My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely
necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed
users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced
Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or
else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up
contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because
of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per
CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough
"checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial
draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the
term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may
be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of
the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for
articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that
particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that
certain measures are good for every student int he program.
--
Derrick Coetzee
User:Dcoetzee
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich <
though.poppies.blow(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a *lot* of the edits students have made have been frankly
terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them,
and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project
and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just
as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was
kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of
my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to
follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make
sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer,
I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but
who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page,
and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an
ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of
courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our
standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could
be prevented on the campus side of things: *before *the in-hindsight
cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate,
and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made *compulsory*. Too many
terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with
Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for
their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia <
guerillero.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of
the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states,
I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small
liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One
hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should
not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write
effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do
real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work
with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try
and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <
ezalvarenga(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_p…
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for
WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some
progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance
and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier
than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of
the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
Wikimedia Brasil
Wikimedia Foundation
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