Very interesting article, and comments.
Although I do agree with Juliana that it is interesting to see the different views if
different cultures, I think translation is indeed a pretty good way to introduce a student
to wiki-editing. I saw it work for my daughter: she's been watching me editing the
past 5 years (on Greek Wikipedia primarily), and she decided to give it a try herself by
translating a ballet-related article from English into Greek. She has very good command of
the English language, but she used Google translate as a "rough" tool, and then
corrected and refined the translation to produce a good piece of work. Needless to say, I
could never have done such a good job (ballet bores me to death). But when a student
chooses to translate an article on a subject he/she is confident in, using translation
tools is handy, so long as they don't get lazy and leave it unprocessed. But the
teacher can certainly judge whether the student has been lazy or not.
On another level, I recommended assigning Wikipedia articles to a friend of mine who
teaches at the Aegean University, and she says that she still does it (she is not an avid
Wikipedian herself, but she's definitely a supporter) because as I told her, it's
a practically foolproof way to prevent students from plagiarising. And I definitely agree
that it helps build the mentality of prventing plagiarism in communities where students
are not so accustomed to the principle.
Mina (user "saintfevrier")
----- Original Message -----
From: Juliana Bastos
To: education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 1:21 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] Fwd: Wikipedia Signpost article
I strongly discourage my students when they want to translate articles. However, these
are the rules of the game, so, if they insist, they may do so. My two objections are:
- There is no guarantee that the original articles are good enough - so we have to come
back to criticism exercises to evaluate them, thus going away from the intended
translation exercise.
- It is a priceless asset to have different cultures stating their own views on the same
subjects. Here I'm thinking about non-technical articles, mainly.
(Not to say that I've spotted lots of cases of lazy Google Translator work).
However, I do agree that the goals of this Mexico project are also important for the
students. Just adding my 2 cents, then.
Juliana.
On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 9:09 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Leigh Thelmadatter <osamadre(a)hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:44 AM
Subject: Wikipedia Signpost article
To: Teachers Wikipedia <teaching-with-wikipedia(a)listserv.olemiss.edu>
Pharos has put something I wrote as a draft article for the Wikipedia
Signpost to push for an education column in the publication.
Please take a look at the draft here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_report and feel free
to participate!
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