On Jul 30, 2012 7:18 AM, "Tilman Bayer" <tbayer(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Florence Devouard <anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
> On 7/28/12 5:58 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote:
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> the Wikimedia Foundation's 2012-13 Annual Plan has just been published
at
>>
>>
>>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:2012-13_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan…
> >>
> >> accompanied by a Q&A:
>>
>>
>>
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_An…
>>
>> The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in
>> Washington, DC, at Wikimania, and previously outlined to the
>> Foundation staff and interested community members at the monthly staff
>> meeting on July 5, 2012. We were planning to publish the video
>> recording of that meeting at this point, but encountered technical
>> difficulties; the video will hopefully become available soon.
>>
>
> Slide 8 : "How are we doing against the 2012 targets"
>
> I was stopped by
>
> "The Global Education Program is now the largest-ever systematic effort
of
> the Wikimedia mouvement to boost high quality
content creation, with a
> projected addition of 19 million characters to Wikipedia through student
> assignements 2011-2012"
>
> OF COURSE, we all know that WMF needs to glorify what it is actually
> initiating/in charge of. And that's fair enough.
>
> But seriously... I would feel fine with us trying to claim that the GEP
is
> the largest system effort to INCREASE the number
of articles. It is
probably
> true.
>
> But we all know that the result is... so and so. Possibly good content,
but
> also lot's of crap being reverted and deleted
afterwards. Claiming it
is the
> largest effort to boost high quality content is
not only disingenous...
but
> I actually find it counter productive and a tiny
bit offensive toward
the
actual
community.
High quality content simply does NOT come from newbie students.
Over the last years, the Foundation has been trying to base decisions
and evaluations more often on objective data and research rather than
on personal opinions and impressions.
Of course, here the term "high quality" does not necessarily mean,
say, featured content (e.g. on the English Wikipedia, featured
articles currently make up less than 0.1% of the total articles), but
instead refers to comparisons with average contributions.
Someone from the Education Program will be able to give a more
thorough overview of the efforts to evaluate its results, but for
example I'm aware of
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fal…
Ive asked for more info at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Education_Program_ev…
. The quantitative method used there has its
limitations, but similar
methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about
Wikipedia in the academic literature.
Do you have links to any relevant studies of the GEP?
--
John Vandenberg