Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-12-12/Opinion essay

Opinion essay

Wikipedia in Academe – and vice versa

What we're good at – and what we're not

United States Education Program campus ambassadors at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. posing with a repurposed quotation of philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Wikipedia has come a long way by relying on self-organized volunteer labour. It's hard for most current editors to imagine what it was like years ago, when pages like Neurology consisted of just two sentences, and browsing the encyclopedia frequently led you to articles so weak they could be improved in a few seconds without sources, just by typing in information you knew off the top of your head. There's still an enormous amount of work to do, but it's now rarer to randomly stumble across articles that can be improved without significant research.^[1]

One result of this change is that you can get a sense of what interests Wikipedians by looking at which areas have good coverage. It's not just video games and military history; there are specialists – some professionals in their field and some who are pursuing a hobby interest – who focus on highly detailed areas, such as Banksia, lemurs, or early English ecclesiastical history. You can also get an idea of what doesn't particularly interest Wikipedians by looking to see what areas are poorly covered: psychology, for example, or major topics in art.^[2]

We'd all like to see Wikipedia's coverage improve in the areas where it's weakest, but we're all volunteers. Not everyone focuses on content; and those who do generally have areas of expertise. With standards for sourcing higher than they used to be, it's no longer enough just to be interested; you also have to have access to good sources. For topics such as Architecture, or History of Sweden, it's not even enough to have good sources; to do the job right you have to have a truly broad understanding of the literature – which sources are fundamental to the subject, which theories are regarded as mainstream, the ideas that need to be covered in the main articles, and what can be relegated to subarticles or ignored completely. In other words, there are many articles that a non-expert simply can't improve above a certain point. This doesn't appear to be a problem caused by poor editor retention. It's certainly true that we need to do a better job of keeping new editors engaged, but simply increasing editor participation won't automatically focus attention on underserved areas.^[3]

Wikipedia needs academics

How can we attract experts in these topics to edit Wikipedia? A professor of physics who spends time improving an article on weak isospin isn't going to get a publication credit that will help his or her career. And Wikipedians don't respond well to a display of credentials; an editor who says "I'm a professor and I know this is right" is going to be met with "show me the citation", which they may find hostile, particularly when the fact in question is something they regard as so basic as to need no evidence. On the other hand, a dispute may arise not because a reviewing editor ignores credentials but because they lack expertise: broad statements can be hard to source, and it may be that only an expert can judge accurately whether a source fully supports a given assertion.^[4] These are real concerns, but despite this, some academic groups are already beginning to take the initiative in improving these topics. The Association for Psychological Science (APS), for example, recently launched an initiative to ensure, among other things, that Wikipedia's "articles about psychological research and theory are accurate, up-to-date [and] complete".^[5] The American Sociological Association included a "Call to Duty" in their November 2011 newsletter, with two goals: "first, to improve the sociology entries in Wikipedia by making it easier for sociologists to become involved in writing and editing them, and second, to facilitate professors giving Wikipedia-writing assignments to students in their courses”.^[6] This is a promising start, but it would be sad if the experts who might arrive as a result of these initiatives are driven away, as many new editors are driven away, by the difficulty of learning how to engage with Wikipedia.

In addition to proposals such as the APS's initiative, there is an ongoing project by the Wikimedia Foundation to get academics to engage with Wikipedia – the Global Education Program (GEP). This grew out of a project called the Public Policy Initiative, in which academics in public policy programs were recruited to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool – they asked their students to improve Wikipedia articles in the area of public policy. Existing editors were recruited to help the students, and the result was a success – the students added nearly nine million bytes of data to the encyclopedia,^[7] and a statistical analysis of the quality of the added material showed that the average article worked on improved dramatically.^[8] The next step was to expand beyond public policy: the USEP (the US branch of the Global Education Program) now recruits academics in all areas of study, and matches them with Wikipedians who are willing to act as ambassadors, to teach and guide the students and instructors. There has been a good deal of interest in the program, and the fall 2011 semester saw 77 classes signed up as part of the USEP – so many, in fact, that it's straining the ability of the limited number of volunteer ambassadors to effectively assist the students.^[9] In addition to the USEP, there is a signup page for school programs that did not form via the USEP that lists another 55 classes, and there are also active classes that do not declare themselves at either page.

One of the goals of the USEP is to recruit new editors,^[10] but I would be very surprised if it's turning out to be a cost-effective recruitment method. The students edit because they have to, so the retention rate is abysmal. We do have some successes at turning students into editors, but they are rare – too rare to justify the significant resources that the WMF and the community are putting into the program. It could also be argued that the use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool is a contribution to the public good, and a demonstration of the value of Wikipedia. Both these things are true, but neither point should be allowed to preempt the primary goal of improving our encyclopedic content. I believe the USEP's significance lies instead in the fact that it is the first time that there has been an attractive way for academics to engage with Wikipedia. It is the academics who can make the investment in the USEP worthwhile for the encyclopedia.

The future of the education programs

Right now, the US program is focused on scaling: recruiting large numbers of classes, increasing ambassador recruitment to support those classes, and training campus support staff to teach students and instructors as much as possible about editing so that they don't cause more harm than good. I want to be very clear that "more harm than good" is not a theoretical problem; the Indian EP (which has the potential to be an even bigger asset to the encyclopedia than the USEP) required a great deal of cleanup work, as reported recently in the Signpost, and it is easy to find editors complaining about individual students or classes making a mess of articles this past semester. This sort of impact on the community is only worthwhile if we are gaining significantly from the program – and the biggest return on investment we can get here is the academics, not the students. In fact, the current focus on growth is actively harmful – as supervision by ambassadors becomes more and more stretched, we will have thousands of students contributing to Wikipedia without truly understanding it. The burden of coping with this will fall on new page patrollers, recent changes patrollers, and the editors who already have the students' articles on their watchlists. Even initiatives such as the Association for Psychological Science's call to action are likely to end up using the USEP approach, rather than having the professors edit directly, partly because the template for using Wikipedia in the classroom exists and is being widely publicized.^[11] There are other education programs for the English-language Wikipedia, such as the Canadian program, and as far as I can tell the WMF regards growth as a high-priority goal for all such programs.

The USEP, and any other similar programs, need to change their focus. Instead of trying to scale the program to the largest possible number of classes, we should be focusing all our resources on working with academics who are receptive to the idea of becoming editors. We can provide a good deal of support to their classes, but in return we should be asking for them to participate, as part of the Wikipedia editing community, in curating the articles in their specialities. Writing a good article or featured article on Wikipedia requires more than knowing a topic inside out; you have to understand what the experienced editors here understand about what makes a good encyclopedia article. We have that, and the academics have knowledge – and now, finally, thanks to the global education program, we have something they want – an innovative and productive way for them to teach their students. Any instructor who gets a couple of good articles under their belt will understand Wikipedia well enough that they will be a much better instructor for their students, and will in turn reduce the burden for the ambassadors supporting their class. We need more subject matter experts, and we need the education programs in the US and elsewhere to help us acquire them.

How do we do this? Here's my prescription.

The community needs to engage with the Global Education Program, and particularly with the USEP, the largest of the country EPs. These programs are largely driven off-wiki, since they are WMF operations rather than community initiatives. Two key WMF staff members are Frank Schulenburg, the Global Education Program Director, and Annie Lin, the Global Education Program Manager. I suspect the best place to discuss these programs with the WMF is the USEP talk page.
The quality metrics which were put in place for the Public Policy Initiative need to be restarted for the USEP and other programs. The USEP will have a cost to the community in terms of support, and we need to understand the benefit to article quality to be sure that it's worthwhile. Currently metrics for quantity exist, such as pages that measure student editing statistics; these aren't inherently harmful but anyone who has spent time reverting poor student contributions this semester will appreciate that a quality metric is at least as important.^[12]
The USEP should change its focus in two ways: from growth to quality, and from students to academics.
- Growth without support will lead to stress on the community and poorer quality. Instead we should work out what it means to support a class properly – there are far too few active online ambassadors to properly review and help with the current class load; the ratio currently seems to be about one ambassador to two classes, which means many students will never hear from an ambassador at all.
- Students will disappear after a single year; academics, if we help them, will return year after year. Any academic can run a class using Wikipedia, with or without formal involvement with the USEP, but the USEP should focus its resources on instructors who show willingness to engage with editors on Wikipedia; who participate in reviewing and managing their own students' contributions; and most of all who show interest in working on articles themselves. In return we can supply ambassadors as teaching assistants – mentors, in Wikipedia terminology.

If we manage the influx of academic interest correctly, Wikipedia will acquire an institutional connection to academia that will be a source of new content for our articles and an intellectual resource to assist with long-term growth. Wikipedia does not need to beg for respectability any more; it is already widely used by academics as a starting point for research, and sometimes for more than that.^[13] We need to accept our respectability, and plan to learn from – and teach – the academic community.

Notes

^ I'm talking about content here – it's easy to find articles that need copyediting or formatting.
^ Recent quotes by editors at the Featured Article Candidates talk page include "the quality across the board in psychology is horrific ... most of the psych articles we could consider "important" on any scale in the psych realm are utterly dismal." and "in my area of the visual arts ... most articles on major topics are crap (Indian art, Italian Renaissance sculpture, in fact anything to do with sculpture, Baroque, Rococo, Romantic art etc etc)" (diff). For the psychology articles you can get an idea of the assessed quality from the Psychology articles quality chart.
^ See the Editor Trends Study for more background on editor retention.
^ For example, a Wikipedian who is a professional neuroscientist recently commented that "For topics with a large literature, where most of the statements synthesize dozens if not hundreds of sources ... it is simply futile to demand that readers with no subject matter knowledge be able to verify articles on large topics – only an expert reviewer can properly do it. I seek [...] an acknowledgement that referencing requirements should be tuned to the breadth of a topic -- the larger a topic, the lesser the need for detailed page-referencing of every line, and the greater the need for reviewers with enough expertise to have a good sense of whether an article is accurate and comprehensive without having to consult sources regarding every line."
^ See the APS's Wikipedia Initiative page.
^ See the November 2011 issue of Footnotes.
^ See the wrap-up blog entry for details.
^ See the statistical analysis of the PPI for details; you may also be interested in looking at the assessment rubric or an example assessment page.
^ See, for example, some extended discussion on this topic at the USEP talk page.
^ See the "increase participation" goal at the strategy wiki; that page is linked from one of the USEP project pages.
^ See this response to the APS initiative for an example of an instructor's response. The drive to expand the USEP was visible at the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit, held this summer in Boston.
^ The PPI quality metric was quite labour-intensive, which may make it more difficult to implement. The Foundation does acknowledge that quantity metrics are inadequate.
^ Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed recently remarked on the use of text plucked from a Wikipedia article in a symposium paper by the president of the American Sociological Association.

In this issue

Opinion essay

Discuss this story

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The elephant in the room is that for some reason people who spend 40 years learning everything they can about, say, the Peloponnesian War — and indeed, advancing the body of human knowledge — get all pissy when their contributions are edited away by Randy in Boise who heard somewhere that sword-wielding skeletons were involved. And they get downright irate when asked politely to engage in discourse with Randy until the sword-skeleton theory can be incorporated into the article without passing judgment. We need to solve that problem before bringing in lots of academics. Otherwise academics who join the project will leave in frustration, and word will get around that contributing to Wikipedia is nothing but an exercise in futility. If that happens we'll be worse off than before. Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 18:12, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I don't think that's actually the problem you're making it out to be. The expert input into Hoxne hoard or Human papillomavirus, for instance, hasn't been removed by a mob of ill-informed editors. On the whole on Wikipedia, good contributions drive out bad. The same is true of good contributions from academics, so long as the academics are aware that the social norms of Wikipedia are different from those of academia (Note that academia isn't exactly a stranger to long-running flamewars, but theirs tend to be conducted at conferences and in learned journals!). The main challenge is getting busy academics to understand that contributing to Wikipedia extends their own personal reach and impact. The Land (talk) 19:03, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  - On Hoxne hoard, this was a carefully engineered collaboration, so may not be typical. Rich Farmbrough, 20:46, 13 December 2011 (UTC).[reply]
I'm rather a fan of this piece. One of the biggest problems with the WMF is that they're apparently all dreamers. They charge ahead pushing noble ideas without adequately assessing the impact or laying out infrastructure ahead of time. Whatever else is accomplished by these noble charges, a great number of completely avoidable problems could have been... well... avoided, if the WMF were only able to start small and stay small until all the kinks were worked out. When we're talking millions of dollars and hundreds of users being thrown at something, you'd think that troubleshooting would take place well ahead of time. If they did so, they certainly did a piss poor job of doing so. We need to put a cap on the programs: they're not allowed to get bigger until Wikipedia can support them. As for the India outreach program, well some programs just need to be cut entirely. Sven Manguard Wha? 19:42, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- I don't think this is entirely fair to the WMF; the PPI was their attempt to lay out infrastructure, and they did a pretty good job with it. The USEP is not a major problem yet, though it is creaking a little; my argument is that we're heading in the wrong direction, not that the program is already broken. I agree in principle that the right approach is small successes followed by gradual scaling, so perhaps the issue here is that the scaling is too rapid. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 20:02, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We do desperately need experts, not so much because of specific deep knowledge, but because they understand how the balance of items at what is a basic level in their field should go - what is due weight, what is fringe but interesting, what is interesting but irrelevant, what has been debunked.

It behooves us though not to forget the flip side of this equation - academics are subject to the same foibles as other Wikipedians and people in general. When things get a little deeper there are turf wars in many academic fields, discussions, sometimes friendly, sometimes bitter, run in the correspondence pages of learned journals for months, friends cite friends, peer review is not as "pure" as we would like, this is without systemic problems like publication bias. We recently had fallacious figures from an academic reprinted in Signpost, so this is not just a hypothetical.

These days, though, I don't think there is the same problem with academics having references demanded, they see how extensive the referencing on Wikipedia tries to be, and are happy to provide references. And often there are "semi-experts" or "lay experts" who will help with that. There is a general move too far in demanding references, I would agree, mostly due to an out of context quote being bandied around.

Rich Farmbrough, 20:44, 13 December 2011 (UTC).[reply]

Obviously recruiting experts is important, but academic experts make their names by disagreeing with one another, and I doubt Wikipedia is geared up to deal with that. I think Mike has missed one important point though, which is that if properly monitored students can learn the importance of sourcing and referencing. I recall during my first week as an undergraduate being dragged around the library and having drummed into me the importance of reliable sourcing. It may be that the failed projects have focused on the wrong things. There's no reason to believe, for instance, that a student in India, Pakistan, or anywhere else has any special knowledge of any social sciences topic, but they ought to be able to learn from trying to write an article on one. Malleus Fatuorum 21:03, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There is another way of getting more academics involved. By suggesting that they write articles/papers on the subject of their choice, get it peer reviewed by some colleagues, and put it up on a website, preferably with a CC by (something) license. Then, they can post a link in the relevant article, or it's talk page. The kick in it for the academic would be that the academics would have an easy outlet for their views, and would get credited for it. We would have more material and sources. They may be allowed to write new articles from their own work, with the caveat that they should not insist on keeping the WP version to their liking.117.198.51.14 (talk) 00:08, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not really practical under the current system of academic funding/prestige. Which journal a paper is published in is important, and the journals end up with the copyright on the paper. Gerardw (talk) 21:35, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I half-agree - or maybe a bit more than half - with "USEP should change its focus in two ways: from growth to quality, and from students to academics". For the first sub-point, I totally agree; I made the analogy in Boston, when Sue demonstrated the contributions of the PPP with a large stack of photocopying paper - without wishing to disparage the tremendous work done, I felt that the whole idea of merely counting added-text was wrong-wrong-wrong, and we may as well have demonstrated it with a palette-full of toilet paper; we must get away from that extended version of "editcountitis". I disagree that "the biggest return on investment we can get here is the academics, not the students"; the students of today are the academics of tomorrow, and any work we can to do make them feel positive about Wikipedia is an investment in the future; academia in 20 years time will certainly use online resources in a very different way, and right now is the opportunity to lay good foundations regarding Wikipedia. However, I do think that Wiki-in-Edu is best driven from the top down; if the lecturers and the other 'wikipedia trainers' (online Ambs, etc) have a solid knowledge of fundamental Wikipedia ethics, and indeed an enthusiasm for the core values, then that filters down to the class-work; indeed, I think that was the major reason for the failings with the India programme - the "drive from the top" was inadequate. I also fear that WMF is taking too much of a back-seat; as the programmes expand, "we" (the projects and/or WMF) need to provide the tools and support to energize the key programme participants; it seems that the programme leaders want the programme to be self-perpetuating, and whilst it is admirable to want academia to go forth and create their own programmes, it needs careful guidance, to keep things on track. It's a tremendous opportunity for the long-term future; it's a very worthy investment, but we cannot expect it to grow without sowing seeds. Chzz ► 03:02, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This is a good article - thanks for writing it Mike. However, I disagree with your view that "all our resources" should be directed away from students and towards academics. While I agree that class-based editing is generally not worth the effort (and when it goes wrong can cause a lot of upset and wasted effort for the poor students and their lecturer), given that a high proportion of our most active editors are university students, I suspect it's an OK way to bolster their numbers. Surely some resources should continue to be directed towards peer to peer recruitment and support of student editors? Nick-D (talk) 10:29, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We should support the students the best way we can, but right now the USEP is trying to expand as quickly as it can, and I don't think that's going to lead to good support for students or academics. My argument is that if we give concentrated high-quality support to those academics who are willing to learn about Wikipedia, we will be expanding the pool of support for students, which in turn will enable us to support more classes since those academics will need less from Wikipedians. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:32, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I also agree this is a good article and important subject. However, as both a professor and Wikipedian, I must confess I am mildly skeptical about the participation of my fellow academics in Wikipedia, especially those who aren't particularly interested in becoming Wikipedians in the cultural sense, i.e. understand the new project they're participating in and its values (some of the mathematics-professor Wikipedians are excellent in that regard). But as for more specific problems. One, I've found academics to be extremely bad at restraining themselves from self-promotion. More edits by professors than you'd think are to things as absurd as an article about themselves, or if not themselves, then their research group, institution, results bearing their name, etc. Two, I've found them often a bad judge of "neutrality", especially in areas they are too close to; as in politics, someone themselves engaged in a dispute is not the best person to write about it. And, many academics are engaged in acrimonious debates within their field, or between their field and others, and they can have very different views of what "neutral" is. Of course, some of these problems can be overcome or mitigated; when I try to recruit new Wikipedia editors from academia, I usually suggest they start with articles broadly in their area but not their specific area, so e.g. if you're a theoretical computer scientist, start with an article on an important theoretical-CS result that is not one you personally are strongly invested in, and try to cite as sources papers written by people who are not you. Medium-low luck so far. --Delirium (talk) 13:23, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
These are all good points, but Wikipedia has fairly strong selection mechanisms that I think will filter out some of these problems automatically -- that is, an academic who insists on self-promotion is eventually likely to get frustrated with the opposition from other editors (not specifically from ambassadors) and will leave. That's the right outcome in that case. If it turns out that academics who are willing to try editing Wikipedia and capable of doing it well are very rare, then my proposed approach is no more efficient at using ambassador resources than the existing approach. However, I know enough academics who do edit Wikipedia well to think that there's no need to be too pessimistic on that score. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library)
That seems reasonable. I'm somewhat wary of these initiatives because I worry they sometimes take on a tone of: let's figure out how to fix Wikipedia culture so it's more like academic culture, when I think Wikipedia culture has the better side of the argument in some (though not all) cases. :-) But it doesn't seem like that's what's happening in this case, so I agree more outreach to find the professors who would be good editors is good. --Delirium (talk) 13:01, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mike, thanks for your thoughtful essay on Wikipedia and academia. I did want to correct one misconception here as the person running the WMF's U.S. Education Program. We absolutely agree that the USEP should shift its concern from quantity to quality. Since I started, I've been working on how to support our students better next term. One of the USEP's major goals for next semester is to improve our support and resources for students, professors, the community, etc. For this reason, we've aimed to maintain our current number of classes that are a part of the program (in other words: not grow!) so we can focus on deepening our support structures.

One of the ways we are trying to prevent some of these problems is by altering our training materials. After some great feedback on the USEP talk page, we are creating a professor orientation that will expose them upfront to some of the challenges students are facing in adapting traditional assignments to a Wikipedia assignment. Another aim of this orientation is to encourage professors to make edits themselves, as it will give them a better foundation in Wikipedia-editing.

I'm also intrigued by the idea of focusing on professors editing rather than students, but as others have mentioned here, getting that to work has been difficult. But I'd love to see someone take this on and develop a pilot program to get professors editing -- perhaps this could be a meta:Wikimedia_Fellowships project? JMathewson (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Jami -- thanks for the comments. I'm glad to hear that we're focusing on quality; that's great news. That prompts two questions: first, do you have a goal for the right number of students per ambassador? At the moment I think we're running at something like 75 or 100 students for each ambassador, which seems much too high to me. The second question is how we are planning to measure quality. There are two kinds of relevant quality, I think: quality of work and quality of teaching (by which I mean the quality of the student/instructor experience). The quality of the work done is an issue to the community, and I'd like to see some version of the PPI metric used. The WP:MED followup (linked in Doc James' comments at the end of this page) is another way to do it. These are labour intensive, unfortunately, but if the students are actually generating more work for the community than they're adding in value we need to know that (and conversely it's good to know which instructors or classes are doing the best work, so we can try to understand why). Are the questionnaires that were put together for the instructors and students the way you plan to evaluate the quality of the students' and instructors' experience on Wikipedia? E.g. did they get enough support from the ambassadors? Were there benefits from working on Wikipedia? What interactions did they have with the community and did this help them learn? If so, then I think that will be very helpful -- for example, if we universally get comments that the classes received enough help from their ambassadors, then it's clear I'm wrong about needed to reduce the number of classes we're supporting.

I also am glad to hear about the expanded training materials and professor orientation. I assume this will be done by the campus ambassadors? I think this is a very positive step.

I agree that it will be hard to get the professors to edit. I don't think it could be a fellowship project, unless I'm misunderstanding the parameters for that; fellowships aren't for things that could/should be done by volunteers, so I don't think it would be possible to make this a fellowship effort. What I do think we should do is something like this: when professors sign up for the spring semester, they should be notified that we may not have enough volunteers to adequately support every class, and we will notify them if we can't provide any ambassador support so that they can decide if they want to continue without that support. We should also ask them as part of the signup if they would be willing to work on improving an article in their own field as part of learning how their students will be engaging with Wikipedia. Any professor who answers "yes" to that question should be given top priority in getting support -- they should get ambassadors for their class who are prepared to work with the professor as well as the students. Finally, if we decided (e.g. from the questionnaires being sent out) that the right student/ambassador ratio is, say, 15:1, then we should identify the classes we will support and ask ambassadors to assign themselves to classes in that list, and keep a list of unsupported classes so that additional volunteers who come along mid-semester can find more classes to support. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:31, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Good essay. Trying to stimulate growth in a community that needs to grow organically is a real balancing act. I have long thought that the Ambassadors' skills would be better invested in teaching interested instructors about the wiki way, rather than serving as teaching assistants for instructors who may not understand the subject—wiki editing—well enough to teach it themselves. Instructors would be well advised to gain significant on-wiki experience, have their work and their community interaction critiqued by an Ambassador, and review case studies of successful and unsuccessful class exercises. Anyone can edit, but not everyone can teach wiki editing without preparation—professors with a sense of professional responsibility should already know this.
Leveraging knowledge by teaching those who want to teach is a powerful way to accelerate organic growth. The hard part is stimulating interest in teachers to really take it on. ~ Ningauble (talk) 19:27, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this essay Mike. I agree with a lot of it. Successful article writing depends on editor ability, motivation and support. Students studying the elementary aspects of their subject are no more able to write or contribute to a professional encyclopaedia article than any reasonably bright person. We really need to move up to the level of graduate student or those with academic or professional careers in the subject before their degree has much influence on the quality of their writing. Traditionally, Wikipedia contributors have been intrinsically motivated volunteers. These student assignments mark a shift in the editor population towards extrinsically motivated writers. There is a pressure to complete the assignment even if one is not proud of the result -- whereas a volunteer might give up or try something less ambitious. And not all the students will be any good. Previously, a dire essay would end up as so much paper in a drawer. Now such bad writing might harm an article read by thousands of people every day. Obviously, the opposite is also true: great students will get the chance to have their fine writing reach a worldwide audience. But these students aren't getting sufficient support.

I note the comment above about the difficulties getting the professors to edit, and some of the issues academics face adapting to the goals of WP. But unless these students can be inspired to write for WP rather than just instructed to write for WP, we won't retain them. Unless they can get ready access to been-there-done-that support from their institution, they will struggle. There is a risk that a poor experience of writing on WP as a student could put a generation of young editors off the idea altogether.

Lastly, I don't believe the Randy in Boise issue is as bad as some make it. Sure it happens, but some of our burnt-out experts sought conflict by playing whack-a-mole with the POV pushers. There are thousands of serious and important topics on WP that one can edit without conflict, where the edit traffic is so low one could go on holiday for a month and see no edits while away. Writing for WP is a unique challenge that requires a major shift in writing style for some. Some just don't get it, and then blame WP when issues arise. I think it would be valuable to write an informal guideline or essay to help those used to academic writing adjust to what is expected on WP. That would help both the profs and the students. Colin°^Talk 20:39, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree; and I think that's something that could be included in the additional orientation Jami Mathewson mentions above. Do you want to write it? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:42, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

While reviewing the psychology student's edits (see below), the same mistakes kept coming up. And every now and then, WP:MED see some new "expert" writer appear who just doesn't get WP. Such as writing an article like a review of the primary literature. Or just not understanding WP:V and WP:NOR at all. So I see the disconnect between academic and WP writing from the WP point of view. I can only guess at some of the reasons for the mistakes, but I'm sure some of my guesses would be right. There are many people on WP who are in academia or have much more experience of it than me who could help make such a guideline. If someone wants to say where to put the essay, then I could dump some thoughts and ideas on the talk page and we can see what happens from there. --Colin°^Talk 20:35, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like a good idea. I left a note on Jami Mathewson's talk page about this suggesting she contact you; I would assume she's coordinating the orientation material. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 17:20, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Randy problem is specifically bad in areas affected by off-wiki ideological conflicts. For instance, I can't imagine any academic wishing to waste time editing our articles on climate change or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when there are legions of Randies ready to jump in and trash the articles (and their authors) whenever the latest faux outrage hits Fox News or Rush Limbaugh. For a more micro example of the problem, I can offer Cyrus Cylinder, an article I've been working on for a while. It's worth contrasting that to Hoxne Hoard, which Rich Farnborough mentioned above, about another British Museum item. The Hoxne Hoard article was written by a group of editors (including me) as a highly focused collaboration with experts from the British Museum. It was successful and effective not just because there was a good bunch of people involved with it, but also because nobody has any ideological difficulties with the subject matter. The Cyrus Cylinder article is about an artifact a few hundred years older than the Hoxne Hoard which has had the misfortune to become a symbol of Iranian nationalism, complete with pseudohistorical claims and outright falsifications. I've collaborated with a couple of academic experts to develop the article. However, although the article has been improved significantly our only reward has been to experience denunciations off-wiki by Iranian nationalists (some of whom are frankly a nasty bunch) and repeated episodes of Iranian Randies attempting to hijack the article and delete academic views that they dislike. Frustratingly, other editors have usually tended to avoid getting involved in resolving disputes, even though the article has nearly 100 watchers. The bottom line is that often the only thing protecting articles against Randies is an active and involved editorial community, and for specialist subjects this is all too often absent. Prioryman (talk) 21:19, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think that's a good characterization of what articles are likely to get Randyized. That sounds like something that should be included in professor orientation too, so that the professors understand some of the nuances of article selection for their students. It's not just Randy-magnets that need to be avoided; just today I saw someone having to userfy student essays such as Global Media and Newspapers. The teacher for that class either did not understand or did not successfully convey to the students what makes an article encyclopedic. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 15:47, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Good essay, Mike. You explained the current situation with background and made specific recommendations, including how to measure the success of those recommendations. There are several methods for dealing with the "Randy" issue, such as by putting all featured articles on sighted revisions, but WP should be aware that this may have a downside in new editor retention and the like. Anyway, good job. Cla68 (talk) 00:09, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have been encouraging my colleagues in academia and education publicly to criticize Wikipedia at every turn because students use it too frequently and there is no rigorous content review process. I also advocate that if academics feel the need to correct or add something to Wikipedia, they can most easily avoid the special sorts of pain alluded to in the WP:RANDY, WP:CRUSH, and WP:MMORPG essays by contributing as IPs — identifying themselves with their real name and academic position in their talkpage signatures if they think it important. Even though there are parts of the encyclopedia that are locked out to IP editors, I've found that contributing as an IP removes much of the problematic aspects of Wikipedia culture and allows content to speak for itself. Content is, after all, the only reason an academic would want to associate themselves with this somewhat seedy website. Leave the user accounts, administrator roles, and other advanced-levels of Wikipedium to the wikiholics, drama-mongers, and gamers. Keeping the expectations low is the best way to avoid problems. When an academic expects to be treated badly, they aren't as upset when it inevitably happens. 128.59.169.46 (talk) 17:03, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think there are two main groups in academia that are apt to be fruitful for contributions to WP in the future — students (who are already here) and emeritus professors. The time aspect is major, with publish-or-perish more than just a catchy slogan and teaching duties sapping all available hours. Retired profs have more time at their disposal, no such requirement to write, and — we can hope — an interest in passing on their knowledge to future generations. Logically the group to target, it would seem. The major impediments are Wikipedia's oft-times nasty internal culture and the lack of some reasonable approximation of WYSIWYG content-writing software. (We still expect our contributors to write code, albeit simple!) I think the Randy-in-Boise phenomenon is a fictional cartoon, the real problem relates to unrestrained POV warriors escaping discipline. Hopefully and presumably WMF is at work on the software issue. The internal culture issue is necessarily a work in progress. Carrite (talk) 03:03, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot express how strongly I agree with the sentiments here. I am saying this as somebody who has been involved with the teaching with Wikipedia approach (and with teaching students) for quite a few years. Hear, hear! --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 16:47, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I very strongly support the ideas expressed in this essay. I support quality over quantity as an emphasis, and I support the idea of principle focus on academics and encouraging/assisting them to wade into the Wikipedia edit space, difficult as that can be for some of them, for the main reason that they might want their field, which they clearly care about enough to study for many years of their lives, to be better represented in Wikipedia articles. I am a mentor in the ambassador program (was involved on the Public Policy initiative last spring) and am also an academic. My experience with the students I mentored, in the main, was like the vast majority of students I teach. Student participate as part of a means to an end (passing a class, or getting a degree) -- only a very small number are intellectually interested in the topic, or in contributing to a growing body of knowledge called Wikipedia. Getting more academics productively contributing to this emeging body of knowledge is the much better objective. Cheers. N2e (talk) 22:49, 7 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Stats on value of student edits

Doc James recently left this note on my talk page, which I'm reproducing here: the link show exactly what value was introduced by each student edit for a given class.

We are currently crunching some numbers at WP:MED here [1]. Things do not look that upbeat in Canada. Have been involved with a great deal of outreach as seen here [2] and the effect has been mixed at best.Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 19:50, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

So far it doesn't look very positive. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:56, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ouch! Indeed not! --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 20:36, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The numbers are very much what I'd have expected in the first place for this type of an assignment. I don't see what's so negative - unless somebody is under the illusion that students are going to be jumping through "learn how to be a good Wikipedia editor" hoops for 3% of credit. In fact, that about a quarter of them tried at least a little, is quite positive to me, as I'd expect a much smaller amount to try it at all. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk to me} 16:51, 21 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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