Hi Sonia,
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
You're saying "a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly
terrible". Are you referring to this term (spring 2012)? Currently, we're having
1,300+ students in the program – did you take a sample? (of the students? of their edits?)
I'm asking because it took us actually a lot of time and number-crunching when we were
looking into the quality of the contributions lately. We finally compared the students who
participated last term (fall 2011) with a group of randomly selected newbies. Our
researchers looked into the survival rate of the content, which was actually significantly
higher for the students than for the control group. The results of that research will be
published next week. With that said, if you have a better method of measuring this, I
would really appreciate if you could share it with me (either on or off-list). Ideally, we
would be able to improve our methodology based on your input.
You're also saying "Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising
them". How many classes out of the 61 that are currently participating is it exactly?
Again, if you could share the data with me (
) – I would really like
to look more into this.
Thanks again,
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 16:45 schrieb Sonia Newton-Shostakovich:
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many
classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that
are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally,
I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just
reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to
monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active
ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make
sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm
sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made
any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have
clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when
looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions
conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could
be prevented on the campus side of things: before the in-hindsight cleaning up,
instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by
experienced Wikipedians made compulsory. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through
the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that
profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should
not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia
<guerillero.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we
would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class
sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our
model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target
class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for
the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier
to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100
freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to
learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga
<ezalvarenga(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_p…
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for
WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some
progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance
and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier
than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of
the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
Wikimedia Brasil
Wikimedia Foundation
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