Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting/September 2011

• Date and time: Tuesday, October 25, 2011, 8 a.m. PT, 16:00 CET
• Led by: Frank Schulenburg (U.S.)
• Short description: The first meeting will serve as an introduction to the Global Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting, its goals and its structure. Representatives from the U.S., Canada, and India will share information about the current status of the programs in their countries with the group. We will also look at the numbers for the month of September 2011.
• Etherpad link (source of these notes)
• Slides presented during meeting are in the link at right.

  

  Global Ed Oct 25

In attendance

• Frank Schulenburg, Wikimedia Foundation Global Education Program Director
• Ayush Khanna, Wikimedia Foundation Data Analyst
• Annie Lin, Wikimedia Foundation Global Education Program Manager
• Hisham Mundol, Wikimedia Foundation India Director
• Adel Iskandar, Georgetown University professor and Education Program Advisor, MENA
• LiAnna Davis, Wikimedia Foundation Global Education Program Communications Manager
• Jessie Wild, Wikimedia Foundation staff
• Sumana Harihareswara, Wikimedia Foundation staff
• Denis Barthel, Wikimedia Deutschland staff
• Elly Koepf, Wikimedia Deutschland staff
• Jonathan Obar, Michigan State University professor and Education Program Advisor, Canada
• Pete Forsyth), Wikipedia/Wikimedia contributor and wiki consultant
• Erkan Yilmaz, Wikiversity contributor
• James Salsman, Volunteer Wikimedian
• Juandev

…

Global Ed Program: Key Metrics (Ayush Khanna)

Basic measures

• Fall 2011 figures (work in progress):
• Universities: 51
• Courses: 98
• Professors: 95
• Students: 1997
• Campus Ambassadors: 108
• Online Ambassadors: 92

Computed metrics

• Fall 2011 figures
  • Students per Course: 17.9 in North America, 27.9 in India
  • Online Ambassadors per Course: 0.9
  • Campus Ambassadors per Course: 1.1 (consistent across North America and India)

Gender Ratios: How many women?

• Campus Ambassadors: 53% in North America, 38% in India
• Online Ambassadors: about 12%
• Students: Work in progress

U.S. Program (Annie Lin)

• 3rd semester now
• Regional Ambassadors run the program now on the ground
  • Recruit & on-board professors
  • Recruit & select Campus Ambassadors
  • In summer 2011, organized 9 trainings
• U.S. Education Program Associate to come on board Nov 1 - hopefully she will give report on U.S. program at next Global Edu metrics meeting

Canada Education Program (Jonathan Obar)

• 5 classes, which are going well
• Professors are excited
• Chair of Steering Committee said would like to work with Obar to find Regional Ambassador for Canada
• Actively looking to expand program to other universities, hoping to have 8-10 classes on board next semester
• Would like to bring on more Ambassadors, especially Regional Ambassadors
• Many students are writing about Canadian topics

India Education Program (Hisham Mundol)

• Wikipedia currently lacks articles on India-related topics, so important to work on those
• Majority of students & Campus Ambassadors never edited Wikipedia before
• One student who started in July now has a "Good Article"
• Challenges & needed changes -
  • Build adequate support infrastructure, e.g. more Online Ambassadors
  • Better communication with Wikipedia community, e.g. relevant WikiProjects, admins, posting more communication on-wiki rather than in private spaces
  • More stringent selection for participating schools, e.g. schools where students can write well in English
  • Motivating Ambassadors & students

Middle East / North Africa Education Program (Adel Iskandar)

• Has been speaking with various professors
• Was difficult to get faculty to respond to interest emails, needed to find them on-site & call via mobile phone
• Once on campus, could meet with multiple professors at once - productive
• Younger faculty understood how Wikipedia works
• Important to clarify to professors how exactly Wikipedia would fit into curriculum, and that the goal is to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool
• Important to show professors that this program would empower them to improve Arabic Wikipedia & contribute knowledge to the world
• Each campus has a small like-minded community - has a lot of potential for fostering community around this program
• Roadblocks come from communication with the university administration, who is looking at program from very official angle
• MENA is in unique moment (e.g. Egypt in a revolution) - increasing gap between administrators & professors
• Not enough time to reach out to everyone!
• Need to have direct contact between WM and each professor

German Education Program (Denis Barthel)

• Kick-off meeting planned in April, after classes have started, and then expand program to other areas
• Need to train trainers
• (Please help add to this section - Denis & Elly?)

• • Ways to get and incorporate community "buy-in" / support
    • Make sure the quality of the content is high
    • Involve community early
    • Have someone from a specific WikiProject "in charge of" (i.e., advising) a certain class (e.g., Germany starting this model)

Suggestions

• Pete: noise in the background makes it hard to follow; meeting gives good overview of entire program
• James: would like more textual data on meeting because hard to follow at times; happy to hear about gender balance among Campus Ambassadors; wondering if growth in students, institutions, classes, and instructors will continue to outstrip Ambassador growth; can guidance to instructors on plagiarism help recruit editors? (see below); can we monitor the quality of such recruits with the same sort of a diff review queue we've been using for pending/recent changes?; can we use the same kind of review queue to handle volunteer review of changes to high-risk specialized watchlists? (also below)
• Adel (on issue of copyright violation): for the most part people in Arab World respect authorship, although people are expected to share information openly; professors are fairly confident that most students do not plaigiarize (Adel please correct me if I misheard you - audio quality not great)

Questions

• Why is there no mention of Brazil starting in 2012?

• Question for Ayush: If I understand correctly, you indicate that the goal is to *reduce* the number of Online Ambassadors (for lower "impact on community".) Could you explain? Recent experience seems to suggest that lower numbers of OAs *increase* the negative impact on community. -PF

  I wouldn't say we're trying to reduce the # of OAs. In fact we would like to involve more Wikipedia community members (and also newbies) in the program as Ambassadors, and as the program expands we will only need MORE Online Ambassadors. We're still strategizing how exactly to go about recruiting more OAs, and whether we want to restructure the OA program somewhat (such as more clearly defining what is expected of them), but we're certainly looking to bring in more Online Ambassadors.

• Are slides downloadable? -PF

  I would also like to see those graphs published. James Salsman (talk)

  Y Done, see File:Global Ed Oct 25 2011.pdf

• Guidance for instructors regarding plagiarists? With the recently announced statistic that 30% of prolific editors started out vandalizing, I'm not sure we can rule out student plagiarists as a potential gender balanced source of new editors the Foundation could recruit by issuing formal guidance to teachers. Such guidance might look like, "...Foundation recommends that students caught plagiarizing from Wikimedia sites be assigned to improve (the plagiarized) articles on the site (no matter how slightly) so that they might become familiar with improving wiki articles."

  The 30% figure has been retracted from the Summer of Research project; update requested.

  The 30% stat is incorrect and has not been included in the summer research findings. It was roughly 30% of the top 100 editors by edit count to EN that had been reverted for any reason in their first editing sessions, and it was miscommunicated that it was for vandalism. The level clearly reverted in their first edit session for vandalism in specific was not significant. Steven Walling at work 18:37, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

  Good to know; thank you. This does not change the premise of the proposal. James Salsman (talk) 21:29, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

  Is there a way to perform a measured trial (by instructors, plagiarists, and/or classes) of such guidance?

• Search failover to PubMed "Reviews" for secondary source search assistance?[1]

  Also include at least top two commercial and top one alternate external search engine)?

• Health and safety article diff review queue salted with bad diffs to provide assignments for anyone who wants to review diffs:[2]

  Test accuracy of reviewers by checking for correctly scored bad diffs and agreement with other reviewers? (2 out of 3?)

• Asynchronous audio (i.e., microphone upload)?

• Should we try to meet by audio or irc next time? Either one is fine with me, but the background noise, soft speakers, and accents were difficult (but worth it.)

  I think the etherpad really helped. I would recommend trying etherpad only at least once.

• Should we ask those who aren't good English typists to try using Google Voice Search to transcribe their audio before posting to text?