Talk:Brazil Program/Education program/Goal/pilot - first semester of 2012

Some small points:

1. Measure of success #2: At least 75% of the content contributed by students "survives" (i.e., is not deleted from the Wikipedia namespace).

- Last time I checked no contribution of students were deleted. One article was merge to another but it was OK. All issues was discussed here and properly solved.

1. (number still depends on one professor answer if she will use both courses)

If you are talking about Juliana's regular course the answer is no. It would be really hard because she wasn't able to schedule a lab and she wasn't prepared to a offline course. We tried to figure out a small outreach like a presentation but strikes disturbed her plans.

1. At least 75% of the students participating in the pilot add 500 words or more to the Wikipedia article namespace.

Good. I like this one!

1. At least 50 students in the Education Program part of the pilot start editing (more than 5 edits in the article namespace; 2011:

This semester it can be calculated manually but when education program grows we will have to figure out an automatic waw to do that. Maybe Helder can help us with that. Another important topic related is that "sandbox strategy" could overload community with merge request (Tom already noticed that and we discussed and another place).

1. What is the impact on the Portuguese Wikipedia community of student editing?

I don't if it is what you mean but I'd like to point out Stegop's reaction. Regards, OTAVIO1981 (talk) 20:23, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Trying to answer question on the Education Pilot

Questions we would like to answer through the pilot

The 6-month pilot in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro will mainly answer five questions:

1 Impact on Portuguese Wikipedia: Will an organized program to work with students in their university courses result in the contribution good quality content to Portuguese Wikipedia by most students? How many of those students we are working with are going to use Wikipedia?

Among 6 courses previously planned, 5 have had at least one activity on Wikipedia. 20 articles have been edited and/or created so far during the first semester and 10 are still on sandboxes. Three have been proposed for deletion (one was kept, one was deleted and one is still under discussion). None of those articles have became featured articles and some of them have been recently moved to the main domain. However we are very close to achieve the target of 75% of cotributions being kept in Wikipedia (more 2 articles moved and we'll be there!). Goals of engaging and retaining new students is the hardest one here. About 40 people (out of about 120) created accounts.--Oona (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't fell confortable to proceed with merge or moving to mainspace any article that the teacher didn't say it was correct of finished. For example, edivaldo pointed out a lot of work to do and I thought it wasn't finished. It should be more clear throught the teacher when articles were ready to be moved. For now, I have no idea what article was deleted but I'll check tomorrow.186.244.162.101 22:34, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure who is talking here. Just to clarify, articles from the public policy course were the most difficult to proceed with. You're right this didn't happen in the Physics course case. The problem in the first case was that in the last lesson articles were uploaded, but obviously there were needs of changes. Tom has asked for help to a some people, who moved a few, but some remained in the sandboxes. Would like to highlight we're not saying it's anybody's fault. We just meant to say this model might need improvements, because there may be barriers when not 10, not 20, but 100 articles are created, depending on how well finalized the articles were. --Oona (WMF) (talk) 02:16, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Before giving my answer for each question bellow, just adding Oona's answer were given while I was on her side and I gave some input to her comments here. Yes, articles of the physics course were moved after one month the course has ended and the professor has had to still fix the content before allowing the CA to ask to merge each article. From the 2 courses which has generated more articles on sadboxes, the most difficult one to have its content on the main domain was the public policy one. This has two main reasons: we don't have enough online support to review all these articles and we haven't worked on Wikipedia during the semester, besides advices to do it. With this situation, there is a great risk to have a lot of articles stuck on sandboxes using this model. We all know if we invite all students (new editors) to edit in the main domain, it will be a disaster, because there won't be enough support to help to fix the mistakes, quite the opposite, the few editors who maintain WP PT will become angry with all the mistakes that will appear. --Ezalvarenga (talk) 13:45, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Agree we don't have enough online support. One reason is editors start to do other things and forget to check students contributions. We should try lighting task forces to correct and move articles with editors that showed up to help it.OTAVIO1981 (talk) 14:57, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Thinking a bit more about Oona's saying of 100 articles to merge, I agree that hopefully it will happen sometime. My suggestion is: when it happens and community don't help rapidly (let's say a week?) it will be a nice problem to solve but a minor one. Worst case could happen it's student copy-and-paste his article at mainspace and any student can do this.OTAVIO1981 (talk) 22:19, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, I think this is important to raise the risks of expansion. I'm more concerned with the improvements the article has to go through before being published than with the technical merge itself. Although that could be a "wonderful problem", it's still a problem. If we have about dozens of articles that need adjustments, if we loose that efforts. Just like it's been happening now with Pablo's students articles. --Oona (WMF) (talk) 14:46, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

I think it's start to analyze deeply what happened with pablo's class to understand what went wrong. Or maybe with all classes. They are all finished so we shouldn't be afraid of point out mistakes that happened. Polyethylen already did something like that at RfD at wikipedia that could be a start point.OTAVIO1981 (talk) 12:46, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

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Otavio, before comingback here to the discussion, what is RfD? --Ezalvarenga (talk) 13:22, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Requests for deletion --Oona (WMF) (talk) 13:32, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

2 Structures for success: What conditions need to be in place to enable quality contributions by students in a single course? On a university campus? Should we work with smaller classes? How will different types of classes shape the models we are analysing to work with? Should tasks on Wikipedia be mandatory or not?

None of the courses made it mandatory to edit this semester. However, the ones that worked better were the ones that involved timelines and edits directly on Wikipedia (although on sandboxes). The great challenge for the ones that were not editing in Wikipedia was to get the feeling of what is a wikipedia article about (language, article structure, types of legitimate sources, citation in line etc). Two training sessions were enough for them to learn basic mark-ups, but weren't enough to make them involved with the project and to learn more about Wikipedia environment. The conditions vary pretty much on the profile and previous knowledge of students. We had success in a course where a campus ambassador has been only once in person, and all the other follow ups have taken place online. Clear and well defined timeline seems to be super important for success. The later they start editing, the less experience they'll get and the less we can try to help. Also, some problems (such as students evasion from a course) might be hard for us to help fixing (surveys to understand why they evaded might be sent though). Focusing on one single campus hasn't been a choice yet. We think we could/should try it on 2013, while some successful initiatives in other courses would naturally continue. --Oona (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

3. Community impact and reaction: What is the impact on the Portuguese Wikipedia community of student editing? What is the community response to the program before, during and after? What resources do they need to succeed?

Reactions have not been bad generally speaking. Some articles have been proposed for deletion and very isolated cases of harsh reaction against students have taken place - but it's hard to say since interaction was low. From the point articles were ready in the sandboxes, moving them was a slow process and not all campus ambassadors felt responsible for it. Not many community volunteers showed interest in bringing them into the main domain. --Oona (WMF) (talk) 22:06, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand. Vini asked for merge at [http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:PA/H and one admin did the merge procedure a day before. It's not a slow pace and as I said articles created at subpage can be moved directly to mainspace. This task must be divided with community and I think it was okay this semester. Only myself can merge articles as an eliminator so it shouldn't be a responsability for campus ambassadors. 186.244.162.101 22:34, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Again, I don't know who said that. But would like to make sure it's clear we're not saying is anyone's fault. In one of the courses, the model was fine. In the other, although we raised this risk beforehand, the fact that students edited in the last class and left for holidays made about 10 articles get stuck in the sandboxes. This is to do more with timelines. However you're right this is not responsibility of campus ambassadors (just removed from above). How this should be done?--Oona (WMF) (talk) 02:16, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Oona, this IP was me. The only point I didn't get it was about what you said it was slow pace. One day to merge it's enough in my opinion. I think it's the same time to other activities like restore, for example. My suggestion is to divide this with community by the way of asking at WP:PA/H to proceed with merge. Also, I believe it's a way to get more editors involved. We already know that just two ambassadors can merge and it's highly improbable we'll enough when pilot grows. Only possible way to solve this is asking for help. If articles are choosen before hand it might be possible work directly at mainspace.OTAVIO1981 (talk) 14:47, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi Otavio, so, maybe my terminology didn't help. I didn't mean that the technical merge was slow. But the process of making the article ready to publish - or maybe it's just completely wrong to rely on anyone else but the students and professor to make the article better. For instance, I tried to edit 2 articles from Pablo's students (one in July and one yesterday). But it may be 100% fool of us to count this interest and availability. --Oona (WMF) (talk) 14:42, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

I think we should invest in very short activities. For example, just 100 words each class and a final paper with more content. I believe that if we work by this way we could work directly at mainspace with articles already created. The only problem we must be aware is too much saving without using show preview button. Or maybe be editing at a subpage and at the end of the class upload this short paragraph to the original article. We'll be more open to risk but a good campus ambassador can ensure a minor risk.OTAVIO1981 (talk) 12:37, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

5 The road ahead: How should the Portuguese Wikipedia community, Wikimedia Brazil, and WMF move forward based on the experience of the pilot? What resources should be dedicated to the program going forward? Based upon these six month experience, how should we set realist goals for a educational program in Brazil?

— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ocastro (talk) OTAVIO1981 (talk) 20:30, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

I thought some of those questions were already answered. For example, Open Call for teachers evaluate estructure, mandatory assigment, size of class as decisive points. Point five have only one successfull answer to the first question: together. OTAVIO1981 (talk) 20:38, 16 August 2012 (UTC)