2009/11/12 zeyi zeyi.he@googlemail.com

Hi, all,

According to the school project we set up, (check here if you need more information http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Schools_project), I have discussed the possibility with the head of sixth forum, she suggested two things. one is we need some documents to prove that "Wikipedia and relevant projects have affected school age students on some way", which will give more sense to committee who can accept us to host the workshop on schools. Second, we need more detail proposal to explain our school project and the content of workshop.

I can complete the proposal with cooperating to others. However, I am wondering that any one has resource about how Wikipedia and relevant projects influence school students? anything is helpful, reports, survey, blog and academic articles?

Hi Zeyi,

There is quite little empirical work that I know of relating to the effect of Wikipedia on children/teenagers. (There is more on potential effects, general wiki (ie non-WP) literature, etc.) One paper that comes to mind is Forte & Bruckman [1] - though the sample here was undergraduate students. The authors have written another chapter on 'Human-Computer Interaction for kids' - I'm not sure whether it deals with Wikipedia specifically - you could get in touch with the authors [2], or I could do so (I know one of them) and report back. Let me know which you'd prefer.

A good, recent paper is Harouni [3], which discusses high school students' critical research skills in using Wikipedia. Another you might be interested in is the write-up of a project to improve articles on Latin American Literature, which had a lot of input from Wikipedians [4] - though again, it's about graduate students.

Cormac

[1] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte/ForteBruckmanFromWikipedia.pdf [2] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte/index.html ; http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Amy.Bruckman/ [3] http://www.hepg.org/her/abstract/742 [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness