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(a)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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