The contributor undertaking, the rules for working in real communities, and the School's Continuity of Service policy.
Policies and support#
This course sends students into communities of real people who did not sign up to be coursework. Most of what follows exists because of that.
The contributor undertaking#
You sign this in week 1 and it binds for the semester. It is four clauses.
- You contribute in good faith, for the project’s benefit, not for the mark. An edit made to have something to log is vandalism with a bibliography. If a week goes by with nothing your project genuinely needs, you log the week as empty and say so.
- You disclose that you are a student when asked, and volunteer it where the community expects it. Some projects require a declaration on your user page; some do not care. The norm map you build in week 2 tells you which yours is, and getting it wrong is the first thing that will be held against you.
- You do not experiment on people. No deliberate rule-breaking to observe the response, no test vandalism, no baiting a moderator to generate material for an assessment. The course sandbox exists for anything you want to try that a real community would have to absorb.
- You clean up after yourself. If your contribution is reverted, you do not leave the talk-page thread unanswered because the marking week has ended.
Breach of clause 3 is academic misconduct and is treated as such. Breaches of the others are usually a conversation.
Writing about living people#
The Conflict Autopsy asks you to reconstruct a real dispute. The people in it are alive, searchable, and in most cases identifiable by username even if you do not give the name.
Write about conduct in the record, not about character. “Their third revert came ninety minutes after the talk-page reply” is a finding; “they were clearly acting in bad faith” is a claim about a person’s interior you cannot source and will not be marked kindly for. Use the name the project uses. Do not cross-reference a username to a real identity that the person has not linked themselves, and do not contact anyone in your autopsy for comment — you are a student with an assignment, not a journalist with a duty, and the distinction matters to the person receiving the message.
If a subject asks you to take something down, tell Prue before you reply.
Machine assistance#
You may use whatever tools you like to draft your own submissions, and you will be asked to say which and where. This is not a concession; it is consistent with the position the course argues in week 11.
What you may not do is put generated text into somebody else’s project without checking every claim in it against the project’s own standard of evidence. That is not a course rule. Wikipedia, OSM and most repositories have arrived at versions of it themselves, for the reason week 11 sets out: producing costs seconds and assessing costs a volunteer twenty minutes, and the bill lands on somebody who is not you.
Disclosed assistance is fine. Undisclosed generated content in a real community’s queue is a breach of clause 1.
Extensions, late work and missed shifts#
Written work: extensions are arranged before the deadline, by email to Prue, and are routinely granted. Late work without an extension loses 5% of the available mark per day.
Shifts are different, and the difference is the course’s whole argument. A missed written deadline costs you marks. A missed shift costs somebody else their evening, because the queue does not clear itself and the next person on the rota inherits it. This is why the week 9 rota names a cover for every slot before anyone needs one, and why using that cover — in advance, in writing — is evidence of competence rather than of unreliability.
Continuity of Service#
The School of Invented Disciplines requires every student holding privileged access on a School system to file a handover note before relinquishing it, under the Continuity of Service policy (SlopU Pol. 4.11). In this course that means the week 12 handover, and it is a requirement rather than an assessment item: the sandbox passes to the following year’s cohort, and an undocumented rule is a rule the next cohort will enforce without knowing why.
The policy was drafted in 2024 by a member of staff who has since left the School without filing one.
If the work affects you#
Moderation queues contain the things that were removed from communities, which is to say the worst of what was submitted to them. The course sandbox is small and the cohort is writing its own rules, so the exposure is far below what a real queue involves — but week 8 onwards is not neutral material, and the research on people who do this work professionally is unambiguous about what sustained exposure does.
You can rotate off a queue at any time, without explanation, by telling your Shift tutor. It is not marked against you; it is the rota working.
The University counselling service is available to all enrolled students, and Prue and Ren will both tell you, at some length, that they wish something like it had been available to their own mod teams.