Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-07-09/Wikimedia in education

Wikimedia in education

Exploring the United States and Canada with LiAnna Davis

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Introduction

Interview

This interview is with LiAnna Davis, the head of communications for the Wiki Education Foundation.

Can you describe how the Education Program started in the United States?

In 2009, the Wikimedia Foundation had started to see a trend of university faculty members assigning their students to edit Wikipedia as part of their coursework. We invited several of these faculty members and asked them for their advice and feedback about starting a more formal program to support student editing. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with the caveat that doing Wikipedia assignments takes much more effort than traditional assignments. So we set out to do a small pilot in fall 2010 to see if a more formal program would work, with Wikipedia Ambassadors available to support the instructors participating. The pilot, called the Public Policy Initiative, was a great success, with student editors improving the quality of Wikipedia articles. We began expanding the program from that term until 2012, when we started the efforts to spin off the United States and Canada programs into their own nonprofit organization. In 2013, the Wiki Education Foundation was born as that organization, an independent spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation.

How many instructors and students currently participate in the program?

Video of a 2012 presentation by Canadian emergency medicine physician Dr. James Heilman at the University of British Columbia on how to use Wikipedia in a medical class.

During the spring 2014 term, 61 instructors and 1,852 student editors participated in the program.

Which areas of the country currently participate?

We're spread geographically throughout the U.S. and Canada. See this pdf for a map.

What grade levels are the students who participate?

First year of undergraduate through last year of Ph.D.

As you probably know, Wikipedia editors are predominantly male in most languages. Approximately what percentage of the students who participate in the United States education program are female?

Student surveys suggest that our student editors are about 61% female.

How are instructors and students trained to use Wikipedia?

We encourage all instructors to go through the WP:EDUCATOR orientation, and student editors to go through the WP:STUDENT training. Additionally, we have Wikipedia Ambassadors who are available to support both instructors and student editors. Like most editors, instructors and students ultimately learn by doing, but we've been continually refining these trainings to help them avoid the most common types of newcomer mistakes.

Do students and instructors usually use VisualEditor?

Some do, but most don't. We explain the options and let them choose. Until recently, the citation features of VisualEditor haven't been mature enough to work well for the kind of work most student editors do, so most of the training and help material has continued to focus on wikitext editing. For the upcoming term, though, we're interested to see if VisualEditor is good enough to make it the recommended way of getting started.

What kinds of assignments do students receive when using Wikipedia in the classroom? For example, are they translating, editing existing articles, or creating new articles? Which languages do they use?

Most student editors expand weak articles, but some create new articles. Most of the work happens on English Wikipedia, but we have a handful of student editors who work on their native language Wikipedias instead.

The most common type of assignment works as a replacement for a typical term paper: student editors begin by exploring Wikipedia's coverage of a topic related to the course, then they start identifying and studying the relevant sources, and then they synthesize that into new Wikipedia content (whether expanding an existing article or starting a new one). But there are a lot of other assignment models as well, from making illustrations, photos or videos to illustrate articles, to short copyediting assignments, to group assignments where several student editors or an entire class try to improve a single article as much as they can.

Has the program received any endorsements from government agencies?

No, but we do work with initiatives from the Association for Psychological Sciences, the American Sociological Association, and the National Communication Association.

How do you expect the program to develop in the next few years?

We want to explore the partnerships with academic associations in the future; we see these as keys to scalability and sustainability. Other keys include institutionalizing our program at university campuses. By this, we mean working with existing university structures that provide teaching resource support for faculty members, such as teaching and learning centers. When we train staff members of teaching and learning centers, they do the outreach work to faculty members, and include Wikipedia as a tool in their arsenal, along with blogs and other tools.

In the fall, we'll begin to explore a pilot to extend Wikipedia to academic honor societies as a way to target high-achieving students in under-represented disciplines on Wikipedia. In coming years, we'd also like to explore more connections with university libraries and archives to connect our program better with GLAM work.

Do you have any statistics or charts showing the growth of articles contributed, number of students, number of professors, number of ambassadors, use of the Education extension, or number of universities for US/CAN?

Video of Professor Adrianne Wadewitz explaining her interest in teaching with Wikipedia and recruiting other professors to do the same. Wadewitz's untimely death in 2014 was noted in American national media including PBS NewsHour and the New York Times (see Signpost coverage: "Community mourns passing of Adrianne Wadewitz").

”Pete Forsyth and Max Klein recruiting for Wikipedia Ambassadors at the Good Internet Conference held at the University of California, Berkeley” in 2011

One of the benefits of being our own organization is we can set our goals up a bit differently; we want to emphasize quality rather than quantity, so we haven't kept as much up-to-date information on numbers. But that being said, this page has the numbers we've tracked since the beginning.

Is there a way to work backwards from an account through the Education program extension to determine if an account has been associated with a registered class?

While the term is current (and thus the student is likely active as a student editor for a particular course), the extension places a note on the top of a student's contributions page. Here's an example of what that looks like, from one of our summer classes going on now.

Once the term is over, that message will disappear. That data is retained in the user logs when the user enrolls in a course, so if you really want to dig, you can find it. But in your example, the edits are happening to articles on your watchlist, so presumably they're happening while the course is active, so you should be able to see it on the student editor's contribs page.

Here's an example of a student editor who was enrolled in a course that's now over; that banner is not on their contribs page, but it is recorded on their log.

For awhile I was hearing that plagiarism and copyright violations were significant problems among the population of student editors. Has there been any research done to quantify the number of reversions and/or the number of copyright complaints for student editors, hopefully showing a decrease in plagiarism, copyright violations, and reversions over time?

Wiki Ed's Sage Ross did a study on plagiarism on the English Wikipedia, comparing our students' work to other new users and top editors.

To get relevant sample sizes for articles in which the majority of content was added by student editors, we had to combine multiple terms into one cohort, so we don't have data tracked over time. That being said, we are really proud that we had zero incidents about Wiki Education Foundation classes on the Education Noticeboard the spring 2014 term, which I think speaks highly about the work Jami, Sage, and our volunteers have done in preparing students to edit effectively.

Has there been any research showing how the retention rates of student editors after their Wikipedia assignments has changed over time?

We see about a 2% retention of student editors—that hasn't changed much over time. But note that our focus is not and has never been retaining student editors; we'd much rather retain instructors. We invest a lot of time into teaching each instructor how to work with Wikipedia as a teaching tool, but once that instructor knows how to do it, it takes very little time on our end, and the instructor brings a new class of high-quality student contributions to Wikipedia each term. So we track instructor retention instead; here's a slide from Jami's recent WikiConference USA presentation about our instructor retention.

Is there anything else that you would like Signpost readers to know about the program?

Video illustration of figure skating jumps, produced by students from Alverno College, Wisconsin, USA, 2014

I think one of the best ways to get a feel for how our program helps Wikipedia is to look through some student editors' work. Here are some examples:

New article that achieved DYK from a Louisiana State University class: Martian lava tube
New article from a University of Toronto class: Gamification of learning
Expanded article that reached GA from a Rice University class: HIV/AIDS in Malawi

The HIV/AIDS in Malawi article before its expansion by the Rice class

A video from an Alverno College class: Figure skating

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As an academic, I used to be highly supportive of Wikipedia Educational projects, but the misfires and backfires over the past three years or so have left me still smarting today from the huge work I did to bring some serious issues to light (which in the first instances were vehemently refuted by the responsible staff), motivate a volunteer clean up team, and spend hundreds of hours on the actual clean-ups myself - all without thanks, and simply resulting in more junkets for the paid staff. It's possible that things have improved since - especially in the USA - and possibly due to some changes in executive management of the GEP, but I am still not wholly convinced that the management team is entirely on the right track and hence I withdrew my support from education projects some time ago. I may possibly return to Wkipedia educational work some day, but certainly not in any geographical regions where the Wiki Education Foundation in its current structure is active. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 04:40, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung, This article is about the US/Canada education program. The education program that had the serious issues you refer to was the Pune Pilot in India. The Pune Pilot in India was cancelled and not restarted. It's wrong to imply that education projects in countries a hemisphere away run very differently than one failed pilot should be viewed with suspicion. It’s not fair to the volunteers who have put countless hours into making the US/Canada program successful — or to the volunteers successfully running education programs in 20+ other countries. And for the record, here's one discussion in which two of the senior staff working on the Pune Pilot acknowledged the burden on the community as a whole and you personally, and specifically thanked you for your work. We are thankful for all the volunteer time that goes into supporting educational efforts globally, which is why it’s so disheartening to see a comment like this about a failed pilot from three years ago in a different country casting doubt on the excellent work volunteers are doing today in the US and Canada. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 21:56, 17 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

LiAnna. Thank you for reminding me of that thread - indeed it was so long ago and such a disheartening issue that I had banished most of it from my memory. I do recall however that I worked literally day and night for over a month on that clean up and during that time the actual physical support from the Foundation appeared to be minimal or at best very slow. The Pune issue left many regular en.Wiki regulars embittered, but not being here in Asia they may have been quicker to overcome their disappointment in the GEP than I have been. There have obviously been some serious changes in both the Foundation's overall education policy and its involved staffs since that time, and I'm sure that projects in North America are working well. I no longer follow GEP discussions and developments, but there was one instance where I was contacted around a year ago by a staffer who was touring around Asia, including Thailand, where I was asked if I could help out on an obscure education related project, unfortunately it was at very short notice, and would also have incurred personal expense that in addition to my volunteer time I was not prepared to make. One cannot ignore the fact that the Wikipedia volunteer community may at times be skeptical about the deployment of donors' funds, especially where staff travel is concerned. Thanks is fine, and where I don't doubt its sincerity for a moment, it is very easily expressed; nevertheless, I and many others still feel that in its enthusiasm, the Foundation might not always act in the best interests of the volunteers who in spite of working very hard at times, receive no other recompense for their work. This is something that Foundation employees may tend to forget. I know many of the most senior Foundation staff personally and have excellent relations with them and my comment above does not address any individual in particular. I do hope that if there are, or are to be, any Wikimedia educational projects in countries where cultural dichotomies exist, that responsible volunteers in those areas may be invited, rather than expected, to join in with the planning and execution, and perhaps with some initiative to help them do so. --Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:52, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Kudpung, we're in agreement about that! As a former Wikimedia employee who was working on global education efforts, I can confirm that all education programs since Pune have been started by or in direct collaboration with local editors from the beginning of the planning stage, and I can say with confidence that was one of many lessons taken to heart from the Pune Pilot's failure. (I'm now with the Wiki Education Foundation, the independent nonprofit that supports the U.S. and Canada education program, so I can only speak for Wikimedia's global education efforts until March, when I left, but I think that lesson was well impressed upon the new education team, too!). --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 02:03, 18 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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