I mention Biology just as an example, it can be any other subject.
It's very easy to start new mediawiki server dedicated to project. But which is better solution: to begin with empty wiki database (no articles, no templates, ...) or with latest snapshot of wikipedia? I suppose your colleague from geology department exploit the benefits of the first option. But when the work was completed on dedicated server, the professor should merge the articles with real wikipedia, and it is not very easy task, I mean it's not simple as copy&paste. Also the moment of collaboration with the wider wiki community is loosed.
I mean that the idea of dedicated server comes from the need to have full control of students work, and to avoid the chaos when huge number of students try to edit some stuffs in real wiki. I think that this mediawiki extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Education_Program, give some solutions to this issue.
On 03.10.2012 17:57, 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
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education