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.C3.B3n_a_la_nanotecnolog.C3.ADa (in 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.
>> >
>> > --
>> > www.domusaurea.org
>> >
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