User talk:Swim123blue

Hello, Swim123blue, and welcome to the Simple English Wikipedia! Thank you for your changes.

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Good luck and happy changing! Osiris (talk) 10:59, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

A barnstar

		The Citation Barnstar
		Thanks for your involvement in the Big Reference Weekend 2016 Peterdownunder (talk) 09:47, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Hello Self

Hello myself. Are you having fun editing wikipedia? Swim123blue (talk) 16:27, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

User sandboxes

Have you ever asked your students to make a sandbox for their articles. You can make a personal one by using User:Swim123blue/sandbox. That way, they can see their changes. And, their changes won't be reverted. //nepaxt 16:28, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. This is my first school project with students. I'll introduce sandboxes to buffer our edits until we are ready to go live with good changes.Swim123blue (talk) 16:49, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

My changes to the user sandboxes

I looked at all the sandboxes I could find, and made some general formatting changes. I hope my edit summaries explained what I did well enough. I also saw that some of them still need to be simpler, and some needed copy editing for grammar (in one or two cases, significant copy editing). I didn't do anything about that because I didn't know if they're still working on that. I know it can be hard for people whose English isn't the best to recognize what's simple and what's not. If you want, I could fix some of that, or put maintenance tags on the articles saying what needs to be done. --Auntof6 (talk) 05:41, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

1000 thank yous for this help! I brought this to the attention of the students today and showed them how to thank another user for their edit. Perhaps you'll hear from them in this way. I agree that some of the students need to use simpler vocabulary and sentence construction. This is something we've been working on, but not everyone has mastered it yet or will master it by the deadline. Final edits are due this Monday. Some students are still making grammar and word choice edits. I would say if you see the problem still persists after 6 June, please put a maintenance tag on it. Gratefully, Swim123blue (talk) 17:08, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Live updates

I noticed that Fat was updated by one of your students, then the changes were reverted by another editor who explained his actions on the article talk page. Are you checking the students' articles before they put them in userspace? --Auntof6 (talk) 18:29, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes. Each article group has a checklist they need to follow and stop before they add it to the main page. Does this mean that our first-time tries at this are going to be perfect and mistake free? No, these are high school aged English learners who are learning by doing. For this article, I judged that the contributions by the students improved the article more than it made more work for others to fix. I could have been wrong. But we're at the end of our semester, so making all of mcdonald ross's suggested changes won't happen under my supervision. Frankly, I think he was a little blunt in his actions and his aspersions that I'm not doing a good job. This is my first time doing this, too. I don't have much experience making judgment calls about when an article's contents get too far off topic and need to begin a new article. How would you recommend that we proceed? Swim123blue (talk) 20:28, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

That's a good question. I agree that Mac was brusque with his comments. When you look at the big picture, the students' updates are no different than anyone else's, and they are entitled to make them. (The main difference I can think of is that, as far as I know, the students won't be staying around to do more work, so we wouldn't have the opportunity to work with them to help them learn what is needed here.) Of course, that also means that they are subject to being reverted by other editors.

So I guess what I'd recommend is to let the students make their updates and take the chance of their updates being rewritten or reverted. If any of them would like an established editor to comment on what they've written, they're welcome to ask me (although I'm known for pulling no punches when I criticize things).

Aside from that, what did the students think of working here? Did they make any comments about the changes I made? --Auntof6 (talk) 22:57, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

We still have one more week together, so I could make this another learning opportunity. I might reach out to Mac to enlist his help or participation in guiding the students through more edits rather than reverts. I alerted the students to your work of formatting their pages, but we didn't work on it together in class today so I won't know their reactions until Monday. I did show them how to "thank" another user for an edit, so you might get feedback that way. As for their thoughts of working here in WP, I would say that my older students (grade 11, 12) were faster learners and more aware of all the features of the WP community. The younger ones (especially grade 9) seemed overwhelmed and not aware of all the ways to use and act in WP. I'll be doing a post-test and reflection activity with them, so I'll see how their attitude and knowledge of how to use WP has grown in about 10 days. I'll direct anyone who'd like more help to contact you via your talk page. Thanks again, Swim123blue (talk) 03:57, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Intensity level article

Hi, Swim123blue. I don't know if you noticed, but one of the students you're working with created an article that contained text copied from another website (the Mayo Clinic's website). As I'm sure you understand, that is illegal and can get Wikipedia in trouble. I know this class is ending now, but it would be helpful if you can mention to these students (if possible) and any future students that they should not copy text like that. Thanks. --Auntof6 (talk) 17:14, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I saw rus793's comment on her talk page. This student isn't doing it intentionally. This morning I was working with her to remove direct links to external websites that were getting spam blocked. In the text of her article, she hasn't plagiarized any content. I'm not sure how she go to creating a new article page and copy/pasting content from the Mayo clinic. She may have thought she was doing one feature I taught her (citing references with footnotes and internal links), but actually she was creating new pages and external links with the wrong markup code. I'll mention it on our final day next week. Swim123blue (talk) 17:20, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Wiki-edu

I don't know if you are aware of the many ways the Wikipedia community try to help editors and particularly teachers. Wikipedia:Simple talk is a good place for everyone to ask questions. en:Wikipedia:Education noticeboard is mainly for teachers. Mainly for higher education, but probably someone will be very interested in what you are doing. You may even be able to find en:Wikipedia:Education program/Ambassadors to help, if experienced editors live near you. Two years ago I was doing this at a university, though this year I don't have the time. Incidentally, your talk page is better than mine for this discussion, because I do many things unrelated to what you are doing. You seem to be doing mainly this one thing, and if you can persuade others to watch your talk page, they can also participate. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:42, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello

This is a sample message. Swim123blue (talk) 16:42, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi

Hi User:Swim123blue I like the way you wrote your user page, I can't wait to do this wikipedia project.17chseld 101 (talk) 16:11, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Unblock request

Request reason(s):
autoblocked by Auntof6, block ID #42299

Your request to be unblocked has been granted for the following reason(s):
@Swim123blue:This block was because a user using the IP was creating bad pages. The user is also indeffed on enwiki. I removed the IP block. Try again and see if you can edit now. --Auntof6 (talk) 22:43, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

My students are done with their project and I am in the process of grading their work and taking down their school banners. Apparently there's a block on my whole school's IP address which is preventing me from doing this routine maintenance. Can you help please? Swim123blue (talk) 22:35, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you. Perhaps it was another student outside of my class but still at my school. I monitor my students closely and if any error was made, it was more ignorant than malicious. Swim123blue (talk) 22:45, 15 June 2017 (UTC)

We usually only block for malicious edits, and work with others to improve. Some IPs used by schools can be part of a massive system wide network, for example in Australia, whole state networks are in place, so a problem user on an IP could be on the computer next to you, or hundreds of miles away. We appreciate the efforts you make to achieve productive edits from your students. --Peterdownunder (talk) 07:57, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Sizing a video

I noticed your user page changes. Just add a size parameter, like this:

[[File:Editing_basics_-_Talk_pages.webm|500px]]

Hope that helps. --Auntof6 (talk) 04:49, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks very much! That did the trick. I'm getting back to WP after a semester off, so my markup skills are a bit rusty. I appreciate you looking out for me. Swim123blue (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Demonstrating how to use a talk page

Hello, Mr. M. You're an interesting teacher for making us do Wikipedia and leave a permanent record online for others to learn from. Swim123blue (talk) 15:13, 23 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello!

I just found your userpage and didn't realize that you like to swim! That's great. I also like water sports, like water polo. Swim123blue (talk) 18:44, 2 April 2019 (UTC)