Wikipedia:Education noticeboard

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

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Should WikiEd be terminated?

Bluntly there are too many problems with bad student edits not being reviewed by the class teachers or the associated WikiEd. While a small number are good (I once helped a student with an article that ended up as GA), far too many are bad. As examples you can look at the recent discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Community composting, Draft talk:Edwin Samuel Lennox or some of the recent edits by students of Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/York_University/BIOL_4095_3.0_Applied_Plant_Ecology_(Winter_2026); there are too many other instances.

1. Why are novices in charge of teaching classes?
2. What requirements and training is their for advisors?
3. What reviewing is done by the class mentors, as against expecting others to to do it?

As someone who taught at an R1 university for many years, I always accepted responsibility for my class students and PhDs. Currently WikiEd is a drain on reviewers.

Maybe this needs to go to an RfC. Ldm1954 (talk) 09:12, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I have had some years of experience with student editors. Problems left by bad edits are rarely fixed by the course teachers and are left for other, like me, to fix. Graham Beards (talk) 10:09, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I have only 2+ years of experience with bad student editors. When I care about the topic I end up checking the class page then adding all the articles to my watch list and then monitoring them. The most common actions are draftify or revert. The "WikiEd" advisers rarely do anything including not responding to pings. Ldm1954 (talk) 22:41, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

@Ldm1954, in my experience the WikiEd advisers are quite good about responding and getting in touch with professors whose classes are causing problems. But they have to know there's a problem in order to solve it. I notice that this is your first post on this noticeboard. If you come here when you see things starting to go wrong with a class, other editors, including the WikiEd employees responsible for the class, can intervene. -- asilvering (talk) 23:15, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

This may be my first post here, it is not my first ping of WikiEd employees about their classes. My experience over the last years is the same as @Graham Beards and many others (e.g. the AfD discussion and the comments below by @Reywas92). Contrary to the statements by @LEvalyn I have AfD'd, PROD'd or draftified multiple pages or reverted multiple edits for STEM classes. Ldm1954 (talk) 23:27, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I, too, have AfD'd several WikiEdu-related articles. But "several" is very far indeed from "7,500-10,000". -- asilvering (talk) 23:34, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I cannot sort my past AfD's on classes, but I think my draftification rate when new articles are dumped in main by classes is at least 25%. Typically they abandon the draft. Reversion of their edits as violating NPOV, unsourced etc is also about 25%. Of course I only do this in STEM, maybe non-STEM is better. Ldm1954 (talk) 23:38, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Copying my comment from Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Student edits: As a start, Wiki Ed classes should prohibit students from creating new articles. New student editors frequently create articles that are not appropriate for standalone pages as they lack notability or are hyperspecific topics. They are very often written as essays with low-quality writing rather than in an encyclopedic style. They often include plagiarism, off-topic content, and other issues you would expect from inexperienced students being forced to do an assignment rather than volunteering like experienced editors who start with smaller edits at a time. I have see far too many AFDs of student articles that should have come nowhere near mainspace had a responsible instructor or an established editor reviewed them first. Some AFDs of problematic articles include Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Community composting, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Systemic injustice in literature, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Impact of sand loss on sea turtles, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Food waste in Barcelona (see Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/IES Abroad Barcelona/The Climate Crisis - Global Perspective, Mediterranean Context (Spring) and the instructor's other classes for how poor this instructor was at letting his students pick topics), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Environmental sustainability of vintage fashion, and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Native Americans and horses. Edits to existing articles are also often quite poor as well and it would be great if WikiEd required teachers to review students' draft/userspace edits before they go live. Students usually each have their own topics, reviewed by just one of their peers, when they should really be working as teams on topics.
I would certainly support an RFC to instititute requirements that student work get additional review before going into mainspace. Too many instructors haven't contributed to Wikipedia themselves and have no idea how to ensure work meet our notability, style, and quality standards. I'm astonished how bad many students are and I always wonder what kind of grades they get, as some certainly don't deserve a good one. — Reywas92^Talk 14:22, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I see criticisms of the entire WikiEd program appear twice a year as the spring and fall semesters conclude, generally prompted by one or two classes that have failed to live up to WikiEd ideals. Indeed, the last such was mid November, at roughly this point in the fall semester. I think that conversation is worth a read. I'd highlight my argument that there is a major confirmation bias problem here: editors will never notice the harmless students, and may not realise the positive ones are students at all, so it will seem that all student editors are disruptive. But WikiEdu interacts with 300-400 classes a semester, and we do not get 7,500 to 10,000 AfDs for problematic student articles. ~ le 🌸 valyn (talk) 23:21, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I certainly don't think all student editors are disruptive, but I will regularly look at class pages and students' contribution history and also see that many students never actually get their assignments out of draft, or they end up only contributing a few sentences and sources. Many others are simply reverted, without requiring a formal discussion to delete, as most students do in fact choose existing articles rather than new ones. But the bad is often very bad. I recently reverted this awful edit. Luckily I could do that without an AFD but jeez. I wouldn't exactly agree with the OP's suggestion for termination, but we absolutely need better guidelines that instructors actually be experienced with the editing process, encyclopedic style, and key guidelines including notability themselves, and that students' work is better reviewed before it goes live. — Reywas92^Talk 04:51, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Two thoughts: (1) Terminating WikiEd won't terminate irresponsible instructors who bring their students here. It will just remove something we have that can help get them under control. (Nothing's perfect, but WikiEd is actually pretty good.) (2) Never hesitate to revert. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:48, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I've seen plenty of good student edit projects, but they really require a teacher who has an understanding of how Wikipedia functions. Inside my frequent topic area of plant science, I've seen various improvements over the years. Such as with the Miss Kim lilac, which went from this to its current state thanks to the efforts of student editor User:Plantlady890. Silverseren^C 23:52, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

The case for WikiEd's existence is that instructors will likely assign Wikipedia editing regardless, so some organizational structure is better than none. At least we have someone to contact if a class goes off the rails, instead of editors trying to cold-contact adjunct professors to ask if they're running a course. In my experience, I've gotten consistently good help from Brianda whenever I've pinged them about a problem.

That said, I do enough NPP to deeply sympathize with the frustration here. Finding the majority of a given class contributing mostly AI slop, copyvio, and non-neutral OR is very disheartening. I think the quality variance traces back largely to instructors. A non-constructive student editor is at least a contained problem: they almost always disappear after the semester ends. A poor instructor compounds and spreads damage over time. Some simply do not have the competence to be driving a bus full of other novices into mainspace, and that seems like a pattern WikiEd may be positioned to identify and address. Zzz plant (talk) 23:55, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

It still surprises me that we don't seem to have any process for stepping in when educational projects go off the rails, especially those which haven't been formally declared by their tutor.

On the 15-minute city article we've currently got three apparently student editors adding the same kinds of inappropriate and sometimes AI-generated material, a lot of which has been reverted. Beyond a couple of welcome templates, it seems this is expected to be handled by existing systems that would stop any three humans from making bad edits: discussion, escalating warnings, and (if the students haven't moved on by then) eventual blocks or article protection.

When we know that it's an educational situation where those three humans are all following the same poorly-considered instructions from a tutor, we might benefit from a process for shortcutting that and going straight to "your school project is breaking Wikipedia guidelines, please stop working on it and inform your tutor of this message" notices and page protection. Belbury (talk) 08:45, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

@Belbury, I don't understand what you're looking to change here? If you report those projects to this board or to ANI, admins will happily protect the page so that students have to go through edit requests. I've done that for this one just now. You just need to ask. Admins, like WikiEdu, can't do anything about problems if no one bothers to report them. -- asilvering (talk) 16:30, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Also, {{AINBA}} allows you to ping admins wanting to deal with AI cleanup! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:36, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for protecting the article. What I'd look to change would be guidance and warning templates for average editors in handling that. I hadn't requested article protection because I wasn't sure that it was warranted yet, and whether (unlike a regular protection request) it would be fair to factor in there maybe being twenty other students poised to make the same kinds of edits to the same article. I haven't given the students a voice-of-Wikipedia instruction/permission to stop working on their apparently guideline-breaking and undeclared school project because I don't feel that that's my call to make. Belbury (talk) 17:19, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

@Belbury, no need to worry about "voice-of-Wikipedia". Really the best thing in these circumstances is for students to hear from Wikipedians. If you don't want to get into an extended back-and-forth with them, though, you can always drop something short like "Hi, it looks like you're editing as part of a student project. Can you please tell your instructor to make a post at WP:EDUN introducing themselves? Thank you!" -- asilvering (talk) 17:45, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I'd more or less done that, asking them and their instructor to read WP:ASSIGN. (This had no effect.) It wouldn't have occurred to me to suggest their instructor also posts at WP:EDUN.

If badly-managed student projects are a problem, I think it would help to have some clear guidelines on how to handle them efficiently, a canonical talk page template for editors who don't want to open a lot of back-and-forths with a full class of students, and to decide at what point (if any) Wikipedia considers it appropriate to close a class project down and explicitly tell the students to stop working on it. Belbury (talk) 18:04, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

If you warn and it has no effect, you're always welcome to head to ANI for immediate admin action. For complicated stuff, this noticeboard is a good place. -- asilvering (talk) 20:38, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

It looks like this is a perennial issue. I'd love to see some data on if WikiEd editors overall tend to produce poor quality edits, or if teachers respond to issues in a timely manner. Closing the whole program seems extreme unless there is documented evidence of extensive work needed to fix bad edits. SenshiSun (talk) 02:02, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree about data being useful. As one current example of data, I just found two newly created articles in main from Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/Jackson_State_University/U.S._History_II_(Spring_2026). One is a US patent, the other is the person who filed it. Neither has any SIGCOV, both were already tagged as AI, and are now draftified (Draft:Virgie Ammons and Draft:U.S. Patent No. 3,908,633). Since they are the only new pages for that class it is currently a 100% failure rate. (For reference, there are 2 other pages where substantive edits have been made, and on one most have been previously reverted by a different editor.) The responsible WikiEd is Brianda (Wiki Ed), the course instructor is User:Jbhistory who has 9 edits. Ldm1954 (talk) 02:49, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Silverseren. It really depends on whether the instructor is knowledgeable enough (on wiki) to be on top of the student assignments. I'm running a course right now (see above) and nobody has complained about my students even though climate change topic was just delisted a month ago from contentious topic designation. Unlike creating a new article, I go with something small (just one or two edits) so that it's easier to manage. I already did a trial run last summer by asking students to write as if they would be submitting the change, but send it to me by email instead of actually saving the edit. Once the method proves to work, I carry it out this term with actual on-wiki edits. This starts off from screening the topic that students will be writing about (which includes rejecting if it's inappropriate or if I think the page is already in a good condition that students are unlikely to bring a lot of value with their edit). And when they are done with directly editing in mainspace, I don't delegate the review process to another classmate which sometimes has the tendency to rubberstamp their peer's work and not fully critique what's wrong with the writing. I go in, check for close paraphrasing and fix stuff like reference formatting and moving contents to more appropriate page. I stayed on top of the editing so that the issues don't snowball and overwhelm the instructor. I used WikiEd's training module which is beneficial for students to learn about how to add reference. As a counterpoint, I have seen instructors who didn't properly vet student's contributions and let glaring issues slip by. I don't think we can fault WikiEd for this because WikiEd can't control what the instructor does or doesn't do. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 06:03, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Comment I think it is worth looking at the instructor cleanup instructions. It includes the specific, and to me troubling statement:

While it's not required for you to fix your students' contributions yourself, we'd love for you to give it a try.

If you follow the links you will see that the current training page for instructors does not require any Wikipedia expertise.

I think we have to change this. While it might have been relevant in the early days, I feel we have to require much more from the instructors if they want to use our time to help their courses. Remember that teaching is a requirement at universities, and nominally what the pay is for. The time of Wikipedia volunteers is subsidising these classes. At the very least instructors should be Extended Confirmed Users, although this seems too low to me.

Similarly the WikiEd experts should have at least the expertise of a WP:NPP, and probably the same rights including tagging and draftification. I think if they spent some time in the dregs and chaos of NPP they might have a much better feel and be better equipped to handle problems. (I have not found details of what training is required to be a WikiEd expert.) Ldm1954 (talk) 16:14, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

That line from the training for instructors makes me cringe. That's something that would clearly benefit from revision by WikiEd. The alternative would be that the community might enact a policy that requires instructors to do this or get blocked, which would certainly lead to a lot of drama that would be best avoided. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:21, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Or the teacher would cheerfully get themselves blocked, so they can say "See? Now I can't, so I don't have to." WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:45, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I feel like if you're a teacher and you get yourself blocked you probably shouldn't be running WikiEd... Sesquilinear (talk) 02:02, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

There are requirements that WikiEd has in place for the classes it supports, and then there are suggestions. The reason we don't see many classes with like 300 literature students editing medical articles anymore is because WikiEd said "hey we have this great infrastructure you can use, but you have to agree not to do these things that make a mess of Wikipedia". It's also that, and not the phenomenon of instructors having students edit Wikipedia, which you're proposing to "terminate" here. Big issues with classes have gone way, way, down since the pre-WikiEd era (and its early days, before those guidelines/best practices/training modules were fully developed). Long-timers may remember the copyright issues from the Indian program, the psychology and medicine blow-ups, etc. from 2012-2016. These days, student editors make edits that are a bit better than a typical newbie, and come with the bonus of having multiple people you can ping for help. Those people might not always respond immediately, but it's better than the zero people you can ping for help with a random new user. If you make the requirements for instructors to teach above board with WikiEd too onerous, and I'd argue requiring extended confirmed is a totally unrealistic bar to set, the risk is that, at least for some nontrivial subset, you're just turning known students with a support infrastructure into random users with no support infrastructure. If someone is a Wikipedia expert, they don't really need the infrastructure that much, after all. But I agree data is lacking. WikiEd (and not even including all the students below the radar) account for about a fifth of all new active editors on enwiki -- thousands of students editing thousands of articles in hundreds of classes every semester. That is in part why "look at this one class" or "I've found 30 bad articles over the last few years" just aren't that compelling as evidence. It's a good reason to get WikiEd staff involved and have words with the professor (and indeed nobody should be affording students any extra leeway than a typical editor), but it's poor evidence of a systemic problem. On the other hand, I do miss the days when WikiEd posted regular reports bragging about the many good articles students did create. Also not a systematic review, of course, but at least provides a counterpoint to the "I found a few bad articles and/or a troublesome class, so let's kill it for everyone" threads that pop up here once a semester. (disclosure: I'm not uninvolved - I was involved with WikiEd some years back, and included Wikipedia in my classes in the pre-WikiEd era [mostly without incident :) ]). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:41, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I am very confused by your statement that ECU is too high, that criterion is "the account has existed for at least 30 days and has made at least 500 edits". This is really minor.

I also have seen far more than "30 bad articles over the last few years". I would say that of the NPP reviewing I have done in STEM, the number of student articles which require major repair is about 25%. Yes, there are exceptions, and in the past I had graduate students create pages as term pages, all of these are still in existence; I checked them personally. However the problem is real. Typically experienced reviewers in Chemistry/Physics (where I mainly work) repair the problems via PROD/AfD/AfC/Merge etc, they do not raise them here. Classes come up continually on the relevant project talk pages, for instance Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry/Archive 40#Essays for a class project,

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry/Archive 37#Seeking input on a student handbook for chemistry and

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Chemistry/Archive 38#Student projects from UCLA Ldm1954 (talk) 17:16, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

@Ldm1954, extended-confirmed is not "minor". Less than 1% of contributors ever get ECR, and of those few who do, it usually takes them more than a year to reach that point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:00, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I am OK if we reduce the requirement, but there should be something. At least when I was active we never asked an economics professor to teach quantum physics, we always required competence, preferably at the research level, particularly for more advanced classes. I am definitely troubled by the prof in charge having, for instance, 9 edits. Ldm1954 (talk) 14:33, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't know if a blanket rule makes sense. We need someone to know what they're doing, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the instructor. The Wikipedia portion of a class might, in practice but not necessarily visible to us, be led by a Teaching assistant who actually knows what they're doing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:31, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

In every course page I know of TA emails are included, along with office hours and sometimes other social media handles; I have never seen any of this on WikiEd. I have also never seen any TA comments on any talk page. The customers (the paying students) are peer reviewing each other.

From what I have seen the students are poorly trained, and I doubt that there is any record that they actually did the WikiEd training. I am required to complete various safety training modules with quite tough questions; an ex-postdoc got fired from a DOE lab for not completing safety and ethics training. Similarly our undergrads are required to take certain safety training, the grads and postdocs far more. I suggest trying one or two of those at https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training yourself to see how they compare to required academic/company/lab training. Ldm1954 (talk) 17:52, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Maybe you should volunteer to help with one of these classes, so you'd know what you're talking about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:18, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

We used to have regional ambassadors, including myself, who are experienced Wikipedians and act as the go-between person between the instructor and the community, online ambassadors who answered specific on-wiki questions and campus ambassadors who offered hands-on training on campus. While the outreach page still displays the ambassador program, I'm unsure if the program is still active. As for extended confirmed user, that is an insanely high bar to demand. And I don't understand why we're bringing up discussion around safety training modules. Seems like a lot of these points are simply distraction. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 19:18, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

As a clarification about safety modules, that was comparing the existing WikiEd training modules to standard training module that students in the sciences are required to take.

As previously stated, I have no problem with a lower level of expertise expected of the instructor. However, we don't ask a genetics professor to teach a class on Dante’s Inferno. Ldm1954 (talk) 19:28, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Do you have any recent evidence that a professor is assigning students to write topics that are outside of their subject expertise or is this vague hand-waving conjecture? For the BIOL 4095 3.0 Applied Plant Ecology course at York University example that you initially raised, I inspected the entire assignment list since I took conservation ecology for my bachelors and currently working in a position related to one health so I'm in a qualified position to judge. Out of 97 articles listed, to your credit, there are perhaps 3-4 articles that are off-topic (some are borderline like Edward Burtynsky, and some are obviously off-topic like Opium Wars) that I'm not certain if the instructor can meaningfully evaluate off-topic contributions. But this course isn't doing anything much different than what my course is doing right now (asking students to add content and add references). I had to self-teach myself on sudden ionospheric disturbance to evaluate my student's edit. If the best examples you can come up with are from 2015 or 2016 then I don't know why you're so fixated to nitpick every minor blunder that students or instructor make. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 21:32, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I did not say anything about the the topics, I have never questioned the competence of the professors in their areas. The point I have raised several times is the Wikipedia expertise. Having an instructor teach a class where an integral part is writing or editing a Wikipedia page, when there is zero requirement that the instructor has themselves ever done that is. IMHO, problematic.

Please do not keep using the the word you which implies that I am the only editor who has ever had to repair student editing problems. And also please note that I stated right at the front that sometimes the pages are good. An example, since specifics seem to be needed, is Computational chemistry which is both GA and high-importance. After the class the student put in extensive time to work on the page, and it has survived for 2 years as GA (with some additions from various people, which is good). Ldm1954 (talk) 22:01, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Excuse me? I have cleaned up my student's editing problems, including minor ones like these to major ones like these . I have also participated in the cleanup of other classes, including deleting a userpage with reference misrepresentation, as early as 2014. So I politely ask you to stop making stuff up. It's clear, from multiple editors' comments, that you don't know what you're talking about. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 20:34, 11 April 2026 (UTC)

I doubt that there is any record that they actually did the WikiEd training - Again, if you just did some looking around and the systems that you're advocating to shut down, you would see there is. Open any class page and mouse over the "student editors" at the top to see how many students are up to date on trainings. IIRC professors have a more detailed breakdown of who's done what that isn't public. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:45, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

• Support allowing WikiEd to exist Previous coverage - Changing the face of Wikipedia, August 2021.

1. Two possible alternatives are 1) replacing the program with nothing and 2) replacing the program with anything else tried or proposed. I feel that of the Wikimedia Foundation programs, Wiki Education is the most successful, at the lowest cost, by any measure anyone has used for analysis and comparison.
2. WikiEd's mistakes may be visible and detectable, but by all measures which anyone has ever devised, Wiki Ed overall has a lower problem rate than 1) any other Wikimedia outreach campaign 2) general editors who come to Wikipedia without a campaign affiliation. Regardless of whether Wiki Ed is good, it is the best we have ever developed in terms of getting edits with a low rate of problems.
3. WikiEd has been more successful and less expensive in all our success metrics as compared to other WMF funded and encouraged programs. There are reasons why we want a diversity of programs, but if the goal were to reduce errors and increase our success metrics, then we could achieve that by cutting every other campaign we have and only funding Wiki Ed.

All of our programs have problems, but there is consensus that doing programs gives much better outcomes than not having any outreach programs. The Wikimedia Foundation has a strategic role in recognizing when to drop funding to address which problems, in which order. If there is anyone here who wants to pull levers on what the success metrics are and what gets funded, then contact the WMF/ volunteer collaborative team for North America at meta:Grants:Regions/North_America.

Through the WMF's process, it is currently decided that Wiki Ed's problems are a good balance for cost / benefit as compared to every other program where we spend money. Wiki Ed's grant from WMF is small considering that 20% of English Wikipedia accounts get registered through this process, and they have the highest rate of good citation-backed edits with the fewest reversions.

Please reconsider using negativity about Wiki Ed. Their current WMF grant is about $200,000/year in the context of WMF having an annual spend of about $200,000,000. And I highly encourage anyone who cares to participate in the grant discussions - it is unusual and powerful for any organization to take user input in its grants funding process and few people participate in the money discussions. If anyone here would actually join the money conversations then there are so many people who would invite you, meet you, talk to you about whatever you wanted to know. Go up a level from Wiki Ed and look at the other millions of dollars to understand a bigger picture. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:48, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

A Signpost story from August 2021, before the era of chatbot slop, necessarily fails to address the escalating problem we have on our hands now. Universities are literally paying for enterprise access to the slop machine. What are we going to do about students who are primed to edit in a way that is antithetical to our goals? I am sympathetic to the argument that we need something like Wiki Ed because any support infrastructure is better than none at all, but it also looks like we need to draw brighter lines for instructors.

One recent explanation of Wikipedia for outside experts had this to say: One strategy that we wish to caution against is assigning students the task of editing Wikipedia, at least until you’ve been a Wikipedia editor yourself for long enough to know what can go wrong. Over the years, many schools have tried involving their students with Wikipedia. This has had mixed results, and many long-time Wikipedia editors have negative reactions to the idea thanks to its being most noticeable when it goes badly. A student with a shaky grasp of the material, writing out of obligation, without the experience to tell a good source from a bad one, and bringing all the habits acquired from essays and term papers ... we shudder a little just to think of it. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 21:07, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

WikiEdu has done a very good job on the AI front. Far better than anyone could have hoped, honestly. I wish I could find the article that broke down some numbers on the topic, but I can at least refer you to . -- asilvering (talk) 21:13, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

It's here. Students appear to be the only group of new users whose contributions are systematically evaluated for LLM-generated content now. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:16, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Is that true? I've seen a lot of rejections recently. Deb (talk) 13:16, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't know what the current state is, but I know that Wiki Edu was mass-screening contributions from students for LLM use. See https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/29/generative-ai-and-wikipedia-editing-what-we-learned-in-2025/ for more information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:36, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

There are still issues and staff are still reverting a large number of articles for tripping that conservative screening model that they use. Superb Owl (talk) 21:50, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Seconding @Bluerasberry's point about joining the regional grants committees. North America especially needs more volunteers for this work. But yes this is where evaluation of Wiki Ed and their impact on en-wiki happens and where they apply for funding. They are one of the most successful grantees for a reason - they have the most impact of any organization , at least that's funded through North America region. I spent 4 years on that committee and saw their consistent results/reporting year after year. Matthewvetter (talk) 13:47, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

I disagree - I have seen very little evidence of true impact so far and would love to see it if you know where that information is. The impact I see is around superficial growth metrics like # of edits and how important the topics are that they are editing. There seems to be a focus on doing enough to win foundation grants and showing growth but not enough of a focus on quality. I have started a page called Help:Wiki Education to document discussions like these, resources, questions from Wikipedia editors and suggestions for improvement. Superb Owl (talk) 21:49, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

@Superb Owl, I'm not sure why you've placed that in the help namespace? -- asilvering (talk) 22:10, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm boycotting the Wikipedia namespace until we get Visual Editor (unless there is a consensus to move a particular article there) Superb Owl (talk) 22:18, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

I have a serious concern that this new page is competing against WP:ASSIGN. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:21, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Did not know about that! Thanks for passing along and I'll start linking to that page and removing redundancies Superb Owl (talk) 22:42, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Superb Owl, boycott not necessary. Try this link, for example. Mathglot (talk) 19:20, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

• I'll echo what Rhododendrites and others have stated. This is a necessary program. Getting rid of Wiki Education will not solve the problem. For full disclosure, I am a former Wiki Education employee as well. This would have fairly disastrous results. For one, people would still use Wikipedia in their assignments. They aren't going to stop because Wiki Education no longer exists. You would just have a class that you may not be able to identify. Secondly, this would eliminate the course's ability to have a dedicated person assist them. They would have to rely on volunteer editors, who would in turn be limited by their off-Wikipedia lives. They could be helping and then just disappear off Wikipedia for months (or forever) because of said IRL obligations. Having a staff whose literal job centers upon helping students and educators helps relieve things for volunteers because we have someone who will reach out to the students/educators. If one of them gets sick, then another employee steps in. Third, WE does actually try to step in and curtail any problematic editing. When I worked with them, a large part of my job was reviewing student work and trying to step in when needed. Of course it's more difficult when you have a huge amount of courses, but trust me when I say that we were as vigilant as possible. From what I've seen, the current staff is doing the same thing. Finally, I'm a little afraid of how shutting down Wiki Education would be perceived, as it would likely come across as the site telling the educational community that they are unwelcome. Those who are anti-Wikipedia would likely have a field day with this. ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 19:23, 27 April 2026 (UTC)
• (new here) While I understand the concerns, and share some of them, I haven't seen any convincing argument that (1) we would be better off without WikiEd; (2) WikiEd student contributions are a net negative; or that (3) WikiEd student contributions are worse than those from other loose or formal groups of new editors such as rabid fandoms and people attracted to high profile or controversial topics. My first real engagement with WikiEd revealed a useful framework for dealing with potentially problematic student editors with support from responsive staff members. If only every new editor came with this much support! It would be great to see increased coordination with WikiProjects or other collaborations on key content areas but I recognize this would require a lot of work from volunteer editors so may not be feasible. Ultimately, we can't stop faculty from assigning these projects and having a support system and easy ways to identify and track these contributions is to everyone's benefit. In fairness to those who support eliminating or reigning in WikiEd, I have not had the experience of repeatedly editing in content areas that are 'targets' for these assignments. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 00:55, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  Really what we are arguing about is whether Wiki Education should be pushing for growth (quantity) or slow down and focus on improving the quality of the contributions and hold instructors to higher standards. I support Wiki Ed slowing down and retooling all of their metrics to focus on quality instead of quantity.

  I also might be more frustrated than most since Wiki Education has made a push into politics, which overlaps with some of the areas I edit, and have reverted 85% of the content added over 3 articles in the past month. What's left is ok but not worth the hours it took to distill those edits down to something usable. Superb Owl (talk) 06:40, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  So far this calendar year, Wiki Edu has supervised more than 300 classes, in which 6,300 new editors have contributed to almost 6,700 articles, including adding almost 50,000 (fifty thousand!) sources.

  So far this year, you've had problems with most (but not all) of the edits to three (3) of those 6,700 articles.

  You propose them "slowing down". They already spend weeks and months training, whereas the typical newbie only edits for one or two days. What does "slow down" look like to you?

  You propose them "retooling all of their metrics to focus on quality". They are already training new editors (better than we are). They are already checking for LLM content (better than we are). They are already tracking the addition of citations (better than we are). They already tell students to double-check each others' work before adding it to an article (far more pre-edit review than our usual). We already know that their students' revert rates are lower than non-student editors. Students are massively (like three orders of magnitude) less likely to get blocked. So all of this "focus on quality" is already happening, but you want something more. What more do you want? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:45, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  @WhatamIdoing, in short, moving personnel away from recruitment and towards quality control would be welcome. Whether that's better training materials or actually reading what their students are writing before they add it to Wikipedia. Not all instructors do this, but I think they should. Perhaps Wiki Education needs to hire seasoned Wikipedia editors at the end of each semester to help respond quickly to the onslaught of submissions (especially those from first-time instructors or instructors whose classes have not had a great track record). For more specific proposals, please see: Help:Wiki Education. And if you have access to the data on those statistics, I would be curious to see it. Superb Owl (talk) 20:59, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  @Superb Owl, my understanding (WikiEdu folks, please correct me if I am wrong) is that WikiEdu isn't exactly going around trying to recruit new classes. They're contacted for help by the instructors, or sometimes they're called in when a non-Edu class project on Wikipedia is going poorly and we'd like someone with experience to help out. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 21:21, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  @Asilvering, that's a good question but was not the impression I got from reading their Annual report for 2025/26 and seeing their dashboard where all of their metrics also suggest a celebration of growth, which is great so long as there aren't metrics that capture the quality of contributions that might lead to better outcomes in terms of the student and instructor experience as well as the long-term editor experience. Superb Owl (talk) 21:37, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  But WikiEd is the people hired to respond quickly to new submissions and undertake cleanup. ~ le 🌸 valyn (talk) 21:22, 21 May 2026 (UTC) -- Like, that's the noticeboard you're at right now. The noticeboard to take a student-created problem, and make it their problem. ~ le 🌸 valyn (talk) 21:25, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  I think their idea is that Wiki Edu would train people all semester long, and then some additional Wikipedia editors would basically grade the students' work in the last few weeks of the class. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:24, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

  Do you have any idea how small this organization is? I think they only have one person doing anything that could be called "recruiting". A lot of classes either heard about it by word of mouth, or the instructor has been doing it for years. (The metric I'd like to see is a very low percentage of eligible classes not working with Wiki Edu.)

  This "help" page does not convince me that you have enough knowledge to be providing advice to other people on this subject. For example, you complain about duplicate refs. You give a bold-faced link to a section in a guideline that says "Do not discourage editors, particularly inexperienced ones, from adding duplicate citations when the use of the source is appropriate, because a duplicate is better than no citation". You're basically violating that guideline right there by complaining about it. And then the very next paragraph in that same section in that guideline links to Help:Citation tools#Duplicate reference finders, where you will find multiple answers to your complaint that "Honestly, this is something where we should have a tool to automatically detect and merge these references together". I know that Wikipedia:Nobody reads the directions, but maybe just a little bit more reading of the directions would be appropriate, if you're going to complain about long-term, good-faith efforts to improve Wikipedia? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:23, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Undisclosed class at Beloved (novel)

Looking at the history of Beloved (novel), it seems like a lot of new users have popped up in the last month to add material to the article. It seems sourced enough, but at least one edit has been reverted. The users seem to be using their real names, but per WP:DOXX I don't want to go any further than that. No idea of the institution. wizzito | say hello! 02:30, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

I have sent welcome templates to all the users, and asked the most recently active one what institution they are at (if they are OK sharing). Hopefully some responses will come. wizzito | say hello! 02:36, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Forgot to update, but this was apparently an edit-a-thon and not a class. wizzito | say hello! 18:33, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Guidance on current events articles

Should we add guidance to WP:ASSIGN discouraging students from editing articles with the {{Current}} tag for class assignments? Today I saw that a student has selected MV Hondius hantavirus outbreak for a Wiki Ed class assignment. I went to the student's user talk page and saw that the Wiki Ed rep for the class had already left them a suggestion about choosing a different topic, mostly related to WP:MEDRS concerns, which are covered at WP:ASSIGN#Editing medicine and health topics.

I chimed in to add that there are a whole host of challenges to editing articles about high profile current events. These articles strike me as especially poorly suited for class assignments. The frequent edits, constantly changing facts on the ground, and fast-moving talk page discussion make it nearly impossible to do the kind of content assessment and well-planned edits that I understand to be a part of the best assignments. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:32, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Good idea, thanks. Done: . --Tryptofish (talk) 21:58, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Perhaps it could be fleshed out a bit and separated as a brief standalone paragraph to distinguish it from contentious topics. Many breaking news stories will touch one or more contentious topics but many don't and there is a unique set of issues at play even when the underlying subject matter is not obviously "controversial" and doesn't fall into one of our CTOPs. An edit that was perfectly placed this morning can be problematic by lunchtime. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 22:49, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

I worry that ASSIGN is getting too long, so I'm kind of thinking that lots of stuff should be shortened, instead of making anything longer. This could also be discussed at WT:ASSIGN. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:52, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Having just become aware of it today, I tend to agree it's too long but something also feels missing. Looking at the Wiki Ed expert's user talk page today, there were a couple similar cases raised, although these articles had other issues like CTOP so it wasn't an issue of not being addressed by the guidance. I may ponder it and propose something more concrete. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 00:10, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I wouldn't worry about the length too much. By college standards it's light reading. Clarinetguy097 (talk) 16:09, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

I see your change as a further improvement. This separates it from CTOPs and gives a little more information without substantially adding to the length. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:34, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

I like that edit too, and I appreciate the observation about not being long by the standards of college reading assignments. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:38, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

Agree, and just wanted to strengthen the argument with another reason to avoid {{current event}}s, namely, the very high likelihood of experiencing edit conflicts. I experienced numerous ec's editing the MV Hondius article. At times I had to alter my normal editing procedure and rather than edit a couple of sentences in two different sections sharing the same re-usable ref, say, I would do it in two very quick, bite-size edits because trying to do it in one would never stick. That's maybe okay for a senior editor (and still no picnic) but is a mine field for the average editor. New users are particularly ill-suited to deal with edit conflicts much less strings of them that might look like they are doing something wrong when they aren't. Ignoring the ec-resolution instructions leaves clobbered edits behind for other users to find (if they ever do) and clean up afterward. So, yeah, avoiding steering students to current event articles is a great idea, for multiple reasons. Mathglot (talk) 19:20, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Oh, I guess you mentioned that already, as 'frequent edits'; I searched for 'conflict' but should have read the whole thing. Anyway, I agree, and can only underline the point. Mathglot (talk)

I wasn't thinking of edit conflicts specifically, but you're right, these are a special case of 'frequent edits' that can cause particular difficulty. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:33, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Is the other reason that students will be competing with editors to add content? Students need to contribute an adequate amount to get evaluated, but there'll be a lot of other people working too (if the topic is popular enough, people might even be working around the clock). Clarinetguy097 (talk) 03:23, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that was part of my thinking, at least sort of. Obviously every assignment is different and the larger Wikipedia community can't control and isn't responsible for student course outcomes. But most assignments, as I understand it, involve selecting a topic, evaluating the current state of on-wiki coverage, identifying meaningful gaps that can be filled, and making substantive edits to improve the content. A well designed assignment that is well executed probably involves a lot of drafting and review before publishing an edit. Pretty much every step of this will be thwarted if students select a breaking news topic. The current state of these articles is unstable and any assessment of coverage will likely be irrelevant within a few hours. If editors take their time to research and draft contributions, both the article and real-world facts will very likely have changed by the time they go to publish. Even high quality additions often don't survive long or are radically transformed because the facts on the ground change or article content is reorganized. These articles just don't seem conducive to WikiEd assignments given the constant change. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 04:02, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Education financing in <CountryName>

Adapted from a similar post at WT:SPI.

I have noticed a recent flurry of articles or drafts named, 'Education financing in <CountryName>'. Could this be students in an unregistered class? Or is it likely to be a couple dozen users honing in on the same topic for some reason? (Note: This navbox is just a convenient way to list them all here; I am not advocating for creation or use of a navbox like this in articles.)

I know that the 'unregistered class' question is a pretty frequent one at this board, and it would be handy to maybe have a {{FAQ}} that mentioned it, as I forget your usual procedures about how to look into candidate unregistered classes, and what, if anything, to do if it appears to be one. Are there any tools specifically for this question, or how do you proceed, usually? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 18:59, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Mathglot:! These can be classes or editathons; the usual procedure is to try to find out any information you can about where they're coming from. If they are a class, Wiki Education will try to reach out to the instructor if they're in the U.S. or Canada higher education system; if not US/Canada, I can try to connect them with someone more relevant for their context. For an editathon, they can usually tell you who organized it, and that person is a better point of contact. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:58, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

Did anyone figure out if this is a class or not? It seems that some of the articles have characteristics of essays and feature long disgressions on the countries' economies, so the authors probably need help. Clarinetguy097 (talk) 15:36, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Spot-checking just a small handful of them, I had concerns about AI-generated content. User:Gnomingstuff has been involved with that and might have comments, or maybe we should just raise this or link it from the WP:AI noticeboard. Mathglot (talk) 15:50, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

Hi - the AI noticeboard is the best place for stuff like this in general, although if it’s a college class specifically the professors may already be looped in.

I don’t have time currently to look over these, apologies, but maybe people can help there. Gnomingstuff (talk) 16:32, 31 May 2026 (UTC)