User:Mike Christie/Sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 Quotes 1.1 Writing 1.2 Learning 1.3 FAC and FA team 1.4 Wikipedia and quality 2 What would happen if

[edit] Quotes

[edit] Writing

• Monica: "I find I have actually learned alot about how to re-write prose, what sounds better and re-visiting journal articles I had previously used" [1]

[edit] Learning

• Carla: "Ive learned more from this Wikipedia project than in any other literature class I have ever taken." Source:[2]
• Monica: "it all makes me feel as though I am pretty much a walking-talking expert on literary criticsm written in english on El Senor Presidnete (The President)." [3]
• Katy: I don't think that it was because our work would be immediately visible that we aimed for a higher standard. Personally, I think what allowed us to aim for a higher standard was the ability to receive feedback and continually rework the page, which is very unlike a paper where you only have the opportunity to submit it once and cannot fix the paper according to the comments. In this sense, Wikipedia was a much better learning tool than a paper, we were actually able to engage with the comments from other editors. Wikinews.
• Monica: "I think what pushed us to achieve higher standards were the other wikipedian editors. They were constantly pushing us to find better references and to reference everything. In working towards GA and FA they set the bar incredibly high." Wikinews

[edit] FAC and FA team

• Katy: "My only comment would be that the Manual of Style was extremely inaccessible to lay users, like myself and if there hadn't been professional editors who knew what they were doing I don't know if we could have gotten over that obstacle." [4]
• Katy: "Luckily, we had an amazing group of Wikipedia users and editors on our side who helped make it very clear what was expected for the article. Honestly, without them guiding us I think this whole process would have been a lot more difficult if not impossible." Wikinews

[edit] Wikipedia and quality

• Big quote: Which would you describe as the harder 'marking authority'? Other professors where you've submitted conventional term papers, or the teams assessing Wikipedia contributions with a view to awarding Good or Featured status?

• MF: No competition. Our Good Article review was extremly intense and I actually was very overwhelmed by it initially. After working through each bullit point though, I can now see why those suggestions for improvement were both necessary and important. The hard work most definetly did not stop after GA review. Infact, before GA review had even ended another editor went through the article for us, line by line and came up with an even longer list of needed improvements, and once we did that, another thourough copyedit was done. At times I was very discouraged by the mountain or work infront of me and not entirely confident that I could fix the problem areas but with their continued support and help we did it. Professors on conventional term papers make a few comments and hand it back to you. In nearly four years of University, I have only had one professor hand back term papers and give students the option to revise, rework and re-write problematic areas in the essay. And personally, I find this process of re-writing, clarifying and improving prose to be extremly helpful. Over the course of the last few months I have learned so much about writing I cannot even express... and it shows. I have been a B+/A- student throughout my entire undergraduate carreer, and my last two papers have been A's! I think the grades speak for themselves.
• KK: Wikipedia was definitely more intense but I think it was probably a fairer process. I don't have a problem with someone being a tough critique when we have the opportunity to fix the problems. This is exactly what I enjoyed about the Wikipedia process and think this is what made it such a great learning tool.
• EE: Wikipedia seems to hold more consistent and constant standards across the board, whereas professors can sometimes mark in an unexpected manner. However, in my experience with Wikipedia and my professors, each expect a high quality of work and challenge the contributor to create such work.

Eva:I now know not to rely entirely on Wikipedia for research, BUT instead to go to the references at the bottom for a good starting point for research. [5]

[edit] What would happen if

What would happen if in the fall semester of 2008, a dozen university professors did just what Jon Beasley-Murray did with Murder, Madness and Mayhem, and set their class a target of making a dozen articles into GAs and FAs?

I suspect a lot of things would go wrong. The main reason is that there would not be enough bandwidth among interested and supportive experienced Wikipedians to support the classes. In turn this would mean:

• Slow turnaround at GA, where the oldest nominations can take over a month to get reviewed. An additional 144 GA nominations in one semester would make this much worse.
• Lack of feedback to the students on core issues such as reliable sources, the need for citations, and no original research.
• Little assistance on WP:MoS: not just esoterica, but basics such layout issues and lead guidelines, meaning likely failures at GAN.
• Insufficient reviewers at WP:FAC to pay attention to these articles even if they were able to get that far; articles at FAC already occasionally are "not promoted" for lack of reviews, rather than because there are clear outstanding objections.

On the other hand, if all the projects could be as successful as MMM, would that be a good thing? The answer is clearly yes -- MMM has had ten (possibly soon to be eleven) of twelve articles promoted to GA, with a further two (perhaps soon to be three) promoted to FA, in the space of less than three months of work. If we had a dozen similarly successful projects, we'd have thirty-plus new FAs and over a hundred new GAs in less than three months. And what if we had a hundred such projects every semester? Goals such as a hundred thousand FAs would start to seem achievable.

Projects such as MMM represent a happy combination of skills and resources, both for educational purposes and for Wikipedia. Here are three areas where the breakdown of tasks between students and Wikipedians was both natural and synergistic:

• Research and content. The students supply the content. The professor can point them at sources, but the material is actually introduced by the students, who have access to the University libraries and sources such as JSTOR where they can research useful materials.
• Verification. The professor is the arbiter of content breadth and accuracy. The references will permit others to verify content, but the professor can do this during the project far more rapidly than anyone else. This includes identifying omissions in breadth of coverage.
• Style. Wikipedians who know the manual of style are absolutely necessary to the project. The students in general will not know it, so this knowledge has to come from within Wikipedia.

Here are three more points about how the process was beneficial educationally. I'm making assertions here; I would like to hear Jbmurray's opinion on these points, of course, but here's how I see it:

• Learning. I feel confident that the students ended up learning much more about their topics than they would have learned by writing a traditional graded paper.
• Prose. The students were all capable of writing good English prose, but many did not initially; I was particularly interested to see a couple of blog comments to the effect that this project taught the students a tremendous amount about writing (that is, in addition to the topic).
• Organization. The process of organizing material to flow well, with internal logic and a natural narrative for the reader, is a skill students acquire in writing papers. I'd like to believe that the feedback process in working with some top-quality Wikipedian editors was beneficial in teaching this skill too.

I am sure that our post-mortem discussions will identify general and specific weaknesses in the process, and things that could be improved. Overall, though, I'd conclude that the project was extraordinarily successful both for Wikipedia and for the class, but that it is flatly impossible to scale the Wikipedia side of the project at the moment. Scaling the University side has its own problems -- if a professor who knew less about Wikipedia than Jbmurray took this on it might have gone quite badly, after all. However, that seems a much more easily solvable problem -- perhaps Jbmurray could become a consultant on how to run these projects!

The professors can't take on responsibility for all the aspects of the project that were, for MMM, largely dealt with by experienced Wikipedians. There would be far too much work for one professor to deal with; Jbmurray has already said a problem with MMM is that it was too labour-intensive, and he had, I would say immodestly, as good a support team as any such project will ever get. -- Mike Christie (talk) 22:17, 19 April 2008 (UTC)