[Wikimedia-l] [WikiEN-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] 2012-13 Annual Plan of the Wikimedia Foundation

[LiAnna Davis]

Hi John,

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 2:39 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ive asked for more info at
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research_talk:Wikipedia_Education_Program_evaluation#random_sample

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#Student_Contributions:_Article_Quality_Improvement

[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%AA%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A8%D9%88

[4] http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B9%D8%B5%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%86_%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%86%D9%8A


-- 
LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://education.wikimedia.org
(415) 839-6885 x6649
ldavis at wikimedia.org