[Wikimedia-l] Education program - quality assessment

I've moved this discussion from an earlier thread. [1] There, I asked about this April 14 press release from the Wiki Education Foundation, [2] "The press release ... says, 'The program, in which students write Wikipedia articles in place of traditional term papers, created the equivalent of more than 7,000 printed pages of new, high-quality content during the fall term of 2013 and the equivalent of more than 36,000 printed pages of content since its start in 2010.' "Can anybody point to a source for the 7,000 printed pages of new, high-quality content during the fall term - particularly the evidence for the high quality of that content?" LiAnne, the author of the press release, replied "...We've done two quality studies on articles written by students participating in the Wikipedia Education Program in the U.S. and Canada, one covering the first two terms of the pilot (fall 2010 and spring 2011) and then again a year later, in spring 2012. "Here's the 2010-11:https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Student_Contributions_to_Wikipe… "Here's the spring 2012:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors/Research/Article_q… "As you might imagine, hand-assessing two versions of an article (the version immediately prior to the student's first edit and the version it was at their last edit) is an extremely time-consuming process. Given we found pretty similar results (the vast majority of students significantly improve articles through our program), we have stopped doing these studies because they take up so much valuable volunteer time. If there were an automatic way to gauge article quality that didn't involve volunteer time, I'd love to repeat the study every term, but I haven't seen any good way of gauging article quality that doesn't involve hand assessment of articles. "In terms of the 7,000 printed pages, we use WikiMetrics ( https://metrics.wmflabs.org/) to determine how much content students add to the article namespace each term." Thanks LiAnna I think you're saying 7,000 printed pages (equivalent) in total was added to the encyclopedia during the 2013 fall term by the education program. If I've got that right, is it accurate to say it was all high quality? [1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/442601 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Education_Foundation/Press_Release_14_… Anthony Cole <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Anthonyhcole>