Jutecht

Hello, Jutecht, and welcome to the Simple English Wiktionary!

We hope you will be happy editing here. Some helpful pages to begin with are Wiktionary:Community Portal, Wiktionary:Useful, Help:Contents, Wiktionary:Rules, Wiktionary:How to change a page, and Help:Creating a new entry.

If you want to talk with other members or ask a question, you can visit Wiktionary:Simple talk. Administrators can also help you with more difficult problems. You can also ask me for help. The best way to do that is to leave a message on my talk page. Just remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing "~~~~" (four tildes) at the end of your words.

Good luck and happy editing! Wpeaceout - Chill out and chat 20:53, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Your students

Are Myuki and YuRi your students? If so, I think it's a great idea, but could you please clean up after them? If not, please disregard.--Brett (talk) 21:10, 28 January 2011 (UTC)

Discussion moved from User talk:61.47.105.130

To D. Hurst

Personally, I think it's a great idea for teachers to bring their students here and have them edit, but, (and these are my personal feelings, not rules),

1. The teachers should begin by making an account, introducing themselves, and explaining what they're going to be doing.
2. The teachers should practice and become familiar with the norms and expectations of the community.
3. Students should similarly make an account, and introduce themselves as connected to their teacher. At least, the teacher should ID the IP address from which their students will be editing.
4. Students should be trained by their teacher, starting in the sandbox.
5. The teacher should alert the community before a group of students goes live, giving us some indication of when they will start and finish.
6. Once students begin making real edits, these should be carefully patrolled by the teacher.
7. When the editing session is finished, the teacher should clean up any mess the students have left behind.

Unfortunately, last week, your students (I assume) came in here without really knowing what they were doing and mostly made a mess. We're a small community and are not able to effectively deal with a large number of low-quality edits, so I ended up reverting most of what they had done, a waste of their time and mine.

If you would like to discuss the issue of a collocations section, please do so here.--Brett (talk) 12:48, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

To Brett

I am the Technology Coordinator at D. Hurst school and have been helping her with this project. To your points above

1. I created an account and introduced myself to the community two weeks before students started posting. I even asked questions about uploading images and told the community that we were going to have some students adding value to some of the word entries as a vocabulary lesson. The community seemed to embrace the idea.
2. The teacher, students, and myself practiced and learned the wiki coding in the sandbox area. We talked about expectations and creating content that would help others learn the words as well.
3. All our students did create accounts and are identified. D. Hurst follows all the edits that students make and spot checks them as they have been working on the words. It's becoming increasingly difficult as people are reverting edits faster than students/teachers can check/chat and update the edits. As for IP addresses like most schools we use a Proxy so all edits come from 1 IP address...unless the students decided to work from home.
4. We did an 80 minute session getting to know the wiki, playing in the sandbox and looking at the layout of pages.
5. Students are making edits in and out of class. I think this is a pretty unfair statement. These kids are 17 and 18 years old and even though we're teaching them vocabulary by working with them on these words if they decided to do it not connected to the school they still could. I believe the whole idea of this community/project was to get people involved in creating content together?
6. What makes a community like this great is we're all responsible for the mess...students can help each other, other community members can come in and help with some of the coding. What's frustrating us at this point is community members don't seem to be looking and evaluating the content. They are looking at the format and then undoing the edits. Formatting is a minor fix when trying to create an amazing site like this. If the content is not appropriate, fair enough, but good content is getting undone because undoing is easier than fixing.

Our students have been working for a good couple of weeks now...so last week would have been the 3rd week of this project and we've got a couple more weeks to go.

When we were looking for a community where we could help English Language Students A) Learn English B) Join a supportive community and C) add value back to the world we thought that this community project was perfect. It's sad to see that a site intended to help people learn English won't support these students who are learning English to add value back. Sure edits might not be perfect, formatting might be a bit off...but they are adding value and at the same time learning how to edit a wiki. These kids have a whole life ahead of them and the skill of learning how to edit a wiki now might allow them to add value on other wikis/communities as they grow.

I think what frustrates me most Mr. Brett is that according to your profile you're a TESOL teacher. This is a learning activity and we're all learning together in this project. Personally I think it's great that we have students who are trying to learn English adding value to a resource they can use throughout the rest of their schooling. Jutecht (talk) 01:47, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Hi, Jutecht

I'm very glad that you've finally introduced yourself. I've been trying to contact you for over a month with no response. I tried explaining things to here, but similarly received no response, and I had no way to know whether she was connected to you or not, though gradually it became clear that she must be. I responded immediately to your note about collocation, but you continued to ignore me until today.

With all due respect, your claims above are mostly false. There's no evidence of the practice you describe. You can check the history of the sandbox if you don't believe me, just a few inconsequential edits. Some of your students (I'm assuming they're your students; I still have no confirmation) have created accounts, but anonymous edits continue to appear from User:61.47.105.130, and nobody made a user page until you did today. Nobody told us they were connected to you or to a school. We had no idea whether the students were children learning English or adults training to become English language teachers or something else.

We start out assuming good faith. But when you've simply continued on blithely ignoring efforts to contact you and not learning from any comments or corrections, that assumption starts to go out the window. We are certainly looking at and evaluating the content. I've tried to leave what edits of value there were. But there's very little.

I log in on a Monday morning and there's this big mess. There are copyright violations at method, which I reverted once only to find that Myuki has put them back. There are useless photos that very little relationship to the words. There are unrelated words added to "related words". There are derived forms added to "related words" there are incorrect pronunciations. There are synonyms that are inappropriately rare. There are example sentences that are almost identical to existing examples. The list goes on. These are not minor formatting problems as you would have them. They are a nuisance approaching vandalism.

You say you're checking the edits, but I've seen not a single correction from you. If these are your students, then why aren't you teaching them? It appears that you've even written a book about building communities, so you should know that you can't just waltz into an existing community without learning about the culture and start playing around while ignoring all attempts to communicate with you.

We appreciate valuable edits, but everyone here is a volunteer, and we don't have time to be dealing with people who won't communicate or learn from their mistakes. If you'd like to continue your project, you and your students are very welcome to stay. But you need to do a better job of teaching and overseeing them.--Brett (talk) 20:11, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Ideas and Suggestions

1. If someone would like to Skype with our class to talk to them about proper formatting of the wiki pages we're up for that. We're GMT +7 (Bangkok, Thailand)
2. Our students have been adding some images to pages as research shows that you can learn and retain vocabulary better if you can associate it with an image. We've taught our students to use only Creative Commons images and as they have added some images to different words they are being pulled. I think the community should consider the idea of allowing images that help represent words being used in a sentence.
3. Our students spend one class period a week working on words on this Wiki. The project will be going on for about another two weeks. We appreciate everyones support and let us know if there is something particular you would like the student to work on or correct.

Jutecht (talk) 01:47, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Copyright violation warning

Your students continue to add definitions and examples copied from other dictionaries. Please, be more responsible for their actions or you will all be blocked.--Brett (talk) 12:23, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Can you point me in the direction of which words you are seeing this on? Jutecht (talk)

Thank you for following up. The most recent instances were resident, regulate, and administration. Previously there was method, and perhaps one or two others I can't recall.--Brett (talk) 02:15, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

Kids are going to be working on the wiki today. Let us know how we're doing. Jutecht (talk) 00:32, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Today's changes

Overall, it looks useful. Thank you! There is some confusion between Related Words (e.g., run, runner, runable) and synonyms, which it would be nice if you would correct. Also, is the Mindmap image added to interpretation something that your students created, or is it copied from somewhere?--Brett (talk) 14:45, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Sounds good...yes they are working on the difference between Related Words and Synonyms. The Mindmap images are all student produced. Jutecht (talk) 00:25, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

Good to hear the mindmap images are not infringing copyright! So when can we expect you or them to go back in and fix up edits they made mistakenly changing the "related words" headings to "synonyms" headings?--Brett (talk) 11:06, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

I'm very disappointed to see that the copyright violations continue. I have blocked two users for this: Selina15319 and Number9. It's also sad to see that the previous problematic edits on related words and synonyms have not been fixed. Since it appears that teachers from your school refuse to adequately train or oversee your students, and since this has been going on for months despite repeated requests for you to do so, I would ask that you entirely cease your project. It is a waste of your time and ours. From now on I will simply be reverting any changes by your students that do not fully meet our requirements.--Brett (talk) 11:58, 23 March 2011 (UTC)