I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
1. Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I agree, this would be fascinating research. Having used Wikipedia with a number of my classes and conducted research in related areas, this sound fascinating.
Happy to talk more about it or assist if you need anything.
-----
With Incredulity toward Metanarratives,
Jeffrey Keefer, PhD User:FULBERT FULBERT@fulbert.org
On Feb 8, 2019, at 1:07 PM, Jonathan Morgan jmorgan@wikimedia.org wrote:
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hello,
Most interesting. One of the works I came along for my paper "Wikis im Unterricht reflektieren und bearbeiten" was this:
O’Donnell, Michael, 2014: Science Writing, Wikis, and Collaborative Learning. In: Dougherty, Jack/O’Donnell, Tennyson (Hrsg.): *Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning*. University of Michigan Press/Trinity College ePress edition 2014, http://epress.trincoll.edu/webwriting/chap-ter/odonnell.
My personal opinion: It may be problematic to use Wikipedia (which is a working and presentation platform) as a teaching platform. If you want to use it anyway, the students must be extremely well prepared for this kind of environment.
Kind regards Ziko
Am Fr., 8. Feb. 2019 um 19:07 Uhr schrieb Jonathan Morgan < jmorgan@wikimedia.org>:
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques < domusaurea@gmail.com> wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the
experience
of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a
lot
of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they
love
the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The lecturer had heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that there would be a student assignment in which student could singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations 3. Write/expand the Wikipedia article.
The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia, but assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the university librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the timetabling it was not possible to do hands-on training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their account sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc). The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had been some "real" achievement from the assignment. The articles were not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in some cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment, I also found and added some photos where I could. About the worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do some complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should create their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had generally followed my early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop that things could have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can generally help out IF I know about the plan in the first place.
As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over a proposed experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented there, instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia community about such things, we would be much better served if we tried to find a way to communicate with universities about both edit-a-thons and research projects and provide them with some entrypoints into our community so we could help them with such things to everyone's mutual benefit. Relying on serendipity and personal contacts (which is how things currently work) isn't an ideal solution.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 4:07 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Thank you for the very detailed story!
I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I heard the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to universities in Poland despite (occasional) interest from the universities themselves: no funds / will to hire a dedicated person for this, and the current salaried staff of the Polish chapter does not have sufficient time to answer all requests.
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The lecturer had heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that there would be a student assignment in which student could singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations 3. Write/expand the Wikipedia article.
The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia, but assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the university librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the timetabling it was not possible to do hands-on training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their account sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc). The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had been some "real" achievement from the assignment. The articles were not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in some cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment, I also found and added some photos where I could. About the worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do some complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should create their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had generally followed my early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop that things could have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can generally help out IF I know about the plan in the first place.
As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over a proposed experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented there, instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia community about such things, we would be much better served if we tried to find a way to communicate with universities about both edit-a-thons and research projects and provide them with some entrypoints into our community so we could help them with such things to everyone's mutual benefit. Relying on serendipity and personal contacts (which is how things currently work) isn't an ideal solution.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 4:07 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I do it as a volunteer. There are no salaried staff at Wikimedia Australia.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Piotr Konieczny Sent: Monday, 11 February 2019 1:20 AM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Thank you for the very detailed story!
I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I heard the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to universities in Poland despite (occasional) interest from the universities themselves: no funds / will to hire a dedicated person for this, and the current salaried staff of the Polish chapter does not have sufficient time to answer all requests.
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The lecturer had heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that there would be a student assignment in which student could singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations 3. Write/expand the Wikipedia article.
The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia, but assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the university librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the timetabling it was not possible to do hands-on training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their account sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc). The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had been some "real" achievement from the assignment. The articles were not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in some cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment, I also found and added some photos where I could. About the worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do some complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should create their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had generally followed my early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop that things could have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can generally help out IF I know about the plan in the first place.
As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over a proposed experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented there, instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia community about such things, we would be much better served if we tried to find a way to communicate with universities about both edit-a-thons and research projects and provide them with some entrypoints into our community so we could help them with such things to everyone's mutual benefit. Relying on serendipity and personal contacts (which is how things currently work) isn't an ideal solution.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 4:07 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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I managed to get funding from my university for grants to students, for our outreach project. This was when the staff went on strike, from May to December [sic!]. The student was very excited to work and help me, but we couldn't have access to the computer labs...
Juliana
On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 9:36 PM Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
I do it as a volunteer. There are no salaried staff at Wikimedia Australia.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Piotr Konieczny Sent: Monday, 11 February 2019 1:20 AM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Thank you for the very detailed story!
I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I heard the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to universities in Poland despite (occasional) interest from the universities themselves: no funds / will to hire a dedicated person for this, and the current salaried staff of the Polish chapter does not have sufficient time to answer all requests.
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The
lecturer had heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that there would be a student assignment in which student could singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations 3. Write/expand the Wikipedia article.
The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia,
but assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the university librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the
timetabling it was not possible to do hands-on training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their account sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc). The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had been some "real" achievement from the assignment. The articles were not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in some cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment, I also found and added some photos where I could. About the worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in
mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do some complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should create their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had generally followed my early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop
that things could have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can generally help out IF I know about the plan in the first place.
As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over a
proposed experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented there, instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia community about such things, we would be much better served if we tried to find a way to communicate with universities about both edit-a-thons and research projects and provide them with some entrypoints into our community so we could help them with such things to everyone's mutual benefit. Relying on serendipity and personal contacts (which is how things currently work) isn't an ideal solution.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 4:07 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching
with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the
outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be
overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are
appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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Hi everyone --
I'm Marshall Miller; I'm the product manager for the Growth team at the WMF (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth). Our team is working on increasing the retention of new editors in mid-size Wikipedias. I wanted to chime in because of the interesting things some of you are saying about what is working and not working for new editors who are trying to learn. Our team is always looking for input and perspectives from all parts of our community, and I hope that some of you could weigh in on our team's work.
Specifically, we have three projects in flight that we're looking for guidance on. Each of these projects is being piloted just in Czech, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias -- these are communities who have volunteered to try out some new things. We're hoping to start some conversations on the talk pages of any of these projects, and we're looking for opinions on any part of them, though some specific questions are listed below.
- Help panel (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Focus_on_help_desk): in which we deployed the "help panel" to our pilot wikis so that newcomers can get answers to questions while they are editing. Our main open question here is whether it is better to help users to find their answer on their own, or to encourage them to make contact with a community member and ask for help. - Engagement emails ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Engagement_emai...): a project that is still being designed that would use email as a way to engage newcomers and encourage them to return to the wiki. Our main open question here is how best to use email as a communication vector without being yet another annoying presence in a user's inbox. - Newcomer homepage ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Personalized_first_day/Newcomer_homepa...): a project that is still being designed that gives newcomers a clear "starting place" to help them achieve their goals. Our main open question here is where to put the homepage, and how to connect it to the rest of the Wikipedia experience.
You can also sign up for our team's monthly newsletter here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Newsletters
Thank you,
Marshall
On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:39 PM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I managed to get funding from my university for grants to students, for our outreach project. This was when the staff went on strike, from May to December [sic!]. The student was very excited to work and help me, but we couldn't have access to the computer labs...
Juliana
On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 9:36 PM Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com wrote:
I do it as a volunteer. There are no salaried staff at Wikimedia Australia.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Piotr Konieczny Sent: Monday, 11 February 2019 1:20 AM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Thank you for the very detailed story!
I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I heard the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to universities in Poland despite (occasional) interest from the universities themselves: no funds / will to hire a dedicated person for this, and the current salaried staff of the Polish chapter does not have sufficient time to answer all requests.
--
Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The
lecturer had heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that there would be a student assignment in which student
could
singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer
had
broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations 3.
Write/expand
the Wikipedia article.
The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia,
but assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone
can
edit" but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the university librarians and
mentioned
this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the
timetabling it was not possible to do hands-on training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual
Editors
just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also
attend
the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or
expanded
the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but
of
course had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their
account
sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc). The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that
there
had been some "real" achievement from the assignment. The articles were not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in
some
cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment,
I
also found and added some photos where I could. About the worst thing
that
happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in
mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy)
take
to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do
some
complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table
of
contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem
was
and that they should create their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group
who
tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had
generally
followed my early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop
that things could have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can generally help out IF I know about the plan in the first place.
As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over
a
proposed experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented
there,
instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia community about such things, we would be much better served if
we
tried to find a way to communicate with universities about both edit-a-thons and research projects and provide them with some entrypoints into our community so we could help them with such things to everyone's mutual benefit. Relying on serendipity and personal contacts (which is
how
things currently work) isn't an ideal solution.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Morgan Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 4:07 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching
with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Piotr,
I think this is an excellent topic, FWIW.
And I bet the Wikipedia Education Program would be interested in the
outcomes of this research. And they might be willing to point you to potential interview candidates (tho, obviously, they have a strong US/EnWiki bias, so it wouldn't be the complete picture).
Best, J
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 8:43 AM Juliana Bastos Marques domusaurea@gmail.com wrote:
I can add something to this, from my own experiences and from what colleagues have told me. Here are some negative feedbacks to the experience of teaching with Wikipedia. Not in any particular order:
- Lack of support from the Wikipedia community (reversions, scaring
newbies - depends on the specifics of each language community) 2. Lack of teacher's experience in editing and dealing with the community (leads to poor management fo issues in 1) 3. Problems with infrastructure in the university 4. Students lacking interest in editing, doing everything in the last minute and not caring about the outcome after the end of classes.
Piotr, I'm very interested in following your research. I'd love to hear about studies examining these issues, and how they were/can be
overcome.
Greetings, Juliana
On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 4:04 PM Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl
wrote:
I am mulling over a new research topic: what researchers think about teaching with Wikipedia type of assignment AFTER having tried it? AFAIK we have a lot of papers on how to teach with Wikipedia, some on effects on students and some about what instructors think about Wikipedia in general, but correct me if I am wrong, nobody has actually asked instructors about their experience with it? And from my personal experience with seeing such projects on Wikipedia, I think there's a lot of people who try it once and don't come back and well, do we know why outside educated guesses?
Right now I am just brainstorming this idea, so any thoughts, up to and including suggestions for what questions to ask, etc. are
appreciated.
Also, I am generally conducting solo research, and all my prior papers on 'teaching with Wikipedia' have been solo authored (and my goal is as always to turn this research into publishable paper), but if someone really, really, really would want to join this project because they love the idea, and would want to be a co-author of the future paper, and/or present the results at a WikiSym or such that I sadly go to every five years or so, feel free to send me a private message. No promises, but I don't bite :)
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- Jonathan T. Morgan Senior Design Researcher Wikimedia Foundation User:Jmorgan (WMF) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF) _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
-- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Dear colleagues:
I work with Wikipedia in classroom since 2015-2016 (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proyecto_educativo/WikiDoc,_Universi...). Of course, I agree with the common problems about this kind of approach...
..but now I'm working on a specific area, asking the students: As new editor, What do you think about the help pages in Wikipedia? Have you used them? Are they helpful? Are they readable? Are they understandable?
So, my approach is to analyze the "technical documentation", identify problems and propose improvements.
Cheers,
Jesús
Jesús, I suppose the key to understanding effectiveness of help pages may have big variations between language projects. As for the help sections on WP:PT, they are simply overwhelming, and navigating through them can feel like wandering through the Minotaur's maze.
Juliana
On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 10:39 AM Jesús Tramullas jesus@tramullas.com wrote:
Dear colleagues:
I work with Wikipedia in classroom since 2015-2016 ( https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proyecto_educativo/WikiDoc,_Universi...).
Of course, I agree with the common problems about this kind of approach...
..but now I'm working on a specific area, asking the students: As new editor, What do you think about the help pages in Wikipedia? Have you used them? Are they helpful? Are they readable? Are they understandable?
So, my approach is to analyze the "technical documentation", identify problems and propose improvements.
Cheers,
Jesús
"Investigación básica es lo que hago cuando no sé lo que estoy haciendo." "Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." Wernher von Braun (1957)
--#------------------------------------------------------------ Ph.D. Jesús Tramullas http://tramullas.com Dept. Ciencias Documentación // Dept. of Information Studies Universidad de Zaragoza 50009 Zaragoza (España) ------------------------------------------------------------#--
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Young people in particular don't tend to look for Help or Instructions. They tend to just jump in. They are more likely to want "live chat" help when they are in the midst of their problem.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jesús Tramullas Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 8:39 PM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Dear colleagues:
I work with Wikipedia in classroom since 2015-2016 (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proyecto_educativo/WikiDoc,_Universi...). Of course, I agree with the common problems about this kind of approach...
..but now I'm working on a specific area, asking the students: As new editor, What do you think about the help pages in Wikipedia? Have you used them? Are they helpful? Are they readable? Are they understandable?
So, my approach is to analyze the "technical documentation", identify problems and propose improvements.
Cheers,
Jesús -- "Investigación básica es lo que hago cuando no sé lo que estoy haciendo." "Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." Wernher von Braun (1957)
--#------------------------------------------------------------ Ph.D. Jesús Tramullas http://tramullas.com Dept. Ciencias Documentación // Dept. of Information Studies Universidad de Zaragoza 50009 Zaragoza (España) ------------------------------------------------------------#--
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Different people have different favoured learning styles. Some will copy others, some will ask others, and some actually go and read the instructions. Presumably some pay attention to lectures.
In order to make Wikipedia open to all goodfaith editors it is helpful to support all learning styles. That means encouraging use of meaningful edit summaries to make it easier to learn by copying others, running wiki surgeries and informal meetups so people can ask each other how to fix things, making the help pages clear comprehensive and up to date, and yes having lectures available to attend or watch on the internet.
Those of us who favour some learning styles over others would do well to try and remember that others may favour different learning styles. And when I fall asleep in a lecture it is probably time for a live example, or a nudge from my neighbour.
Jonathan
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________________________________ From: Wiki-research-l wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org on behalf of Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2019 2:20 am To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities' Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Young people in particular don't tend to look for Help or Instructions. They tend to just jump in. They are more likely to want "live chat" help when they are in the midst of their problem.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jesús Tramullas Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 8:39 PM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
Dear colleagues:
I work with Wikipedia in classroom since 2015-2016 (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proyecto_educativo/WikiDoc,_Universi...). Of course, I agree with the common problems about this kind of approach...
..but now I'm working on a specific area, asking the students: As new editor, What do you think about the help pages in Wikipedia? Have you used them? Are they helpful? Are they readable? Are they understandable?
So, my approach is to analyze the "technical documentation", identify problems and propose improvements.
Cheers,
Jesús -- "Investigación básica es lo que hago cuando no sé lo que estoy haciendo." "Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." Wernher von Braun (1957)
--#------------------------------------------------------------ Ph.D. Jesús Tramullas http://tramullas.com Dept. Ciencias Documentación // Dept. of Information Studies Universidad de Zaragoza 50009 Zaragoza (España) ------------------------------------------------------------#--
_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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