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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Jon Beasley-Murray
<jon.beasley-murray(a)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_Po…
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