Hi Juliana and all! This discussion seems great! As Jami pointed out, WMF does count bytes as a way of assessing how much it has been contributed, as it's hard/impossible for WMF to evaluate quality in every article edited in the education program in different languages.
I do agree that the side effect of it might be a wordy/prolix writing.
But I guess that having a set of criteria such as: number/quality of sources added, new sections created, bytes added, language accuracy and style, as well as balance and objectiveness, together, may help you evaluate and encourage better contributions.
I think having it selected as good/featured article could be a bonus, but since it has to go through discussion in the community and sometimes this can be frustrated by things unrelated to the article itself (i.e. having a long list of articles to be discussed and voted for good/featured), I'm not sure I'd bring it to the center of the assessment criteria.
Oona
On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 7:04 AM, Jon Beasley-Murray < jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca> wrote:
In fact I find the "good article" and "featured article" criteria very helpful, whether or not a class's aims are to enter their work for such reviews. Not least because they do deal directly with quantitative as well as qualitative measures, and they certainly quite explicitly address problems such as "inaccuracies, bias, contradictions, and missing topics."
After all, the second criterion for an FA (at WP:WIAFA) is that it is "comprehensive"; the third that it is "a thorough and representative survey." At no point is it suggested that a featured article has to be *long* (indeed, there have been repeated discussions about brief featured articles on talk).
In fact, the GA criteria provide a useful caution when they state that a good article should stay "focused on the topic without going into unnecessary detail." I often find that, for instance with articles about literary works, there are whole chunks (usually plot summary) that need to be cut down, sometimes quite drastically.
More generally, students focussed single-mindedly on bytes added, beyond being immediately tempted to copy-paste (frequently from dubious sources) are also unlikely to look out for errors and/or plagiarism etc. that already exist in the articles they are working on.
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.
Take care
Jon
On Jan 28, 2014, at 5:42 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Would a leaderboard which breaks down bytes by those advancing any good
article criteria, bytes toward references added to un-sourced crucial statements, negative bytes reverted, and neutrally (e.g. no "points" for) other bytes added?
I have a feeling that if we tell students that is how they will be
scored up front, it will work out better than otherwise, whether the subsequent scoring criteria are good or poor. If it were up to me I would ask students to search for inaccuracies, bias, contradictions, and missing topics, and most of those things fit into a few of the good article criteria, but not very explicitly.
Best regards, James Salsman
On Jan 29, 2014 9:11 AM, "Pepe Flores" pepe.fls@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I'm working in an Educational Program in Mexico with the Universidad de
las Americas Puebla. I agree that adding a lot of bytes doesn't necessarily contribute to the quality of an article. We have been working on the development of the nanotechnology entries in Spanish, since this topic is kinda new in developing countries but there's a lot of research in the last 20 - 30 years. One of our goals was to improve the quantity and quality of references, in order to provide little but accurate information rather than a lot of unreferenced data. This standpoint was well perceived by the Spanish Wikipedia community as the entries has not been deleted but improved by other Wikipedia users.
You may know a little bit more about this program in
https://mx.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proyectos:Programa_Educativo_UDLAP#Introducci.... Spanish). The report isn't finished yet but it's illustrative about the importance of working toward reference quality instead of volume (bytes).
-- Personal Sent with Airmail
En 28 de enero de 2014 at 18:42:23, Juliana Bastos Marques (
domusaurea@gmail.com) escrito:
I forgot to mention a couple of important things I'm expecting to
happen. First of all, I thought about measuring bytes *only after* the qualitative part is assessed (kinda like publishing guidelines, which I'm trying to make them acquainted with). But I think the reason this could work is because at least half of the enrolled students have already worked with me in other previous classes with Wikipedia editing. My idea is to make them help the other students learn how to edit during the course, together with the ambassador.
In the last course I offered, some students later got Good Article
status, and they were very excited and proud ( https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genotdel, https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipa_de_Lencastre). This wasn't the main goal, but kept them engaged even months after the course. A Facebook group helped with continuous lively discussions - the students are always there, anyway. I'm also relying on word of mouth, which has actually been proven quite effective. ;)
Juliana.
On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Jon Beasley-Murray <
jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca> wrote:
Indeed. The WMF repeatedly bandied around the number of bytes produced
by education projects, and it was (understandably) hugely controversial, not least given the problems that the program has had with plagiarism (most notoriously with the Pune project).
I would strongly suggest that bytes are a very poor indication of
success.
Take care
Jon
On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:31 AM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@wikimedia.org.au
wrote:
The obvious problem I see is that adding a lot of bytes to an article
doesn't necessarily equate to adding a lot of *value* to an article. On enwiki at least, it's probably very easy to inflate the bytecount by inserting superfluous templates and the like into an article, without actually adding any content. At most I'd recommend using it as a rough guide for students as to when an article may be ready, and then assess the articles qualitatively after that.
Cheers, Craig
On 28 January 2014 11:12, Juliana Bastos Marques <
domusaurea@gmail.com> wrote:
*NOT a CFP!* ;)
Hello all!
I have been thinking about using the criterion of a minimum number of
bytes to evaluate the students' edits for my next course - together with content, of course. This came up because I noticed some students were editing as little as possible, and this time I want the whole group to start new articles from scratch.
Has anyone used this approach? Pros/cons? What would you consider a
reasonable number for the minimum of bytes in the final article?
Juliana.
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