Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate

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

by elect_engineer • 13 years ago

66 57 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

Professor Steve Joordens of the Psychology Department at University of Toronto Scarborough<p>has 1700 students fill Wikipedia with plagiarism so he doesn't have to grade papers. When<p>caught, he accuses Wikipedia of illegal behaviour.

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

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

dal• 13 years ago

Those people are probably too lazy and high to edit Wikipedia.

dasil003• 13 years ago

Yes, but they aren't required to do it for college credit. They're just like any other troll Wikipedia is constantly dealing with.

rohansingh2• 13 years ago

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.

lolcraft• 13 years ago

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".

vickytnz3• 13 years ago

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...

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• 13 years ago

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!

rhizome3• 13 years ago

One wonders why 'elect_engineer' created an account only to submit it with that title.

elect_engineer2• 13 years ago

Because I am one of the Elect of course!

Seriously tho created an account because I never had anything to post to Hacker News before and for the title I just copied the title on the Wikipedia page and cut it down to eighty characters as required by hacker news

Here is a previous assignment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/A_large_scale_studen...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...

Here is the 2013 assignment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WoodSnake

pyrocat• 13 years ago

Except that still implies that 1445 students plagiarized. "Professor tells class to edit wikipedia, results in 16 cases of plagiarism" would be way less misleading.

rm999• 13 years ago

Wow, that's an absurdly misleading headline.

Here's the editor's analysis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psyc...

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.

ryanholiday2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

ch4ch4• 13 years ago

Keep in mind that the discussion page was not designed to be consumed by outsiders and is only for internal discussions.

In fact, they mention near the end of the post that they should lock the discussion before media outlets pick this up and blow it out of proportion.

Too late now! lol

ffk• 13 years ago

That came from Mike Christie. Information was included in the user_talk page where he says 16 out of 19 students plagiarized. That works out to about 84% of known editors from that class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:WoodSnak...

Steko• 13 years ago

Hundreds of students made edits. 16 are accused of plagarism. Which is laughable because this accusation is based on the citation provided by the student's own edit.

The only thing these students are guilty of is bad citation form.

notahacker• 13 years ago

Scanning the cited examples of plagiarism suggests that some of the alleged "unreasonably close paraphrasing" wasn't actually that close, the text insertions were generally short and referenced, and the 85% stat wasn't reflected in the assessments other editors (who picked up other issues) made of other students' work. Are they any worse than the average edits introduced by other novice editors which don't get such forensic scrutiny? Probably not.

If you'd prefer the world's most popular anonymously-editable website to be a carefully-curated collection of articles written largely by experienced editors (which a lot of the experienced editors evidently do) then you'd wouldn't want this class anywhere near it. But I think Wikipedia has bigger problems to fix.

It stretches credulity to suggest it's akin to vandalism.

_fs2• 13 years ago

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.

swang3• 13 years ago

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.

_fs2• 13 years ago

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.

henrikschroder• 13 years ago

> This is bad because it opens up Wikipedia to liability.

What? How?

DanBC4• 13 years ago

I hate WP, and have said so here more than once.

This instance is a bit different. WP recognises the importance of student editors, even as part of student course work. There's an established program to welcome students and their teachers; to introduce WP to them; and to help them through the baffling bureaucracy.

This professor was invited to that program. They declined.

fnordfnordfnord4• 13 years ago

"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.

GabrielF003• 13 years ago

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.

BruceIV• 13 years ago

Although, at least back when I was choosing my Internet handle, Wikipedia recommended usernames that resembled your real name.

DanBC4• 13 years ago

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.

ryanholiday2• 13 years ago

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

saintx• 13 years ago

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.

rhizome3• 13 years ago

Does any of that detection mechanism exist already?

rohansingh2• 13 years ago

As far as I'm aware, no. As far as I know, while IP's are logged, users with the "checkuser" privilege need to manually search and interpret the logs during each investigation.

aaron6952• 13 years ago

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.

swang3• 13 years ago

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=Insomnia&actio... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Action_potential&#... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cerebral_hemispher... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Corpus_callosum... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neurogenesis&a...

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.

alexchamberlain3• 13 years ago

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.

vickytnz3• 13 years ago

As someone who's being involved with wikedit days (e.g. for Women in Science) and also in academia, I think this was a typical 'good idea, terrible execution'. The washup from 2011 noted that not many people did it, and those that did weren't very useful. And probably should be later on in university curricula (sad but true): letting first year undergrads at it is asking for trouble.

alexchamberlain3• 13 years ago

But there's nothing stopping them doing it in their own time. I've edited a couple of articles here and there and, had I have found an error in a Maths article in my first year, I would have edited without a second thought.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Alex_Cham...

DanBC4• 13 years ago

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...)

> 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.

alexchamberlain3• 13 years ago

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

vickytnz3• 13 years ago

That is interesting. Or in particular, when you get to the pages that actually spell out how it works http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Tips_and... (that landing page is somewhat nebulous, it takes a little digging to find the actual content!)

drcube• 13 years ago

What's wrong with plagiarism?

DanBC4• 13 years ago

It's a problem for WP because people are supposed to be able to re-distribute it under the right licence, and slapping copyright restricted stuff prevents that happening.

aaron6952• 13 years ago

I'd image if it's not copyright infringement on the one article across the entire Wikipedia it could become copyright infringement.

teeja• 13 years ago

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.

lancewiggs• 13 years ago

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...

elect_engineer2• 13 years ago

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...

"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...

"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...

qompiler• 13 years ago

only crazy people study psychology

Professor tells 1700 students to edit Wikipedia, 85% plagiarism rate

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