Now I am a huge supporter of encouraging students to edit Wikipedia. However last fall I can across a psychology class of 1500 first year students contributing content to psychology articles. There was four ambassadors / teaching assistants. Two of these never made a single edit to Wikipedia and the other two had only made a handful. The prof of this class never made a main space edit.
Three long standing editors from Wikiproject medicine took it upon themselves to review every edit made by this class as it was clear that no one involved with in an official manner was planning on providing any oversight. I brought my concerns to the profs attention and I guess hurt his feelings as he as left Wikipedia and stopped responding to my concerns. He also cancelled his next semesters plan to contribute. Our analysis can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Colin/Introduction_to_Psychology,_Part_I#R...
There appears to be a mis perception from some in academia that anyone can just show up to Wikipedia and have at it. That we are little more than anarchy. We need to be very clear that this is far from the case. That while anyone can contribute, we have policies and procedures that vary from subject area to area and are supported by small groups of dedicated volunteers. And that if people / classes do not contribute in a possible manner than they will have their edits reverted and may lose their editing privileges.
Unless we go about these collaborations slowly and carefully we are only going to alienate those we are reaching out to and piss off our current volunteers. We need to make sure that if students are going to contribute content that it is of high quality and that mechanisms are in place to review their work. While Wikipedia can be used as a teaching tool it is first and foremost an encyclopedia. And we can not just expect the current community of volunteers to take on the task of providing guidance to large classes of students who are here as part of their classwork. This population is different than people who are here as simple volunteers, not only in the fact that there are more of them but also due to the reason for them being here.
A few things that IMO would make a difference: 1) The profs themselves must edit Wikipedia (preferably having brought something to GA or FA within their subject area). And if we are going to go with large classes than so must their teaching assistants. The only way to learn how Wikipedia works is by editing content. 2) There must be a number of hours of in class instruction on Wikipedia's policies and procedures. One does not begin writing for the New England Journal of Medicine without first learning their manual of style and referencing requirements. 3) If classes are working on content they should concentrate on improving the quality of one or a few articles. Assignments such as "go out and make an edit to the subject area of this class" should not be repeated.
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 2:24 PM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
A few things that IMO would make a difference:
- The profs themselves must edit Wikipedia (preferably having brought
something to GA or FA within their subject area). And if we are going to go with large classes than so must their teaching assistants. The only way to learn how Wikipedia works is by editing content. 2) There must be a number of hours of in class instruction on Wikipedia's policies and procedures. One does not begin writing for the New England Journal of Medicine without first learning their manual of style and referencing requirements. 3) If classes are working on content they should concentrate on improving the quality of one or a few articles. Assignments such as "go out and make an edit to the subject area of this class" should not be repeated.
I think the focus of routing classes into English Wikipedia is a mistake. One of the best, best uses I have seen of WMF in a classroom setting was in a psychology class, who were non-disruptive in their editing and created featured content. Where was this done? http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cognitive_Psychology_and_Cognitive_Neuroscience. Take a look at it. Beautiful work. Seriously beautiful work.
(There has also been awesome work done on Wikinews and Wikiversity. None of this was disruptive, and it was done with community knowledge and support. The DYK community was not consulted about student DYKs. The instructor had about a week for students to submit to DYK. This same professor wants students to submit works for GA. I've had articles sit in the first one about a month waiting for a review, and I believe I am going on close to two months for GA reviews waiting.)
I do like your suggestions. I think one could be done with a bootcamp for professors before they design their class syllabus and where professors are given suggested lesson plans for how to use WMF projects in the classroom in order to meet learn objectives in the class. (Yes, I know, on the university, professors generally do not draft lesson plans. I've had several conversations with various academics about the merits of this on that level in order to help students excel.)
On the issue of teaching assistants, I think this is extremely important: We need to do away with the campus ambassador programme. It needs to be replaced with a Teaching Assistant/Graduate Assistant process. If students are going to be required to be non-voluntary editors in topic areas not of their choosing, they need to be properly guided by highly skilled Wikimedians who understand they will be in a teaching/assessing role. This is discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#Policy_for_compensat.... This needs to be paid for by the university participating. This level of supervision is really, really required, especially given the non-voluntary editing component.
Point two: Yes, they need to be familiar with that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#DYKs_and_students. These non-voluntary editors are not reading the rules and are not incentivized to read them. One student nominated an article for DYK that had been taken from around 3,000 words down to 1,000 words. Another student nominated an article that would have required expanding the article 16,000 words. These clearly did not even pass the most basic DYK expansion test... yet submitted. (The ambassador did not review the DYKs before submission, no one from the programme stepped up to review additional DYKs to help clear the student generated cue... and a lot of stress was put on a system that is often under scrutiny. A DYK review these days at times is tantamount to GA-lite.)
Point three: Yes. We appear to have a number of articles on the five personality components created. They do not appear distinct. Before a class does any work, the professor needs training to make certain what they are requesting is feasible.
I'd like to respond to a few of specific points here.
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 9:24 PM, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Now I am a huge supporter of encouraging students to edit Wikipedia. However last fall I can across a psychology class of 1500 first year students contributing content to psychology articles. There was four ambassadors / teaching assistants. Two of these never made a single edit to Wikipedia and the other two had only made a handful. The prof of this class never made a main space edit.
James, as you are well aware, we have worked very hard to address the problems raised by this course last fall. We created the new Participation Requirements [1] in part because of the valid objections you and others raised about the fall term. But one thing I'd like to point out here is that while there were 1,500 students in the course, only 318 of them participated in the Wikipedia portion of the course. You're absolutely right that four Ambassadors were not enough to support 318 students (hence our new Ambassador:student ratio in [1]), but please don't exaggerate the problem by claiming we had 1,500 students being supported by four Ambassadors.
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:04 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote: I think one could be done with a bootcamp for
professors before they design their class syllabus and where professors are given suggested lesson plans for how to use WMF projects in the classroom in order to meet learn objectives in the class.
Please note that according to [1] referenced above, all professors participating in the U.S. and Canada programs are required to do an orientation where they learn exactly what you're suggesting, as well as some Wikipedia basics. We've also conducted in-person faculty workshops at our pilots in Egypt and Brazil to cover similar material.
On the issue of teaching assistants, I think this is extremely important: We need to do away with the campus ambassador programme. It needs to be replaced with a Teaching Assistant/Graduate Assistant process.
I'm sorry you feel that Campus Ambassadors aren't useful, but the data we have from our student surveys (which will be released in a WMF blog post later this week) indicate that students overwhelmingly find the Ambassador support incredibly helpful. According to the survey data, 92.8% of students who worked with Campus Ambassadors found them to be useful.
Let me point out as well that some of our Campus Ambassadors are TAs or GAs for that professor (we ask the professor if they have someone they'd like to have us train as a CA, and a TA or GA is a logical choice). Replacing the CA program as you propose also eliminates all professors who do not have a TA or GA, and as we have seen from survey data, having that presence on campus is incredibly important for students' success.
LiAnna
[1] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program/Participation...