While I tend to support live article Wikipedia edits, for 10,000 student project, Martin's point about Wikipedians going nuts trying to deal with such a large influx of new editors is a valid point. There is a point at which the educational program threatens to overwhelm the community. We have not reached it yet, but it is worth remembering our community numbers only few dozen thousand of active editors (depending on which metric one uses), a number that pales in comparison with that of the students who could potentially be contributing.
Of course, much of this could be alleviated if the instructors and their assistants had sufficient Wikipedia experience to monitor the student progress. Unfortunately, this is a case for only a small number of classes so far, and unlikely to change that much even if we were to stress the importance of that more (which, sadly, we don't).
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 10/3/2012 11:57 AM, Martin Walker wrote:
A colleague of mine from our geology department has run article improvement projects for US undergraduates, and he found it very beneficial to have the main editing work done on a separate geology wiki (running Mediawiki) on a college server. Pictures were still uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (and therefore could be read in the college wiki). He was easily able to use the history feature to track students' contributions. Once the work was completed, the professor himself did the edit, presumably after checking for outside edits done while the project was ongoing. Students were able to improve Wikipedia, and see their real-world impact (a very poor article is now good and gets 70,000 hits a year).
For what you're proposing, I think a separate wiki like this would be essential. That way the chaos is contained and the Wikipedia biologists aren't going nuts; also, you can assess the students' contributions more easily. Once the work is complete, improved articles can be integrated into the main Wikipedia and everyone benefits.
Martin
Martin A. Walker Department of Chemistry State University of New York at Potsdam +1 (315) 267-2271 walkerma@potsdam.edu
On 10/2/2012 10:51 AM, Dimce Grozdanoski wrote:
Hi folks,
I want to open discussion and hear some practical ideas or real stories about projects with large scale editing participation, or how to distribute assessment to the editors/students who are geographically distributed throughout the country.
For example, let's say that we want to recruit 10000 students grouped in class groups in particular schools to work on biology topics. Each school must follow the teaching plan / time-line according to the adopted methodology, i.e. they start with general biological terms then with kingdoms, ecosystems, interactions of living bing in ecosystem, evolution, and so on ... And the teachers give one or two assessment per student of biology in particular class in particular school, to write new or improve already written article in wikipedia. How to menage this process? How to measure student work? The goals are to create maximal number of articles with good quality. How to deal with projects of this kind in limited time if you have time window of 6 months to start and finish the project.
Any idea,
Dimce Grozdanoski Wikimedia Macedonia
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