

Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate - elect_engineer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Class_of_1700_  students_fill_Wikipedia_with_plagiarism._Response_from_prof_is_accusation_of_illegal_behaviou  r_by_editors
Professor Steve Joordens of the Psychology Department at University of Toronto Scarborough&#60;p&#62;has 1700 students fill Wikipedia with plagiarism so he doesn't have to grade papers. When&#60;p&#62;caught, he accuses Wikipedia of illegal behaviour.
======
rm999
Wow, that's an absurdly misleading headline.

Here's the editor's analysis:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psychology,_2013)

I see 16 cited cases of supposed plagiarism. How did we go from 16 cases to
claiming 85% of people in a 1700 student class are plagiarizing? No offense to
the submitter, but I feel these kinds of things are best submitted after
someone reasonably objective distills and summarizes the issue. Devoted
wikipedia editors can be somewhat dramatic about things, so in cases like this
I prefer to see other points of view.

~~~
ryanholiday
Right, this thread should just be deleted until someone writes a story about
it. The page is unreadable--like most of Wikipedia's talk pages...and then
they wonder why normal people don't participate.

~~~
vacri
You make it sound like 'normal' people discuss things in a calm manner and are
never affected by things like tunnel vision, irrationality, or ignoring the
other person while waiting for your turn to speak.

------
_fs
First of all, misleading title. The professor simply offered student extra
credit to add a sentence to a psychology article of their choice. The sentence
is supposed to include references and is not supposed to be plagiarized.

I know this is beating a dead horse, but I get really sick of hearing about
abuse from Wikipedia editors who have gone power-mad. Edit-wars, blacklisting,
and more is an ongoing state of affairs on the site. The fact that they are
considering blocking the campus and a large chunk of the surrounding area from
editing wikipedia in order to punish the professor is just stupid.

I understand that editors put a lot of time in cleaning up wikipedia, and that
is great. But wikipedia is a system designed for public use, and that use
includes editing and updating articles.

The problem that they have found themselves in now is that articles slowly
evolve their own individual bias based on the managing editors point of view.
New users and counter arguments are lost, as it's rare to find someone to edit
an article that has the patience to start an edit war with a moderator who has
babysat an article for years.

~~~
swang
I'm not sure if you read the same Wikipedia page I did. This isn't a turf war
issue. A professor has been asked by editors to tell his students to stop
editing Neuroscience/psychology articles because they are terrible edits that
are unreferenced and plagiarized. This is bad because it opens up Wikipedia to
liability. I haven't dug too much in but it seems like the Professor is
brushing it off and refusing to really help that much which is why they are
contemplating banning the entire schools IP range. It has to be really bad if
they are even contemplating that point.

~~~
_fs
It's really not surprising that the professor reacted the way that he did. His
intentions where basically to improve wikipedia articles in his field through
a group effort by his students. Instead of praise and thanks from the
wikipedia editors, he was ostracized and rejected. I'd wager this entire
situation could have been averted if the editors initially reached out to the
professor in a more positive way.

~~~
swang
They did, see:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WoodSnake#Copyright_v...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:WoodSnake#Copyright_violations)

That was from last year.

This year there was no notice because apparently he decided to not publicly
announce he was doing it again this year and it took them some time before
they realized what happened. It seemed that he didn't like the fact that
people were pointing.

I can't read through everything so I may have not been following everything
correctly. This is what I've extracted about the situation by gleaning
information off the various pages talking about this.

------
lolcraft
The submission is great, but "Professor tells 1700 students to fill Wikipedia
with plagiarism" is a bad title. The professor didn't tell those students to
_plagiarize_. A better title would be something like "Professor tells 1700
students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate".

~~~
vickytnz
Yeah, the official title on Wikipedia (or at present is) "Class of 1700
students fill Wikipedia with plagiarism. Response from prof is accusation of
illegal behaviour by editors" link:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Class_of_1700_students_fill_Wikipedia_with_plagiarism._Response_from_prof_is_accusation_of_illegal_behaviour_by_editors)

If you read through the information, the story appears to be : prof assigned
wiki edits to class, wiki find the class do more harm than good and ask prof
to stop, prof does it again the next year anyway.

Basically this is a 'friends don't let friends assign their students wikipedia
editing'!

~~~
hkmurakami
Thanks, this summary was extremely helpful since I didn't want to read the
gigantic wall of text in OP and the title, no matter how I tried to parse it,
didn't give me enough information!

------
lancewiggs
It's worth reading through the discussion by the Wikipedia admins.(1) I'm
disgusted.

The idea that it's a fantastic thing that a large class of students are
invited to participate in Wikipedia occurs to only one admin, while the
general reaction is to call the professor, his boss or to create a bot to stop
this happening. It's knee jerk, petty and power crazed. Read elsewhere and see
their instinct to block, their lack of knowledge about basics like Twitter and
HN (perhaps they could look it up), and general juvenile behaviour.

And the accusation of 85% plagiarism stands essentially uncontested.

The Wikipedia editors have utterly destroyed the pleasure of creation that
Wikipedia used to give us all. Their own biased perspectives and petty games
risk destroying the usefulness of Wikipedia itself. Outsiders are treated like
enemies, and extrapolating all of this leads to a desperate ending.

Leadership is required.

(1)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Class_of_1700_students_fill_Wikipedia_with_plagiarism._Response_from_prof_is_accusation_of_illegal_behaviour_by_editors)

------
fnordfnordfnord
"Since Joordens won't release the class list..."

A professor giving a list of students' names to the public would be illegal in
the US. I'd expect that to be true in Canada as well.

~~~
GabrielF00
He isn't being asked to give out the student's names. He is being asked to
give out the student's Wikipedia usernames so that Wikipedia editors can see
what edits they are making and correct any problems. The students or the
course staff can choose usernames that have no relation to their real names.

~~~
DanBC
That's still personal information. It'd be illegal in England. I have no idea
what, if any, privacy laws the various US states (or Canada) have.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
FERPA <http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa>

I can't give information that would identify a student or allow someone to
make direct contact without the student's prior consent.

~~~
GabrielF00
If that's the case, then obtaining the students' consent to release their
Wikipedia username (which could be a random string of characters with no
identifying information) needs to be a precondition of the students'
participating in the assignment.

If a professor has 1700 students start editing Wikipedia and 85% of them are
plagiarizing, that's a huge burden to place on the Wikipedia volunteer
community to clean up. There are a limited number of volunteers who handle
copyright and plagiarism issues and it is unfair for a professor to increase
their workload without giving them information about which users are making
changes that need to be scrutinized.

The problem here is that the professor has refused to engage the Wikipedia
community and has, in his own words, gone underground.

~~~
illuminate
"obtaining the students' consent to release their Wikipedia username (which
could be a random string of characters with no identifying information) needs
to be a precondition of the students' participating in the assignment."

Why?

"If a professor has 1700 students start editing Wikipedia and 85% of them are
plagiarizing"

This is still a number pulled from the air.

------
saintx
A potential solution to their problem is to establish a WP editing aberration
detection mechanism, which would run quietly all the time and establish
statistical baselines for editing frequency, and recognize when an unusually
large number of edits from a geographical area or maybe CIDR block are coming
in during a short period of time. This would help them automatically identify
cases where a professor tells a couple of thousand students to make updates
without supervision. Maybe correlate these with accounts or IPs that have few
prior edits. This could then raise some sort of quality control flag on the
edits and simplify the process of reverting the topics.

I shudder to think of what the Wikipedia-editing analogue of a global DDOS
attack would be.

~~~
rhizome
Does any of that detection mechanism exist already?

~~~
aaron695
Most of wiki is patrolled by robots, I'd image if it was useful it would.

I'd see natural disasters possibly false positiving compared with turf wars
between groups/countries after a flare up being the main reason you'd do it.

I think professors asking students to edit would be rare enough not to make it
worth while.

------
alexchamberlain
Bloody good assignment if you ask me. Ok, need to improve the teaching and
editors need to get off their high horse (again), but the principle is sound.
It could substantially improve some articles.

~~~
DanBC
Frustrating that no-one in the WP thread bothered to link to the right way to
do it:

([http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Progr...](http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program))

> The idea behind the Wikipedia Education Program is simple: Professors around
> the world assign their students to contribute to Wikipedia for class
> assignments.

> Wikipedia is being used as a teaching tool in education around the world
> (see a list of programs). The Wikimedia Foundation currently runs four
> programs: Brazil, Canada, Egypt, and the United States.

> In each country, volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors assist professors as they
> assign their students to contribute to Wikipedia on course-related topics.
> The Wikimedia Foundation started the program in the United States in 2010,
> Canada in 2011, and Brazil and Egypt in 2012. More than 3,500 students have
> participated in the Wikipedia Education Program around the world, adding the
> equivalent of 20,000 printed pages of quality content to more than 6,000
> Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.

~~~
alexchamberlain
Thanks for posting this; as you said, there was no indication whatsoever in
the thread that there was a correct way to do this.

------
swang
So I have looked at the complaints. If you look at the Edit History of the
following articles:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Axon&action=hi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Axon&action=history)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Insomnia&actio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Insomnia&action=history)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Action_potential&#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Action_potential&action=history)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cerebral_hemispher...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cerebral_hemisphere&action=history)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Corpus_callosum...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Corpus_callosum&action=history)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neurogenesis&a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neurogenesis&action=history)

Basically look for any name in red, which is a high signal for a new editor
who hasn't put in much time, and look at the revert edit above it, then click
on the "prev" link to see what edit a Wikieditor reverted.

Essentially a lot of stuff the students are putting in are probably facts and
may be true. However the Professor has essentially failed to teach the
students how to put these "facts" in Wikipedia.

------
georgemcbay
Probably a drop in the bucket compared to Stephen Colbert goading his watchers
to edit silly things into wikipedia.

~~~
rohansingh
Actually, no. When Stephen Colbert asks his viewers to edit some article, it's
fairly simple to lock that single article. Any collateral vandalism is easily
reverted.

The problem here is much more insidious: hundreds of articles are being
edited. Furthermore, though the edits are of low quality and often
plagiarized, they are not so obviously vandalism that bots or editors can
instantly revert them.

------
elect_engineer
Interesting PR spin...

"...the new course called Wiki Scholar, designed by psychology professor Steve
Joordens, who believes that by learning to write and rewrite research until it
makes sense to the wider Wiki world, students are forced to grasp ideas more
deeply — and produce research that is useful..."

[http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2012/07/23/wiki...](http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2012/07/23/wikipedia_course_gets_students_research_online.html)

"Cognitive psychologist Steve Joordens, from the University of Toronto
Scarborough in Canada, believes the APSWI provides students with effective
practice for solving real-world problems. 'You can do it in any class,' he
said. 'It’s really a good thing to enhance deep learning skills and another
tool we can use to keep our students in the mental gym.'"

[http://dev.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/o...](http://dev.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2012/july-
august-12/papers-with-a-purpose.html)

"Using Wikipedia in a Mega Classroom: A 1,700 Student Case Study

Steve Joordens, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada

Students in our Introductory Psychology mega-class could earn bonus marks by
signing up to the APS Wikipedia Initiative and making minor edits to two
psychology-related Wikipedia entries. We describe our implementation of such a
large scale assignment and report data depicting the rate of participation,
the quality of the edits, and the larger impact on both students and Wikipedia
Psychology content. We also highlight some of the difficulties we initially
encountered and our attempts to minimize them in efforts to hone the 'many
small edits' approach to answering the APS Wikipedia Initiative."

[http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/2012-w...](http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/2012-wikipedia-
symposium)

------
ryanholiday
Aren't a good portion of Wikipedia edits plagiarism regardless?

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drcube
What's wrong with plagiarism?

~~~
teeja
It's because WP is an encyclopedia, not a bulletin board.

If people aren't literate enough to understand text well-enough to restate it
in their own words, do you really want them adding that text to WP? It may be
obviously wrong, it may be misleading, it may be off-topic or not fit
logically into the surrounding text, etc. A copy-pasted "encyclopedia" would
be an ugly mess. I frequently find a sentence or paragraph just tipped in
somewhere that's in the wrong place. That's a collage, not an article.

------
qompiler
only crazy people study psychology

