Sure only 300-400 participate but the class itself was indeed 1500 first year students support by 4 ambassadors. I think it was a fair try and glad to hear that we have all learned from it.
I guess the main think I wish to emphasis is that we have in place mechanisms to verify the edits of contributors through this program and we cannot simply expect the community (which is in fact very small in many academic areas) to take on this role. As mentioned by others may be funding from the University to pay for grad students to specifically review all the work?
Well, there is some difference between 318 and 1,500 students, but that is unarguably too many for four non-Wikipedian CAs to handle. Too many for four Wikipedians to have handled, too, for that matter.
I'm not sure I follow your logic on the grad student bit, though. Don't get me wrong, being paid for my CA work would be great. However, paying grad students to do the work? Unless you're specifically talking about finding grad students who are also Wikipedians, it seems like you'll have the same issue. Paid or not, they're still not Wikipedians. I don't think the current issue with the CAs is that they don't have a monetary incentive to do the work. They just aren't familiar enough with Wikipedia to know how to handle some situations. Paying people who don't know Wikipedia will not change this.
On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 6:26 AM, Gorilla Warfare gorillawarfarewikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure I follow your logic on the grad student bit, though. Don't get me wrong, being paid for my CA work would be great. However, paying grad students to do the work? Unless you're specifically talking about finding grad students who are also Wikipedians, it seems like you'll have the same issue. Paid or not, they're still not Wikipedians. I don't think the current issue with the CAs is that they don't have a monetary incentive to do the work. They just aren't familiar enough with Wikipedia to know how to handle some situations. Paying people who don't know Wikipedia will not change this.
Last October there was a discussion of setting up a diff review queue system, apart from the usual Mediawiki interface, which would show people a sequence of diffs and allow them to flag potentially bad edits for intervention. This could be used for monitoring edits to high importance medical articles as well as keeping track of new editors working on a project for their class. In the former case, you might want grad students, but for monitoring new editors any wikipedians could do such a review. Keeping medical articles accurate is only somewhat more important than making sure classwork editors don't further infuriate the community, but they are both high priorities so you might want to pay something per each review task so they don't just become another large number in WP:BACKLOG. Presumably the existing Foundation grants process should work with that, if someone would build the infrastructure for it. It probably wouldn't take too lonh to adapt an existing open source RSS reader to subscribe to the pertinent RSS feeds (such as from a "related changes" of a page with links to the articles in question, or the contributions of the new student users) and show them in sequence with [OK] and [Needs intervention] buttons.
One thing we didn't discuss back then: Once the bad edits are flagged, who does the intervention?