Well, a little unfair perhaps. The education program was not a single thing, and I certainly acknowledge your own valuable contributions throughout, that consistently ensured (and continue to ensure) a more thoughtful approach to counteract the editcountitis and bytecountitis that was prevalent in other quarters. Still, there's no denying that the focus on quantity (seemingly at the expense of quality) has always been, and continues to be, one of the major sources of tension between the education program and the Wikipedia community. Hence there is good reason to think and talk in other ways about how to assess and encourage student work.
Take care
Jon
On Jan 29, 2014, at 1:23 PM, Sage Ross sross@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Jon Beasley-Murray jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca wrote:
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.
Jon, I think you're being unfair here. Despite being much harder to measure, quality has been part of WMF's education programs since the beginning. During the Public Policy Initiative, we created a system for quantifying article quality (and how the work of student editors impacted it) that was directly based on WP:WIAFA [1].
It should be uncontroversial to say that what we -- and by "we" I mean both WMF and the editing community -- want is large quantities *of* high quality content. From what I saw, the leaderboards were pretty effective at motivating a handful of most involved classes during the Public Policy Initiative -- classes with instructors who were the most into the goal of improving Wikipedia -- and for those classes, the quality was also high. For the classes that were doing lower quality work, from what I remember they were also the ones that did not take an interest in the leaderboard. (I also suggest that the Pune pilot would have gone just as badly with or without leaderboards; counting bytes was not among its critical problems.)
(I agree that, for evaluating an individual student's work, bytes added is not a great metric, and in general there are some dangers to incentives based on quantity of text.)
[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Pol...
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