On Jul 30, 2012 7:18 AM, "Tilman Bayer" tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Florence Devouard anthere9@yahoo.com
wrote:
On 7/28/12 5:58 AM, Tilman Bayer wrote:
Hi all,
the Wikimedia Foundation's 2012-13 Annual Plan has just been published
at
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/File:2012-13_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan_...
accompanied by a Q&A:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2012-2013_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Ans...
The plan was approved by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in Washington, DC, at Wikimania, and previously outlined to the Foundation staff and interested community members at the monthly staff meeting on July 5, 2012. We were planning to publish the video recording of that meeting at this point, but encountered technical difficulties; the video will hopefully become available soon.
Slide 8 : "How are we doing against the 2012 targets"
I was stopped by
"The Global Education Program is now the largest-ever systematic effort
of
the Wikimedia mouvement to boost high quality content creation, with a projected addition of 19 million characters to Wikipedia through student assignements 2011-2012"
OF COURSE, we all know that WMF needs to glorify what it is actually initiating/in charge of. And that's fair enough.
But seriously... I would feel fine with us trying to claim that the GEP
is
the largest system effort to INCREASE the number of articles. It is
probably
true.
But we all know that the result is... so and so. Possibly good content,
but
also lot's of crap being reverted and deleted afterwards. Claiming it
is the
largest effort to boost high quality content is not only disingenous...
but
I actually find it counter productive and a tiny bit offensive toward
the
actual community.
High quality content simply does NOT come from newbie students.
Over the last years, the Foundation has been trying to base decisions and evaluations more often on objective data and research rather than on personal opinions and impressions.
Of course, here the term "high quality" does not necessarily mean, say, featured content (e.g. on the English Wikipedia, featured articles currently make up less than 0.1% of the total articles), but instead refers to comparisons with average contributions.
Someone from the Education Program will be able to give a more thorough overview of the efforts to evaluate its results, but for example I'm aware of
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall...
Ive asked for more info at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Education_Program_eva...
. The quantitative method used there has its limitations, but similar methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about Wikipedia in the academic literature.
Do you have links to any relevant studies of the GEP?
-- John Vandenberg
Hi John,
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 2:39 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Ive asked for more info at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Education_Program_eva...
I did my best to answer your question there.
. The quantitative method used there has its limitations, but similar methods are employed in independent (i.e non-WMF) research about Wikipedia in the academic literature.
Do you have links to any relevant studies of the GEP?
For the English Wikipedia, you might be interested in the Article Quality Improvement section of the Public Policy Initiative Learning Points document[1] (that project was the pilot of the U.S. Education Program). Last term, because of some of the limitations Tilman referenced above, I worked with English Wikipedia editors Mike Christie ([[User:Mike Christie]]) and Doc James ([[User:Jmh649]]) to run a modified version of the Public Policy research, where a corps of volunteer Wikipedians edited a random sample of student work from last term. We hired an outside researcher to cross-tabulate the good classes (as determined by the quality improvement shown) with a series of factors present in the various classes (so, for example, how many Ambassadors did the class have? Were they undergraduate or graduate classes? Did the professor edit Wikipedia? etc.). We're expecting the results of that research in the next two weeks. You can see more about it here: [2].
For the Brazil and Egypt pilots, the number of students is so low that it's easy to see the improvements by hand. For example, students in the Cairo Pilot wrote the article on Laura Restrepo by hand [3] and translated the article on Civil disobedience from the French Wikipedia [4]. All the articles students work on are listed on their course pages; links to the various language Wikipedia course pages are at http://education.wikimedia.org
I'm happy to answer other questions about the Education Program either here or on wiki.
LiAnna
[1] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_Learning_Points#...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research
[3] http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%84%D9%88%D8%B1%D8%A7_%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%B3%D8%...
[4] http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86_%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%...
On Jul 31, 2012 1:43 AM, "LiAnna Davis" ldavis@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi John,
On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 2:39 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Ive asked for more info at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Education_Program_eva...
I did my best to answer your question there.
Ive replied with more specific questions.
This research was mentioned because of bold statements in the annual plan, and Tilman Bayer mentioned this blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall...
Which says U.S. Education Program users are three times better than other users.
-- JV
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Ive replied with more specific questions.
This research was mentioned because of bold statements in the annual plan, and Tilman Bayer mentioned this blog post:
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/19/wikipedia-education-program-stats-fall...
Which says U.S. Education Program users are three times better than other users.
Just to clarify, it says three times better than other *new* editors, not established editors! New is a very key word there.
I'm afraid I don't know the answers to the questions you posted as I was not involved in any of the methodology of this particular research, but I will see if I can find answers for you.
LiAnna