Student Assignment Help

Student assignments can help improve Wikipedia, but they can also cause the encyclopedia more harm than good when not directed properly.[1] Even experienced Wikipedia editors who are classroom instructors have had mixed experiences.[2] Despite the difficulties, successful assignments and classrooms do exist, and this information page is intended to point the way to achieving good outcomes. A successful assignment requires careful crafting and its grading system will be in accordance with Wikipedia needs and Wikipedia norms (known as policies and guidelines). If you have any questions about anything related to student assignments, please ask at the education noticeboard.

Instructors are expected to have a good working knowledge of Wikipedia and should be willing to help address core content policy violations.[3] Each assignment should have a course page, so editors and ambassadors can direct constructive feedback to the right place. The user pages of students should link to the course page and any draft. Instructors should be identified at the course page, and their user page should provide contact details or enabled email. If issues such as copyright infringement develop, contact with the instructor can become necessary.

Established editors should welcome student editors, and students should learn to communicate via the normal Wikipedia channels, such as on article talk pages and user talk pages. If editors contact an instructor, they should try to be helpful. Likewise, if an instructor receives constructive feedback on a classroom assignment, they should be responsive. Improving medicine and health topics often requires particularly careful use of sources. Specific examples of best practices are also shown below.

Good assignments are based on a knowledge of Wikipedia's norms (known as policies and guidelines). When knowledgeable instructors, competent students, and good ambassadors collaborate based on those norms, an assignment has a good chance of succeeding. To keep things on the right track, a grading system and assignment that are aligned with these norms are necessary. Students should be willing to put in the effort to leave a quality contribution.

Students and instructors participating in assignments can feel overwhelmed by multiple policies and guidelines, style preferences, some unpleasant Wikipedians, and coding complexities. Wikipedia can have a steep learning curve, especially when editing in controversial subject areas, or areas related to health, medicine, biology, or psychology (which have their own norms described below).

When experienced editors encounter the results of a poorly performed assignment, they can feel overwhelmed by an onslaught of multiple content or format issues in articles they care about. They might also feel as if they are acting as unpaid and unthanked teaching assistants. If an entire class has systematically failed to adhere to Wikipedia's content policies and guidelines, student work may be reverted or deleted, and it can drive away or discourage existing editors, especially when students do not use talk pages to reachconsensus on disputed material.

Wikipedia takes pride in being "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", and the Wikipedia community is based on volunteers who attempt to follow the norms of the site. When students edit to meet the requirements of a class (which might not align with the norms of Wikipedia), rather than out of a voluntary desire to execute Wikipedia's mission, this dynamic changes. Because of this fact, Wikipedia justifiably expects instructors to take responsibility for their students' work both for the students' sake and for the good of the encyclopedia.