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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 31 August 2020 and 7 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): KaiAbiola. Peer reviewers: Anonymouse3042, Aarukrish.
Hi Marthasjones and Ian (Wiki Ed). I need to touch base about the editing procedures students are being given (if I gather, they are taking whole entries and revising in their userspace then pasting back in?) because it reverts any constructive intervening changes to the entry. There is also an attribution issue created when large portions is copied out of and then back into an entry. I noticed the infobox was missing because I’m the one who added it but because I don’t know when the entry was copied out, I don’t know what other changes need to be restored. I’m not pinging the student because if this is the assignment, then it’s not their fault, but it’s also not fair to volunteer editors to be left to clean up problems introduced by work that is compensated, either with course credit or salary. Please, could you have students enter their changes one by one, as most of us do, or simply assign another type of assignment (new entries could be worked up in sandbox without generating this problem)? Thank you. Innisfree987 (talk) 19:05, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Innisfree987. So sorry about any issues I may have caused. I'm unsure as to why the infobox was removed. The only sections I contributed edits to was the Later Life, Personal Life, Death, and Legacy sections. I made sure to copy sentence by sentence from my sandbox, but it seems like it got messed up along the way when I was adding citations to sentences that you had already contributed. So sorry again. Please let me know if there is anything else you noticed that may have been slightly altered by the contributions that I made. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. KaiAbiola (talk) 19:22, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
KaiAbiola, thank you for your quick reply! As I say above, if this method of editing was part of your course assignment, it definitely isn’t your fault. It will almost necessarily introduce errors because a wiki is dynamic and can change between when you copied out text and when you pasted back in. Going forward—I hope you stick around and share more of your valuable knowledge!—I would advise only using your sandbox to work up brand-new work (either new entries or totally new passages) and if you’re making edits to existing texts, do that directly in the entry. This also helps adhere to the attribution requires of our Creative Commons license, so you don’t accidentally make the edit history look like you wrote something someone else actually did (don’t worry, I know you def don’t want to do that, I’m sure you just weren’t alerted to that issue). Hope that’s clarifying—let me know if I can answer any questions for you! Innisfree987 (talk) 19:53, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Innisfree987: thanks for the ping. We've tried it both ways, and getting students to draft their contributions in their sandbox is usually the least disruptive. That said, we encourage them to just copy pieces of the article they want to edit, rather than the whole thing, and always re-add things in smaller pieces (to avoid deleting infoboxes, templates and categories). But any general strategy ends up, unfortunately, with specific problems. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:03, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 31 August 2020 and 7 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): KaiAbiola. Peer reviewers: Anonymouse3042, Aarukrish.