Very interesting article, and comments. Although I do agree with Juliana that it is interesting to see the different views if different cultures, I think translation is indeed a pretty good way to introduce a student to wiki-editing. I saw it work for my daughter: she's been watching me editing the past 5 years (on Greek Wikipedia primarily), and she decided to give it a try herself by translating a ballet-related article from English into Greek. She has very good command of the English language, but she used Google translate as a "rough" tool, and then corrected and refined the translation to produce a good piece of work. Needless to say, I could never have done such a good job (ballet bores me to death). But when a student chooses to translate an article on a subject he/she is confident in, using translation tools is handy, so long as they don't get lazy and leave it unprocessed. But the teacher can certainly judge whether the student has been lazy or not.
On another level, I recommended assigning Wikipedia articles to a friend of mine who teaches at the Aegean University, and she says that she still does it (she is not an avid Wikipedian herself, but she's definitely a supporter) because as I told her, it's a practically foolproof way to prevent students from plagiarising. And I definitely agree that it helps build the mentality of prventing plagiarism in communities where students are not so accustomed to the principle. Mina (user "saintfevrier") ----- Original Message ----- From: Juliana Bastos To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 1:21 AM Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] Fwd: Wikipedia Signpost article I strongly discourage my students when they want to translate articles. However, these are the rules of the game, so, if they insist, they may do so. My two objections are: - There is no guarantee that the original articles are good enough - so we have to come back to criticism exercises to evaluate them, thus going away from the intended translation exercise. - It is a priceless asset to have different cultures stating their own views on the same subjects. Here I'm thinking about non-technical articles, mainly. (Not to say that I've spotted lots of cases of lazy Google Translator work). However, I do agree that the goals of this Mexico project are also important for the students. Just adding my 2 cents, then. Juliana. On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 9:09 PM, John Vandenberg <[email protected]> wrote: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Leigh Thelmadatter <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 4:44 AM Subject: Wikipedia Signpost article To: Teachers Wikipedia <[email protected]> Pharos has put something I wrote as a draft article for the Wikipedia Signpost to push for an education column in the publication. Please take a look at the draft here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_report and feel free to participate! _______________________________________________ Education mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Education mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
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