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.
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@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@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
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