Hi, I’m working in an Educational Program in Mexico with the Universidad de las Americas Puebla. I agree that adding a lot of bytes doesn’t necessarily contribute to the quality of an article. We have been working on the development of the nanotechnology entries in Spanish, since this topic is kinda new in developing countries but there’s a lot of research in the last 20 - 30 years. One of our goals was to improve the quantity and quality of references, in order to provide little but accurate information rather than a lot of unreferenced data. This standpoint was well perceived by the Spanish Wikipedia community as the entries has not been deleted but improved by other Wikipedia users.
You may know a little bit more about this program in https://mx.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proyectos:Programa_Educativo_UDLAP#Introducci.C3.B3n_a_la_nanotecnolog.C3.ADa (in Spanish). The report isn’t finished yet but it’s illustrative about the importance of working toward reference quality instead of volume (bytes). -- Personal Sent with Airmail En 28 de enero de 2014 at 18:42:23, Juliana Bastos Marques ([email protected]) escrito: I forgot to mention a couple of important things I'm expecting to happen. First of all, I thought about measuring bytes *only after* the qualitative part is assessed (kinda like publishing guidelines, which I'm trying to make them acquainted with). But I think the reason this could work is because at least half of the enrolled students have already worked with me in other previous classes with Wikipedia editing. My idea is to make them help the other students learn how to edit during the course, together with the ambassador. In the last course I offered, some students later got Good Article status, and they were very excited and proud (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genotdel, https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipa_de_Lencastre). This wasn't the main goal, but kept them engaged even months after the course. A Facebook group helped with continuous lively discussions - the students are always there, anyway. I'm also relying on word of mouth, which has actually been proven quite effective. ;) Juliana. On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Jon Beasley-Murray <[email protected]> wrote: Indeed. The WMF repeatedly bandied around the number of bytes produced by education projects, and it was (understandably) hugely controversial, not least given the problems that the program has had with plagiarism (most notoriously with the Pune project). I would strongly suggest that bytes are a very poor indication of success. Take care Jon On Jan 28, 2014, at 4:31 AM, Craig Franklin <[email protected]> wrote: > The obvious problem I see is that adding a lot of bytes to an article doesn't > necessarily equate to adding a lot of *value* to an article. On enwiki at > least, it's probably very easy to inflate the bytecount by inserting > superfluous templates and the like into an article, without actually adding > any content. At most I'd recommend using it as a rough guide for students as > to when an article may be ready, and then assess the articles qualitatively > after that. > > Cheers, > Craig > > > On 28 January 2014 11:12, Juliana Bastos Marques <[email protected]> wrote: > *NOT a CFP!* ;) > > Hello all! > > I have been thinking about using the criterion of a minimum number of bytes > to evaluate the students' edits for my next course - together with content, > of course. This came up because I noticed some students were editing as > little as possible, and this time I want the whole group to start new > articles from scratch. > > Has anyone used this approach? Pros/cons? What would you consider a > reasonable number for the minimum of bytes in the final article? > > Juliana. > > -- > www.domusaurea.org > > _______________________________________________ > Education mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education > > > _______________________________________________ > Education mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education _______________________________________________ Education mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education -- www.domusaurea.org _______________________________________________ Education mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
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