On 9 Jan 2010, at 21:14, geni wrote: > 2010/1/9 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com>: >> Thomas Dalton wrote: >>> 2010/1/9 Chris McKenna <cmcke...@sucs.org>: >>> >>>> On Sat, 9 Jan 2010, Charles Matthews wrote: >>>> >>>>> The point (for the guide that Brian and I are apparently >>>>> writing) is >>>>> that "empowerment" is a good buzzword, but there is a small, >>>>> treacherous >>>>> area to explore from a teachers' point of view: accounts for >>>>> minors >>>>> should not give personal details, so a "role account" for say, >>>>> Tynecastle High School, looks more appropriate. But there are >>>>> administrative reefs also, namely the deprecation of role >>>>> accounts and >>>>> shared passwords in general. Something can be done in practical >>>>> terms by >>>>> stating that the project has a fixed term, will be retired, and >>>>> will >>>>> have its password changed by a school staff member. >>>>> >>>> Would not it be perhaps better for the individual students to have >>>> accounts, but under teh control of the school. Perhaps based on >>>> their >>>> school pupil number (e.g. Tynecastle-091 Tynecastle-122) which >>>> means that >>>> attribution for good and bad edits could be given to the >>>> individual rather >>>> than the school. >>>> >>> >>> Yes, that's the usual recommendation. I'm not sure what you mean by >>> the school having control of them, though. >>> >>> >> In the scenario of the school in Edinburgh, a group is told to >> execute a >> certain project on WP. The attraction of a single account is clear >> from >> the point of view of monitoring: a single edit history tells you >> everything. If you have a group editing one page - and I have met >> just >> this on WP, American college students assigned a task of upgrading a >> nominated page - a bunch of people all trying to edit from different >> accounts can lead to edit conflicts, if no worse. >> >> Any account where the email address supplied went to a computer in >> the >> school's administration would be "controlled" by the school, from the >> point of view of resetting the password. >> >> This discussion seems like fine tuning to me, actually; but, yes, I >> can >> see it might be worth going into the issues a little in a guide. (I >> do >> want to be concise, though ... all experience suggests verbose is >> easier >> to write and less likely to be read.) >> >> Charles >> > > Well so far everything you have described would risk getting you > blocked from wikipedia. > > Probably the most important thing to do is to contact > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects > first. > -- > geni
On the narrow point of whether schools or pupils should have accounts, I have come across a similar issue at work. We provide a web service with some similarities to WP, and we started off with company accounts. For security (and accountability) reasons, we moved to giving each individual a user name which can be given access to any number of accounts. The incentive for a business is that they can add or "ban" users from their own accounts without having to go through us (ie they can administer their own users); and also they can monitor usage by each user of their own account, which is a big incentive to do it our way and not to share user names in business. Providing some incentive for people to do it the WP way - which basically could be a similar combination of information and control - is a good way to get schools to do it your way. As it happens, our web service is available to all UK schools at no charge to them (paid for by a charity), so I suppose it has a parallel existence. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
