User:MCruz (WMF)/Sandbox/Newsletter/2015/2/6/Draft

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Blogs

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• Learning Day Blog

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Grow the Awesome

• Tagline: Will university students edit in their free time?
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  "The University of Arizona Geo Club on a field trip tied to Wikipedia articles on geology"
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  "Berkeley Water Group Idea Lab student Presentations at Inspiration Point."]]
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  "Arizona Geosciences Student Club members practice editing Wikipedia"

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The Wiki Education Foundation worked with six student groups, training students on how to contribute illustrations and text to Wikipedia articles. Two groups engaged in a group field trip and editing project. We found that some students can and will make high-quality contributions when working as part of a student group outside of class hours, but that while some students seemed to embrace Wikipedia, the majority of students showed enthusiasm only when staff was around. After the workshops, the majority of student editors stopped editing. In general, a few students contributed really great content. The rest of the students only edited at the workshop and under staff’s direct supervision.

It seems that the best student edits come when students have incentives – with either a grade or a field trip. We think that involving honor societies and academic associations who have sanctioned Wikipedia editing for students and instructors as part of their community service requirements has the potential to lead to quality student contributions in the future. Our major learning from this term is that with an incentive (a grade, a field trip, a push from their national honor society, or a visit from a Wiki Ed staff member), students will contribute content in their spare time. But without these incentives, students are unlikely to contribute content in their extracurricular time.

• Further reading (2 - 3 links):

• Student groups and WIkipedia (blog post summary of final report)
• Our full final report
• Details from University of Arizona's GeoClubs field trip

Grow the Awesome

• Tagline: Will training academic experts to edit Wikipedia create active editors?
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As part of the Wiki Education Foundation's partnership with the Association for Psychological Sciences, we designed a month-long pilot course for APS members to teach them how to edit Wikipedia.

The Summer Seminar in Psychology began in late July, and wrapped up at the end of August. While 20 psychology instructors were interested enough to sign up, only five made mainspace contributions. Four of those five had edited Wikipedia in the past. All told, the participants added slightly less than the equivalent of six printed pages of content to Wikipedia.

The contributions participants made were well-written, cited reliable sources, and were formatted correctly. Nonetheless, the amount of output generated by this pilot does not justify the input in terms of cost and staff time.

The Wiki Education Foundation considers this a successful pilot. We answered our research question: Would a structured, month-long class in the summer activate instructors to edit Wikipedia? As an organization, we believe in trying experimental pilot programs like this to see if something works. While we found that this program did not work, it has given us ideas for an alternative engagement strategy with instructors to improve Wikipedia, such as an “ask-an-expert” program, which we’d like to pilot in the future.

We’d like to extend significant thanks to the Association for Psychological Science for piloting this program with us, and an especially large thank-you to the five participants who made great mainspace contributions, improving Wikipedia’s coverage of psychology topics with their expertise.

A longer description of the inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes, as well as a longer conclusion section, are available in our final program evaluation report of the Summer Seminar pilot.

• Further reading (2 - 3 links):

• Summer Seminar pilot final report)
• Course dashboard for Summer Seminar pilot

Leave your mark on Meta

IdeaLab

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Learning Pattern Library

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