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%...