Wikipedia talk:Schools/Teachers' Guide

• Individual student usernames - This is not recommended as this gives the least control over edits made by students.

Surely a teacher can keep a tab on the submission by all his/her students if they have different usernames? In fact, if you use one name for the entire class, it's impossible to tell which student made an inappropriate edit. Separate names would allow blocking one student without wasting the lesson for the others.- 131.211.210.16 12:46, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

If thirty students create user accounts, it would take the teacher a lot of work to check each users' contributions. Billz (Talk) 12:53, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

• Yes, the IP address is shared, in a class.-- Tdxiang 09:29, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Actually some schools use a range of IPs, allocated on startup. But if we block one, we could take out up to half a class. Archer7 - talk 12:39, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Added a section about notifying admins so we can be ready to assist users/remove all their vandalism/remove the names and addresses of all their friends. I think this could only work if admins are around to keep this as safe as possible. Archer7 - talk 14:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I think we should also say somewhere about administrators not being official staff or something like that. Basically, don't give out the names of all your students to someone just because they are called an administrator, they're the same as all the other users. But I do want it to say that administrators are the people you should go to if some personal info is posted, even though that is sort of a contradiction. Archer7 - talk 14:31, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

Complex tag

This page is tagged as not using Simple English. It's true, but it's target audience is teachers in English speaking countries (or so I thought anyway). Does this need to be simplified? Archer7 - talk 17:37, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Added 2007 Wikipedia Selection for Schools which seems relevant and I guess this self reference must be ok on this page. --BozMoBozMo at En 08:27, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Through a class username - account sharing

"This is recommended as this gives you most control over the contributions made by your class...etc". This is what we'd classify as account sharing, which I don't think we allow, correct me if I'm wrong. ס ^Talk 11:40, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Some comments

• If the teacher has a named account giving rollback for the duration of the project can/should be discussed
• In my opinion, the "best" solution is either using no account at all (and being able to identify contributions through the IPs of the school) or to have one account per (group of) students; Ideally we want to avoid the situation of "account sharing" as much as possible - account sharing makes it impossible to assign responsibility.
• I think students can be motivated by the fact that if they do good work (on a verifiable, notable subject) there is no reason at all to delete their work.

These are of course just my thoughts. --Eptalon (talk) 11:49, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Some feedback;

• I think giving the teacher rollback could be a good idea. It could speed up undoing unconstructive edits by the students, and hopefully cancel out the need to make a "group account" - I really dislike the idea of that.
• Per above. I think students creating separate accounts is best, policy wise. It also helps the teacher to see exactly who has done what.
• Agreed. It's always disheartening to have your hard work deleted. Knowing that doing good work can be somewhat rewarded is encouraging. ס ^Talk 12:02, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Towards Wikipedia's for every age group

I guess you know these books "My first Encyclopedia". Do you see any way to generate wikipedia's for every age group? Maybe it has to go in combination with wikibooks? The Simple English wikipedia is still too difficult for say 9 year olds. Thy --SvenAERTS (talk) 01:37, 17 March 2016 (UTC) OLPC - One Laptopschool Per Child community.

Ground rules for classroom projects

We have had problems with projects for primary schoolchildren. I want to air some observations and recommendations.

1. Registering teacher(s): registering groups or even pairs of users is not permitted by the basic WP rules. Individuals can be registered because each person is held responsible for their own actions. All pages worked on by pupils should be done on sub-pages of a teacher's registered page.

This covers several issues that have occurred. One is unregistered teachers writing unsigned messages. Another is pupils making changes to pages which are deleterious, and which have to be reverted. We know all too well the difficulty of writing and improving existing pages, and it is no surprise that primary schoolchildren rarely find ways of writing contributions which stand up to a critical reading. So we revert them, and that sometimes causes pain and suffering... That is why it is really essential for the work to be done on sub-pages of a registered user (because in that case the work is not treated as part of the public encyclopedia).

2. Teachers must have some experience of editing WP. It is very clear that some do not. Some teachers have never registered as users, and naturally run into difficulties when managing a project on WP. One area is understanding what a hypertext is in principle, and then how it works on WP. We have a plethora of guidelines, and it is too much to expect anyone to pick all this up on the run. They need experience before a project is planned.

We have had projects where everything that was done could have been done with simple word processing software. So why do it on WP?

3. There is a forgetfulness that WP is already a pretty good encyclopedia which children can use to find information. Projects should start there, because actually putting stuff in is an order of magnitude more difficult. It would be beyond many or most adults.

In some projects, children have written material which was quite wrong, where the relevant WP pages gave correct information. The primary function of an encyclopedia is to get things right.

I may add more thoughts, as I hope others also will. Macdonald-ross (talk) 15:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)