Education/News/February 2019/Basque Education Program: 2018 in review

Basque Education Program: 2018 in review

Author: Galder Gonzalez

Summary: At the end of 2017 we began our Education Program. Its purpose was to improve, with the help of university students, the content that students between the ages of 12 and 16 need. 2018 has been an intense year, in which more than 1,500 students have participated in more than 80 courses, adding 1.5 million words to Basque Wikipedia.

It has been an intense year, convincing university professors of the importance of their students contributing content to Wikipedia. Our challenge was complex: we needed content in each and every subject, from A to Z, letters and sciences, popular culture and philosophy, astronomy and music. We have held meetings with more than 200 university professors, explaining the project to them, and we have managed to get the project off the ground in some 75 university courses.

We have created material for these students to know how Wikipedia works, including video tutorials and printed material. We have used Dashboard intensively. We have travelled thousands of kilometres, even though our country is small.

But the result is good, very good. Although the improvement of articles never stops, it is time to take stock of what has been achieved this year:

Improvements in the number of bytes

Our 1.700 scoped articles in the Education Program has grown in the last year clearly. When we started the program mean article size was 5.950 bytes, so we decided that having articles over 5.000 bytes should be a goal. 332 articles were non-existing, 841 were (48,95%) were below 5.000 bytes and only 31,72% were above it. 203 articles were below 1.000 bytes, and the median size was 2.439,5 bytes.

When we measured again in June, the global situation was clearly better. Article's mean size had risen to 7.372 bytes, the median size was 3.325 bytes, only 258 were non-existing and 674 articles (39,23%) were above 5.000 bytes.

We have measured it again and we thing that the results are great. Articles mean size is now 9.395 bytes, median size is 4.366 bytes, near the 5.000 bytes goal. 216 articles are non-existing, but 804 articles (46,8%) are over 5.000 bytes.

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  Article size variation over time. In blue, the situation when the program started, in orange the global improvement on may 2019. In yello, the situation when 2019 started. Overall distribution is clearly rising: non existing and very short articles are disappearing and articles over 5.000 bytes are rising.

Improvements in article quality

Basque Wikipedia was the first to implement an automatic ORES article rating in every article. This has been of great value when students are creating their assignments, as they can see live how they are doing and what we would expect from them. Article quality measurement has been important since we started, and ORES prediction gives us insights on this goal. We have six ranges: stub, start, C, B, good and featured. We want to make all articles at least C class, but this could be impossible with some topics. Nevertheless, we are working with this goal in mind.

Arloa	Stub		Start		C		B		Good		Featured
	Jun	Dec	Jun	Dec	Jun	Dec	Jun	Dec	Jun	Dec	Jun	Dec
Math	13	7	47	43	25	32	6	10	4	4	0	0
Biology and geology	3	1	86	62	51	63	21	29	21	33	2	3
Physics and chemistry	3	2	80	54	39	51	16	28	5	15	1	1
Geography and history	14	12	99	96	52	53	18	45	30	30	8	9
Scientific culture	2	0	15	14	13	12	9	6	4	7	3	11
Information technology	1	0	17	8	10	13	7	14	3	4	1	1
Languages	5	5	15	13	9	10	9	9	6	6	0	3
Literature	2	3	58	40	29	52	35	27	6	12	0	1
Economy	19	13	42	48	19	19	5	6	4	5	1	1
Classical culture	11	12	49	49	9	10	7	8	7	6	0	0
Philosophy	4	4	22	22	10	11	1	3	3	1	0	0
Arts	5	5	58	58	37	41	13	11	5	6	0	0
Music, dance, theatre	11	10	63	63	42	43	22	22	3	3	0	0
Sports	10	13	13	13	12	12	4	5	0	0	0	0
Women and gender	0	0	23	23	10	9	5	7	1	1	2	2
Total	103	87	688	606	366	431	178	229	102	135	17	32
C or better											663	827

Improvements in page views

During 2017, the articles in the list had 1,899,241 views, is to say, 5,365 views per day.

This year we had 2,143,988 views in the same time range, is to say, 6,056 views per day. This is an increment of a 12% in page views.

You can easily see how articles are viewed during the school-year, and how visits are mostly done from monday to friday. This statistics reinforce our idea that this articles are mostly consumed by students, to help them learning concepts or, sometimes, copying for their assignments.

Tags: basque wikipedia, oer, education program, university, curriculum, content creation