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).


While I recognize how much things are unlikely to change from this only, I do beg to stress the importance of this factor. : ) 

I am not aware of a consolidated method of training and retaining ambassadors out of the group of students new to Wikipedia. The ambassador training sessions I know of are still a bit empirical - mostly, it's a crash course on editing, which we know is only part of the requirements.

Here in Brazil we don't have enough volunteers from the editors' community to cater for the demand of interested teachers throughout the country. Unless we can finally rely on new people, I understand the need for big amounts of effort such as a new wiki, so to control the final results. 

Juliana.

 
--
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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