Hi everyone --
I'm Marshall Miller; I'm the product manager for the Growth team at the WMF
(
). 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 (
):
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 (
):
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 (
):
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:
Thank you,
Marshall
On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 1:39 PM Juliana Bastos Marques <domusaurea(a)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(a)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(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Piotr Konieczny
Sent: Monday, 11 February 2019 1:20 AM
To: wiki-research-l(a)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(a)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(a)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:
>
> 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(a)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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>
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>
--
www.domusaurea.org
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Jonathan T. Morgan
Senior Design Researcher
Wikimedia Foundation
User:Jmorgan (WMF)
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jmorgan_(WMF)>
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