Hello!

I have been a Wikipedia assistant to a course in my local university for three years. The course is mandatory for third year students of natural and technological sciences (from computer technology through physics to biology) and is mainly about written expression in Estonian language (our native language) - how to write well about their respective fields and topics of research and study.

One of their assignments is a Wikipedia article. Minimum length is 8000 characters (incl. spaces, excl. references, 4 or 5 pages on paper). Yes, characters, not bytes. They write their articles first in sandboxes. Guidelines are given to them how to write good wikiarticles and they should write well sourced and accurate texts with all necessary wiki markup. Then some assistants like me read their articles and give them feedback mostly on what is the goal and purpose of the course - if the text is understandable and language is correct. If they spot any dubious content (copypaste, errors) or unsourced paragraphs, they point it out too. Then students correct their articles.

The minimum limit of characters is only there to give students somewhat equal assignments so they know how long is expected. I measure it by highlighting the text and copying it to Word which counts characters for me. Some students write barely enough and their text usually needs some more work anyway so I encourace them to add 500 characters or whatever is lacking. Most write a few thousand characters more, but I tell them to not exceed the minimum length too much and to concentrate on the quality.

As they are studying technology and sciences, they are not really used to paying attention to language so sometimes they are grumpy and unpatient about me demanding understandable and well written text, but Wikipedia is really the best way to teach them that not only their fellow scientists need to understand them.

2014-02-01 James Salsman <jsalsman@gmail.com>:

I thought we created earlier rubrics in 2009, but not sure what got pushed out to ambassadors.

On Feb 1, 2014 9:41 AM, "Juliana Bastos Marques" <domusaurea@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank, Jon. I'd also love to know about the requirements of other Wikipedias, they may not be the same.

James, I believe we always have some room for experimentation in grading. Countries are different, schools are different, courses are different, goals are different. Guidelines are great (aren't we just creating them right now?), but they should not be rules, IMHO.

Juliana.

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 8:12 PM, Jon Beasley-Murray <jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca> wrote:

Juliana:

This question has been asked a lot on wiki. The following link might help a first stab at an answer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles/By_length

Though I'm not sure how accurate the list is, as #4156 on the list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Irene_%282005%29) as well as #4160 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Brown_Saw_the_Baseball_Game) both appear to be rather shorter than #4161 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boletus_luridus).

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_articles/Archive_6#Which_is_the_SHORTEST_Featured_article_.28by_length.29.3F
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_criteria/Archive_7#Article_length_criteria
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates/archive24#When_an_article_simply_has_no_more_information...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates/archive31#Notability.2C_etc
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates/archive31#Followup_on_500-word_FACs

and so on.

Take care

Jon

On Jan 29, 2014, at 3:31 PM, Juliana Bastos Marques <domusaurea@gmail.com> wrote:

> If you allow me, perhaps I should rephrase:
>
> ***After all requirements of quality are assessed and evaluated***, what would you consider a reasonable number for the minimum of bytes in the final article?
>
> Indeed, maybe this question overlaps with some of the criteria for GA/FA, but I also suppose they are not the same for all Wikipedias.
>
> Juliana.
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 9:01 PM, Jon Beasley-Murray <jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca> wrote:
> Well, a little unfair perhaps. The education program was not a single thing, and I certainly acknowledge your own valuable contributions throughout, that consistently ensured (and continue to ensure) a more thoughtful approach to counteract the editcountitis and bytecountitis that was prevalent in other quarters. Still, there's no denying that the focus on quantity (seemingly at the expense of quality) has always been, and continues to be, one of the major sources of tension between the education program and the Wikipedia community. Hence there is good reason to think and talk in other ways about how to assess and encourage student work.
>
> Take care
>
> Jon
>
> On Jan 29, 2014, at 1:23 PM, Sage Ross <sross@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Jon Beasley-Murray
> > <jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> In short, focussing single-mindedly on bytes contributed (as the WMF has repeatedly done in the past) in counterproductive and goes directly against Wikipedia's own criteria for what are (rightly) valued as its most important and valuable contributions.
> >>
> >
> > Jon, I think you're being unfair here. Despite being much harder to
> > measure, quality has been part of WMF's education programs since the
> > beginning. During the Public Policy Initiative, we created a system
> > for quantifying article quality (and how the work of student editors
> > impacted it) that was directly based on WP:WIAFA [1].
> >
> > It should be uncontroversial to say that what we -- and by "we" I mean
> > both WMF and the editing community -- want is large quantities *of*
> > high quality content. From what I saw, the leaderboards were pretty
> > effective at motivating a handful of most involved classes during the
> > Public Policy Initiative -- classes with instructors who were the most
> > into the goal of improving Wikipedia -- and for those classes, the
> > quality was also high. For the classes that were doing lower quality
> > work, from what I remember they were also the ones that did not take
> > an interest in the leaderboard. (I also suggest that the Pune pilot
> > would have gone just as badly with or without leaderboards; counting
> > bytes was not among its critical problems.)
> >
> > (I agree that, for evaluating an individual student's work, bytes
> > added is not a great metric, and in general there are some dangers to
> > incentives based on quantity of text.)
> >
> > [1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Policy/Assessment
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Education mailing list
> > Education@lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
>
>
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