On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 10:12 PM, Anthony Cole <ahcoleecu(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Can anybody point to a source for the 7,000 printed pages of new,
high-quality content during the fall term - particularly the evidence
for the high quality of that content?
Replying on-list since you asked on-list. :) We've done two quality studies
on articles written by students participating in the Wikipedia Education
Program in the U.S. and Canada, one covering the first two terms of the
pilot (fall 2010 and spring 2011) and then again a year later, in spring
2012.
Here's the 2010-11:
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Student_Contributions_to_Wikipedia
Here's the spring 2012:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Article_qualit…
As you might imagine, hand-assessing two versions of an article (the
version immediately prior to the student's first edit and the version it
was at their last edit) is an extremely time-consuming process. Given we
found pretty similar results (the vast majority of students significantly
improve articles through our program), we have stopped doing these studies
because they take up so much valuable volunteer time. If there were an
automatic way to gauge article quality that didn't involve volunteer time,
I'd love to repeat the study every term, but I haven't seen any good way of
gauging article quality that doesn't involve hand assessment of articles.
In terms of the 7,000 printed pages, we use WikiMetrics (
https://metrics.wmflabs.org/) to determine how much content students add to
the article namespace each term.
Hope this helps.
LiAnna
--
LiAnna Davis
Head of Communications and External Relations
Wiki Education Foundation