Hi Samir,

The use of VE may partially depend on the particular wiki involved. Also, we are still waiting on Citoid, which means that we still do references the old fashioned way. We also need to show new users how to create accounts and how to register in Education Extension course pages. So there is definitely room for training new users on Wikipedia mechanics even if they use VE.

In addition to the mechanics of editing, new users need to learn community norms with new users so that they know how to select article topics, how to avoid copyvios and BLP violations, what the 5 pillars are, how to meet medical referencing standards where appicable, how to use talk pages, how to use user and user talk pages, when to use the draft namespace and AFC, what sandboxes and infoboxes are, and how to deal with deletion discussions. Some of these norms will vary by wiki.

We also need to inspire new users so that editing feels valuable. LiAnna from Wiki Ed has some wonderful slides and ideas about that, so you may want to talk to her about incorporating her ideas into a learning pattern.

I would like to be able to cover all of these subjects with new users in one hour. If you can create a lesson plan for this, do please upload an outline and slides to Commons, and create one or more learning patterns. You may want to coordinate the lesson plan development with other people on the WMF education team and in Wiki Ed. There will be a substantial time commitment to do all of this well, so I hope that Floor will agree to support this project with the necessary staff time.

I would like to make use of these resources in April if not sooner.

Thanks very much for your interest. Please let us know if Floor wants to proceed with this project and when we can expect the finished products.

Pine

On Feb 22, 2015 3:33 PM, "Samir Elsharbaty" <selsharbaty@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hello everyone,

Seems that there is a great interest in having a tutorial for the VE especially for WEP workshops. However, as a volunteer Wikipedian, I have always looked at it as a tool that could help with copyediting and fixing typos after a long editing session for example or that would help a new user make a quick change without a need to master the editing techniques. I would have thought like Filip that Visual editor wouldn't need a tutorial. It's just like social media websites that people work on directly and learn by practice. Anyway, sorry Filip, seems the majority looks at it differently.

Would it be helpful if there is a learning pattern on helping with VE? If yes, would anyone of the VE users be able to volunteer for creating it? Also, if another more practical detailed option is needed I would be happy to create a PDF tutorial. It can be uploaded to Commons so that anyone can print and dispense in the workshops as a handout.

Do you think any of those two ideas would help? Do you have other ideas that could be more practical?

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 12:49 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

I am very happy to see such strong interest in VE from the education communitty.

FYI, if we don't hear back about a lesson plan for VE training in the next few days, either in Hebrew or English, I will contact our colleague Michal who is the executive director of WMIL to see if she can provide us with at least a Hebrew version that we can use for inspration.

Pine

On Feb 22, 2015 2:14 PM, "Vojtěch Dostál" <vojtech.dostal@wikimedia.cz> wrote:
I also wondered if there is a VE-oriented training somewhere. It seems there isn't - because VE is in a state of flux.

Because Czech Republic uses VE to train students we are in a great need of such a training, and are currently asking for a small contract to write a simple wiki-based tutorial, mostly based on Wikipedia:Training module for students.

If there is a Hebrew VE training could someone please link it? It would be lovely to see it, at least to get some inspiration.

thanks
 

Vojtěch Dostál

místopředseda / vice-chairman
Wikimedia Česká republika / Wikimedia Czech Republic
http://www.wikimedia.cz

2015-02-22 14:02 GMT+01:00 Leigh Thelmadatter <osamadre@hotmail.com>:
I still do not use VE in my training (despite having 200+ students working on three campuses) because there are too many things it cannot do. I dont have time to constantly play with it to see if it is now good enough to use.  I will likely not use it until it is accepted by the wider community. However, the lack of a viable VE does make scalability very very difficult, especially with older teachers who adjust less to idea of coding in any form.

+1 on the frustrations for those with new accounts. I understand the need for protections with new accounts, but why in the heck does the captcha "error" message appear at the top and the captcha itself at the bottom? Students only see the red "error" and I have to tell them to go to the bottom and its only a captcha.  In addition, because we use wireless with the same IP address, we get errors when I am having a class move text into sandboxes or copy/paste finished articles into the mainspace. Most students cant use the move function as they dont have enough errors. Even if they did, using it would render the sandbox worthless because of the redirect. Add to this trigger-happy bibliotecarios in es.wiki who erase student work with little or no explanation, the last two times being wrongly done. 

Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2015 11:55:31 +0000
From: charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
To: education@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] Editor training with VisualEditor

On 22 February 2015 at 10:33, Filip Maljković <dungodung@gmail.com> wrote:
It is my impression that the VE should be ideally made in such a way that a tutorial isn't really necessary. But I guess we don't live in an ideal world :)

That is the "ideal world according to Silicon Valley", not the world we inhabit as Wikimedians. 

The projects want useful content, and how people write for Wikipedia matters much more than how they do on Facebook. The world of no manuals, no help pages, no support is not one in which we can easily grow our community of productive Wikimedians.

And the way the WMF releases software makes life very hard for trainers. 

It is literally true that you need to check the night before giving a workshop, with a new account, what the current experience for a newcomer to Wikipedia is (capchas, strange messages, moving buttons and all). 

I believe the latest WMUK training leaflet takes the VE as a given. I know their older leaflet on images mentions it, in a way found confusing to a newcomer (as I found - she was a Computer Officer).

Charles 


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Samir Elsharbaty,
Communications Intern, Wikipedia Education Program
Wikimedia Foundation
+2.011.200.696.77

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