Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

[Juliana Bastos Marques]

I managed to get funding from my university for grants to students, for our
outreach project. This was when the staff went on strike, from May to
December [sic!]. The student was very excited to work and help me, but we
couldn't have access to the computer labs...

Juliana

On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 9:36 PM Kerry Raymond 
wrote:

> I do it as a volunteer. There are no salaried staff at Wikimedia
> Australia.
>
> Kerry
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On Behalf Of Piotr Konieczny
> Sent: Monday, 11 February 2019 1:20 AM
> To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with
> Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?
>
> Thank you for the very detailed story!
>
> I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I
> heard the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to universities
> in Poland despite (occasional) interest from the universities themselves:
> no funds / will  to hire a dedicated person for this, and the current
> salaried staff of the Polish chapter does not have sufficient time to
> answer all requests.
>
> --
>
> Piotr Konieczny, PhD
> http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEJ
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
>
> On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
> > I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The
> lecturer had heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia
> and decided that there would be a student assignment in which student could
> singly or in a group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had
> broken the assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by
> various dates, which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you
> chose it. 2. Write an essay about the topic with citations  3. Write/expand
> the Wikipedia article.
> >
> > The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia,
> but assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can
> edit" but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the
> students how  to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer
> happened to be chatting with one of the university librarians and mentioned
> this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened to have done
> Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I
> might be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.
> >
> > So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the
> timetabling it was not possible to do  hands-on training but I figured,
> rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors
> just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia
> (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they
> had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in
> advance of them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend
> the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded
> the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of
> course had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit
> with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their account
> sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were
> created as Draft into mainspace etc).  The outcome was that the lecturer
> and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there
> had been some "real" achievement from the assignment.  The articles were
> not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and all have survived and in some
> cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying
> afterwards of course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment, I
> also found and added some photos where I could. About the worst thing that
> happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.
> >
> > Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in
> mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced
> Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I
> find undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take
> to the Visual Editor very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and
> most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help only to do some
> complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of
> contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on
> one IP address, they quickly grasped my explanation of what the problem was
> and that they should create their accounts from their phones via their
> mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my
> experience). One student choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an
> alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the group who
> tend

Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

[Kerry Raymond]

I do it as a volunteer. There are no salaried staff at Wikimedia Australia. 

Kerry

-Original Message-
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On 
Behalf Of Piotr Konieczny
Sent: Monday, 11 February 2019 1:20 AM
To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with 
Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

Thank you for the very detailed story!

I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I heard 
the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to universities in Poland 
despite (occasional) interest from the universities themselves: no funds / will 
 to hire a dedicated person for this, and the current salaried staff of the 
Polish chapter does not have sufficient time to answer all requests.

--

Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus

On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
> I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The lecturer had 
> heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that 
> there would be a student assignment in which student could singly or in a 
> group write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had broken the 
> assignment down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, 
> which were roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an 
> essay about the topic with citations  3. Write/expand the Wikipedia article.
>
> The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia, but 
> assumed it would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" 
> but was wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how  
> to contribute to Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be 
> chatting with one of the university librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia 
> assignment and that librarian happened to have done Wikipedia training at UQ 
> for groups of librarians and suggested that I might be contacted to do the 
> Wikipedia training.
>
> So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the 
> timetabling it was not possible to do  hands-on training but I figured, 
> rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors 
> just with a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of 
> which the lecturer was completely unaware). This occurred before they had to 
> submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of 
> them doing it (for those planning a new article). I also attend the 
> "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually created or expanded the 
> Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course 
> had to re-do their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the 
> usual event problems (people who did not create their account sufficiently in 
> advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into 
> mainspace etc).  The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all 
> happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had been some "real" 
> achievement from the assignment.  The articles were not too bad (I kept them 
> on my watchlist and all have survived and in some cases have been expanded 
> further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of course and, as 
> photos had not been part of the assignment, I also found and added some 
> photos where I could. About the worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag 
> on one of them.
>
> Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in mid-process, 
> there is no doubt in my mind that having an experienced Wikipedian in the 
> loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find undergraduate 
> students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor 
> very easily (I gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, 
> generally seeking "how to " help only to do some complex things they could 
> see in other articles, "how do I make a table of contents" being the most 
> common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly 
> grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should create 
> their accounts from their phones via their mobile data not the Wifi (older 
> people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student choosing to 
> use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and 
> older people in the group who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on 
> the flip side, had generally followed my early advice about creating their 
> account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were 
> autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).
>
> However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop that 
> things could have gone

Re: [Wiki-research-l] User type context sensitivity to introduction sections.

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Do realise that when this is the 'best practice' we will make the gap
between English and the others only bigger.. From my perspective to improve
quality, we could start with linking to Wikidata for blue, red and black
links in any Wikipedia. This will have a measurable quality effect of some
6%. It is easy to implement and what is proposed  is imho technically not
something that is easily realised.
Thanks,
   GerardM

On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 at 13:27, Ziko van Dijk  wrote:

> Hello Stuart,
> No, I totally disagree. :-) I absolutely don't mean "plain English" but the
> special concept as described in the article linked.
> And I do not think that we need a software solution. We need good writing
> skills.
> Kind regards
> Ziko
>
>
>
> Am So., 10. Feb. 2019 um 03:02 Uhr schrieb Stuart A. Yeates <
> syea...@gmail.com>:
>
> > I believe that the English language term you are looking for is
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English and the problem is that
> > en.wiki policies already require plain english. The core of the issue
> > is that writing in plain english is hard and currently there are few
> > tools to support editors produce it.
> >
> > A decent reading level test applied by section and calculated using a
> > javascript tool that fitted into the standard wiki framework for tools
> > would be a very useful addition. The tool could annotate the article
> > and for new articles notify the article creator.  Of course, we'd need
> > supporting materials to aid editors learn plain english and so forth,
> > but we have to start somewhere.
> >
> > cheers
> > stuart
> >
> > --
> > ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
> >
> > On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 at 11:22, Ziko van Dijk  wrote:
> > >
> > > Allow me to propose something different: Wikipedia needs better
> writing,
> > > not technical solutions. And for different target groups, we need
> > different
> > > encyclopedias:
> > > * for children
> > > * for people with disabilities, such as
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichte_Sprache
> > > * for scholars, e.g. "Wikipedia scholar".
> > > A different wiki for every target group can be arranged in the best
> > > possible way for the target group.
> > >
> > > Kind regards
> > > Ziko
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Am Sa., 9. Feb. 2019 um 21:55 Uhr schrieb Aaron Gray <
> > > aaronngray.li...@gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > > I am thinking maybe we could use subdomains for layperson, and for
> > schools,
> > > > and maybe universities to have specialized [approved] content also ?
> > Just
> > > > an idea given this possible mechanism.
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 at 20:15, Aaron Gray 
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Thank you please keep suggestions and pragmatics coming in !
> > > > >
> > > > > I looked at this problem some time ago and the extra programming
> for
> > what
> > > > > I am proposing is quite minimal utilizing existing MediaWiki
> > libraries
> > > > and
> > > > > adding extra code to support the tag structure with defaulting to
> > make it
> > > > > seamless to existing articles.
> > > > >
> > > > > I really think this would increase the usability and audience of
> > > > > Wikipedia and also might possibly allow us to integrate content
> from
> > > > other
> > > > > Wikipedia projects.
> > > > >
> > > > > Regards,
> > > > >
> > > > > Aaron
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 at 07:57, Amir E. Aharoni <
> > > > amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>
> > > > > wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > >> The suggestions that bring up the Simple English Wikipedia miss
> the
> > fact
> > > > >> that it only covers the English language, which most people don't
> > know,
> > > > >> and
> > > > >> doesn't do almost anything for the many other languages of the
> > world.
> > > > (I'm
> > > > >> saying "almost anything" because I know that there are people who
> > prefer
> > > > >> to
> > > > >> translate articles from the Simple English Wikipedia, and this
> > > > indirectly
> > > > >> benefits other languages.)
> > > > >>
> > > > >> One thing about how Wikipedia works that practically no-one ever
> > > > >> challenges
> > > > >> is that every page title is associated with a page, and the page
> is
> > > > always
> > > > >> a single big blob of sections, section headings, templates and
> magic
> > > > >> words.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> What if it was not a single blob?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> What if all the magic words, such as NOTOC, DISPLAYTITLE, and
> > > > DEFAULTSORT
> > > > >> moved to a separate metadata storage?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> More closely to this thread's topic, what if at least some
> sections
> > that
> > > > >> all or most pages have were stored separately, so that it would be
> > > > >> possible
> > > > >> to parse and render them semantically? The References section, for
> > > > >> example,
> > > > >> is something that many pages have. What if it could be separated
> > from
> > > > the
> > > > >> prose blob and stored separately, so that it would be parsed
> > > > semantically
> > > > >> 

Re: [Wiki-research-l] User type context sensitivity to introduction sections.

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

This has been discussed many times, see also:
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Multi-level_Articles_(By_Difficulty)
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Filter_content_based_on_desired_level_of_detail
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Divide_Wikipedia
https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Create_Scientific,_Popular_and_Hobby_encyclopedia_levels
(and links from there)

Federico

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Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

[Piotr Konieczny]

Thank you for the very detailed story!

I don't know about US/Canada(?) where Wiki Edu operates, but recently I 
heard the explanation for why there is almost no outreach to 
universities in Poland despite (occasional) interest from the 
universities themselves: no funds / will  to hire a dedicated person for 
this, and the current salaried staff of the Polish chapter does not have 
sufficient time to answer all requests.


--

Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus

On 2/10/2019 3:16 AM, Kerry Raymond wrote:

I supported a 2nd year Gender Studies course late last year. The lecturer had 
heard about the Gender Gap in terms of content on Wikipedia and decided that 
there would be a student assignment in which student could singly or in a group 
write or expand a Wikipedia article. The lecturer had broken the assignment 
down into a number of tasks to be completed by various dates, which were 
roughly. 1. Pick a topic and explain why you chose it. 2. Write an essay about 
the topic with citations  3. Write/expand the Wikipedia article.

The lecturer had no personal experience at contributing to Wikipedia, but assumed it 
would not be hard to do as it's the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" but was 
wondering if there needed to be a session to teach the students how  to contribute to 
Wikipedia. By sheer chance the lecturer happened to be chatting with one of the 
university librarians and mentioned this Wikipedia assignment and that librarian happened 
to have done Wikipedia training at UQ for groups of librarians and suggested that I might 
be contacted to do the Wikipedia training.

So I did a Wikipedia training session with the students (because of the timetabling it was not possible to do  hands-on 
training but I figured, rightly, undergraduates would pick on the "how to" with the Visual Editors just with 
a presentation) but also addressed the policy side of Wikipedia (of which the lecturer was completely unaware). This 
occurred before they had to submit their essays so I got to talk about writing a good lede in advance of them doing it 
(for those planning a new article). I also attend the "edit-a-thon" afternoon where the student actually 
created or expanded the Wikipedia articles (mostly copying and pasting their essay text but of course had to re-do 
their citations in Wikipedia format) where I dealit with all the usual event problems (people who did not create their 
account sufficiently in advance, 6 user limit, shifting new articles that were created as Draft into mainspace etc).  
The outcome was that the lecturer and students were all happy at the end of the afternoon, feeling that there had been 
some "real" achievement from the assignment.  The articles were not too bad (I kept them on my watchlist and 
all have survived and in some cases have been expanded further by others). I did a bit of MoS tidying afterwards of 
course and, as photos had not been part of the assignment, I also found and added some photos where I could. About the 
worst thing that happened was a "essay" tag on one of them.

Like a number of edit-a-thons where I have been parachuted in mid-process, there is no doubt in my mind that 
having an experienced Wikipedian in the loop helps a lot as the known risks can be managed. I find 
undergraduate students (who are mostly young and digitally-savvy) take to the Visual Editor very easily (I 
gave them a one-page cheat sheet and most were fine with that, generally seeking "how to " help 
only to do some complex things they could see in other articles, "how do I make a table of 
contents" being the most common). When we hit the 6 new account limit on one IP address, they quickly 
grasped my explanation of what the problem was and that they should create their accounts from their phones 
via their mobile data not the Wifi (older people don't grasp this as easily in my experience). One student 
choosing to use her USB mobile dongle as an alternative. There were some middle-aged and older people in the 
group who tended to ask more "how to " questions but, on the flip side, had generally followed my 
early advice about creating their account in advance and practicing on their user page (so all were 
autoconfirmed users and didn't have those problems).

However, I can see that without an experienced Wikipedian in the loop that 
things could have gone very badly. And this is the problem for me. I can 
generally help out IF I know about the plan in the first place.

As you might have seen in Signpost recently, there was some upset over a 
proposed experiment over giving out random barnstars. As I commented there, 
instead of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that goes on in the Wikipedia 
community about such things, we would be much better served if we tried to find 
a way to communicate with universities about both edit-a-thons and research 
projects and prov

Re: [Wiki-research-l] User type context sensitivity to introdcution section.

[Jan Dittrich]

> but you are correct in that many articles don’t follow the manual of
style
> as they lack introductions that are in clear, jargon free English.

It might be interesting to find out what trade-offs people perceive when
writing these introductions. How does one write simply, yet "correct"
(particularly not create impressions that are "wrong" from an experts
standpoint)? I assume this is hard, and it might be very tempting to lean
to the expert’s judgement. It is just an hypothesis, but in case it has
something to it, a lot of introductions manage the wicked problem quite
well.

Jan


Am Sa., 9. Feb. 2019 um 09:52 Uhr schrieb Jonathan Cardy <
werespielchequ...@gmail.com>:

> Dear Aaron,
>
> The policy is already that the introduction should be suitable for a lay
> reader, but you are correct in that many articles don’t follow the manual
> of style as they lack introductions that are in clear, jargon free English.
> What would be useful from the research community is some research on the
> sorts of barriers and maybe even a way of finding articles whose leads
> might need rewriting. Or even research on the size of the problem.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Get Outlook for iOS
>
> 
> From: Wiki-research-l  on
> behalf of Aaron Gray 
> Sent: Friday, February 8, 2019 9:44 pm
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] User type context sensitivity to introdcution
> section.
>
> I am suggesting WikiPedia has context-sensitive articles so if you are a
> kid or a layperson or an expert in a field you get a different
> introduction. Often the reason people don't read WikiPedia articles is they
> are too complex at the start.
>
> This needs facilitating by WikiMedia technology.
>
> Thoughts and ideas and possible implementation ideas on this idea are
> welcomed.
>
> Regards,
>
> Aaron
>
> --
> Aaron Gray
>
> Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher,
> Information Theorist, and amateur computer scientist.
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> ___
> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>


-- 
Jan Dittrich
Teamleitung UX/Design

Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 26-0
https://wikimedia.de

Unsere Vision ist eine Welt, in der alle Menschen am Wissen der Menschheit
teilhaben, es nutzen und mehren können. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
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Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
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Re: [Wiki-research-l] User type context sensitivity to introduction sections.

[Ziko van Dijk]

Hello Stuart,
No, I totally disagree. :-) I absolutely don't mean "plain English" but the
special concept as described in the article linked.
And I do not think that we need a software solution. We need good writing
skills.
Kind regards
Ziko



Am So., 10. Feb. 2019 um 03:02 Uhr schrieb Stuart A. Yeates <
syea...@gmail.com>:

> I believe that the English language term you are looking for is
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English and the problem is that
> en.wiki policies already require plain english. The core of the issue
> is that writing in plain english is hard and currently there are few
> tools to support editors produce it.
>
> A decent reading level test applied by section and calculated using a
> javascript tool that fitted into the standard wiki framework for tools
> would be a very useful addition. The tool could annotate the article
> and for new articles notify the article creator.  Of course, we'd need
> supporting materials to aid editors learn plain english and so forth,
> but we have to start somewhere.
>
> cheers
> stuart
>
> --
> ...let us be heard from red core to black sky
>
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 at 11:22, Ziko van Dijk  wrote:
> >
> > Allow me to propose something different: Wikipedia needs better writing,
> > not technical solutions. And for different target groups, we need
> different
> > encyclopedias:
> > * for children
> > * for people with disabilities, such as
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leichte_Sprache
> > * for scholars, e.g. "Wikipedia scholar".
> > A different wiki for every target group can be arranged in the best
> > possible way for the target group.
> >
> > Kind regards
> > Ziko
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Am Sa., 9. Feb. 2019 um 21:55 Uhr schrieb Aaron Gray <
> > aaronngray.li...@gmail.com>:
> >
> > > I am thinking maybe we could use subdomains for layperson, and for
> schools,
> > > and maybe universities to have specialized [approved] content also ?
> Just
> > > an idea given this possible mechanism.
> > >
> > > On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 at 20:15, Aaron Gray 
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Thank you please keep suggestions and pragmatics coming in !
> > > >
> > > > I looked at this problem some time ago and the extra programming for
> what
> > > > I am proposing is quite minimal utilizing existing MediaWiki
> libraries
> > > and
> > > > adding extra code to support the tag structure with defaulting to
> make it
> > > > seamless to existing articles.
> > > >
> > > > I really think this would increase the usability and audience of
> > > > Wikipedia and also might possibly allow us to integrate content from
> > > other
> > > > Wikipedia projects.
> > > >
> > > > Regards,
> > > >
> > > > Aaron
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 at 07:57, Amir E. Aharoni <
> > > amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > >> The suggestions that bring up the Simple English Wikipedia miss the
> fact
> > > >> that it only covers the English language, which most people don't
> know,
> > > >> and
> > > >> doesn't do almost anything for the many other languages of the
> world.
> > > (I'm
> > > >> saying "almost anything" because I know that there are people who
> prefer
> > > >> to
> > > >> translate articles from the Simple English Wikipedia, and this
> > > indirectly
> > > >> benefits other languages.)
> > > >>
> > > >> One thing about how Wikipedia works that practically no-one ever
> > > >> challenges
> > > >> is that every page title is associated with a page, and the page is
> > > always
> > > >> a single big blob of sections, section headings, templates and magic
> > > >> words.
> > > >>
> > > >> What if it was not a single blob?
> > > >>
> > > >> What if all the magic words, such as NOTOC, DISPLAYTITLE, and
> > > DEFAULTSORT
> > > >> moved to a separate metadata storage?
> > > >>
> > > >> More closely to this thread's topic, what if at least some sections
> that
> > > >> all or most pages have were stored separately, so that it would be
> > > >> possible
> > > >> to parse and render them semantically? The References section, for
> > > >> example,
> > > >> is something that many pages have. What if it could be separated
> from
> > > the
> > > >> prose blob and stored separately, so that it would be parsed
> > > semantically
> > > >> for different screens and contexts, such as Wikicite? Currently its
> > > >> rendering and storage is heavily biased for desktop and wiki syntax
> > > >> editing, and suboptimal for mobile display and editing, as well as
> for
> > > >> translation.
> > > >>
> > > >> And most closely to the thread's original topic, what if one page
> could
> > > >> have several lead sections? Sure, this can be done now with hacks
> such
> > > as
> > > >> templates and namespaces, but these are still hacks: they are not
> > > >> semantic,
> > > >> not portable across languages, and not easily machine-readable.
> > > >>
> > > >> Of course, doing all these things would require major, major
> changes in
> > > >> how
> > > >> Wikipedia's software works. Developers

Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

[Jonathan Cardy]

Different people have different favoured learning styles. Some will copy 
others, some will ask others, and some actually go and read the instructions. 
Presumably some pay attention to lectures.

In order to make Wikipedia open to all goodfaith editors it is helpful to 
support all learning styles. That means encouraging use of meaningful edit 
summaries to make it easier to learn by copying others, running wiki surgeries 
and informal meetups so people can ask each other how to fix things, making the 
help pages clear comprehensive and up to date, and yes having lectures 
available to attend or watch on the internet.

Those of us who favour some learning styles over others would do well to try 
and remember that others may favour different learning styles. And when I fall 
asleep in a lecture it is probably time for a live example, or a nudge from my 
neighbour.

Jonathan

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From: Wiki-research-l  on behalf 
of Kerry Raymond 
Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2019 2:20 am
To: 'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with 
Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

Young people in particular don't tend to look for Help or Instructions. They 
tend to just jump in. They are more likely to want "live chat" help when they 
are in the midst of their problem.

Kerry

-Original Message-
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On 
Behalf Of Jesús Tramullas
Sent: Saturday, 9 February 2019 8:39 PM
To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] What instructors think about teaching with 
Wikipedia AFTER having tried it?

Dear colleagues:

I work with Wikipedia in classroom since 2015-2016 
(https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proyecto_educativo/WikiDoc,_Universidad_de_Zaragoza).
Of course, I agree with the common problems about this kind of approach...

..but now I'm working on a specific area, asking the students: As new editor, 
What do you think about the help pages in Wikipedia? Have you used them? Are 
they helpful? Are they readable? Are they understandable?

So, my approach is to analyze the "technical documentation", identify problems 
and propose improvements.

Cheers,

Jesús
--
"Investigación básica es lo que hago cuando no sé lo que estoy haciendo."
"Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing."
Wernher von Braun (1957)

--#
Ph.D. Jesús Tramullas
http://tramullas.com
Dept. Ciencias Documentación // Dept. of Information Studies Universidad de 
Zaragoza 50009 Zaragoza (España)
#--

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