1700 students, I wouldn't have a clue as to what to do with myself. Moreover, I fear that many profs (and in the future, perhaps more administrators) see Wikipedia assignments in much the same ways. I fear that the Educational Program at times may have encouraged this view; it certainly encouraged Joordens at first. Moreover, this is the way that much of higher education is going (see also the various discussions about MOOCs): seeing technology as a cheap and quick response to rising demand as well as a way to reap more profit from student fees etc. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 16:27, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Well done in bringing the issue to ANI. I've closed it after exchanging email with Philippe Beaudette and Geoff Brigham. They're on it and thanked me for bringing it to their attention. Toddst1 (talk) 22:00, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

My sympathies about your encountering a class assignment that has gone badly awry. I think your policy proposal looks like a good idea, and I support it. It's especially regrettable that we are not receiving more well sourced, thoughtful edits to psychology articles here, as most of those articles badly need better sourcing and more coherent editing to represent current established knowledge from a neutral point of view. Keep up the good work. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk, how I edit) 22:35, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Dear Colin,

I am not sure if you will have the chance to read this, or if you'll have a moment to respond, but I am a student in the University of Toronto and specifically one of the 1700 psychology students mentioned in the article. However before I go any further, may I express my most sincere and deepest appologies to you and everyone involved. I will not try to make excuses for my actions, nor will I try to do so for my fellow students as I do not speek for them. I realise (and no doubt others will too) that what we left behind was unbecoming of a sutdent at U of T. And most importantly, I realise that we did as future scholars was wrong.

I know that you and you colleagues are considering taking extreme measures to ensure the content of Wikipedia stays secure as a responce to our actions. Though I can understand where you are coming from, I do not believe that this will solve any of your problems and will only make things worse in the long-run. I see this situation as a systemic error on both of our sides, but as a first year student I have very little educational and social clout to enforce my statement. I am asking as both an avid reader of Wikipedia and as a lover of knowledge, please do not black-out our privaleges to use and edit articles. Let us both use this experience as a steping stone to learn how to go about doing this in a constructive manner benefits Wikipedia and my school.

Looking to make this a better place,

CivCodex CivCodex (talk) 01:49, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. We have no issues with people who are interested in Wikipedia coming to edit Wikipedia. What seems to be the issue is when we have a large group of students editing Wikipedia not for the love of knowledge but simply for marks. These students do not stay around and seem to plagiarize at a high rate. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:25, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Have replied on your talk page. Colin°^Talk 07:20, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I'd like to advertise this (very draft) proposed new policy: Assignments.

Comments please. Colin°^Talk 07:21, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

I think the central dillema is this: a student could make a poor-quality contribution that harms Wikipedia but then recieve partial or full credit. If the grading rubric was accurate, a student would receive 0 or negative credit. My personal solution has been to engage with professors to try and influence the assignment, increase their Wikipedia knowedge, and improve the grading rubrics themselves. I'm fairly proud of Education Program:Saint Louis University/Signal Transduction (SP13), which I helped write. You might want to ask User:SlimVirgin to comment on your draft. They were very vocal on the ENB some months back. Biosthmors (talk) 18:11, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

There should also be some sort of policy re: how the community reacts to profs and students. The active community is more likely to be aware of and act on policies, in the first place; and we are often more unkind than necessary, in the second.

I proposed an alternative idea on the assignments talk page - as an example of the sort of implementation that I would hope is compatible with any policy we adopt. – SJ + 23:33, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

		The Barnstar of Diligence
		Thank you for all your attention and work related to WP:ENB-ish issues. They help protect the quality of Wikipedia. Biosthmors (talk) 18:02, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

		The Copyright Cleanup Barnstar
		Thank you for your focus and for drawing attention to the copyright issues raised by that poor-quality assignment. Biosthmors (talk) 18:02, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks very much Biosthmors. Cheers, Colin°^Talk 08:20, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Hi Colin. I was wondering if you could take a look at the talk page for the above mentioned article. I have been, along with some others now and then, arguing with an IP about this theory. That said, there seems to be a review now that might satisfy WP:MEDRS. I am not sure I could neutrally add any info, as I have been arguing about this stuff for so long. I would appreciate it if you could take a look. I will also ask SandyGeorgia to take a look. Thanks! Dbrodbeck (talk) 17:48, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

I see the discussion on the article talk page has been closed. I'll reply on Anthony's talk page, where you both have been chatting. Colin°^Talk 19:28, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks so much. 20:44, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

I am very sorry; I thought I had replied. I got the e-mail, and, although cleanup will likely take a while, I'll have it ready ASAP. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 00:04, 23 April 2013 (UTC)