Wikipedia:Education Program/Structure proposals/Cheryl (MichChemGSI)

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Cheryl (aka User:MichChemGSI)

What idea(s) do you have for what the new structure for the U.S. and Canada Wikipedia Education Programs could look like?

My idea for the new structure would be to ramp up and take advantage of the WikiProjects that are already established for each subject area. I do recognize that a few are more active than others and I will address this in a later section on potential pitfalls of this approach. This idea also follows and closely relates to User:Jan eissfeldt and User:Pharosproposal that takes advantage of existing infrastructure.

Many of the major complaints from the program have been from the large number of edits in which the community needs to "Wiki" cleanup after the students has contributed their work. This is hypothesized to be due to many factors that I will not expand on here, but for a great synposis, please refer to Mike Christie's proposal.

At the start of the program, we were concerned about the willingness of academics to be involved in this initiative and therefore set up the program to be as helpful for professors as possible which may have detrimentally, in some cases, given these professors a false sense of what their responsibilities were for the project. We now know that professors will need to be heavily invested in their students projects (at least in terms of the content being added) and actually guide students in what would be appropriate for an encyclopedic audience. Now that we are aware of the success and draw of this program, we can increase the requirements for active professors, one of which would be for them to be familiar with the community. This is why I propose to ramp up and encourage involvement in Wikiprojects. These groups are subject matter specific, is already, for the most part, an established infrastructure that we can work within, and a central repository of topics that need to be improved. (Great ideas for professors!) We have found our Wikiproject (Chemistry) to be incredibly helpful in our efforts for using Wikipedia in Education. They have been very helpful not only in letting us know of community rules but they also can collaborate with our students offering suggestions on content and therefore improving the learning the students experience in working in this project.

If the Working Group agrees with this direction, the tasks for the WMF and the active ambassadors prior to 2013 would be to clean up the Wikiprojects. This would entail: finding the ones that academics are most likely interested in, encouraging active use of the project page, and to encourage professional societies to also us this page as a means for setting up projects.

I also feel that working within a Wikiproject will give the students a greater sense of their contribution for their work. We have found in our undergraduate implementation (preliminary results) that the students do not feel that their work was worthwhile. This is because undergraduate students seem to have a more difficult time recognizing the greater picture of their contribution to Wikipedia as a whole. Therefore if they are active within the project for the topic they are working, perhaps the smaller community will be able to give them a better sense of the importance of their contribution.

How would you ensure this new structure involves all key stakeholders, including academics and the Wikipedia community?

I feel that this would be the best way of bring together both academics and the community together to work on similar projects. Of course the community needs to realize that professors will not assign students to do ONLY clean up, but on these pages some have created bots that indicate subject matter that requires high expert contribution and these project would be great for students to be involved in with professor oversight.

What are potential pitfalls of this approach?

As I am aware, not all Wikiprojects are equally active. We are lucky in chemistry to have such an active and well kept Wikiproject. Therefore a potential pitfall would be the need to survey the necessary subject matter Wikiprojects that academics may potentially need to use and to increase their activity. However, here is where current ambassadors and past participants in the current USEP and Canada program can help! They can start or revamp Wikiprojects currently out of commission. Being a part of the Wikiproject would eliminate the need to hire an "instructional designer" as Zach has suggested. Not that it is not a great idea, but it is very difficult for someone allow another person to design their syllabus for them or who is not familiar with their subject matter. I do realize that this might seem like a completely decentralized approach; however, perhaps the article quality will increase significantly when suggestions that are made are not just Wikimarkup but on content as well.

Any other comments about your proposal?

I realize that this is a very brief synopsis of my proposal, but please feel free to comment on any aspect about it and please recommend great Wikiprojects that we might be able to model other Wikiprojects on. I think that this would also be a great way to share bots and organizational features that some Wikiprojects have in being able to organize content by subject matter and to rate articles.

References