Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-10-08/News and notes

This RfC is about the future—the Future of the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Outreach and the US Canada Education Program. This RfC is not about, and should not be about the past. ... Those who have opposed this new organization to date, and indeed are calling for the elimination of the Education Program are focused on the past. ... [They] only cite the mistakes, the missteps and rarely give credit to the successes, to the good works by all sorts of ambassadors, students, faculty and WMF Education Program staff. ... I realize there have been missteps in the Education Program, but for opposers to characterize all the work done under [it] as a failure is not supported by the facts. ... Why is this partnership essential for the future of Wikipedia? If we truly believe in the mantra—the sum of all knowledge for the human race, and if we want to create an encyclopedia of world class quality and scope, we have to involve the Academic Community. It is doubtful we can continue robustly growing the encyclopedia without them.

Education professionals who support the program believe that without this form of outreach (assuming that professors will continue to assign their students to edit Wikipedia), their students will not receive the on-wiki interaction necessary for them or their articles to succeed. Theredproject commented that editing the site opened his students' eyes to the "questions of Free Culture, collaboration, and wikis." Ocaasi took a different approach, believing that the previous problems with the program have been addressed and that it deserves a "second chance" over one to two years to prove itself.

Opposers have largely focused on whether there is a need for the program. Fluffernutter commented that there is a "lack of evidence of any material benefit from the existence of the program. All signs I've seen have indicated that the program creates a lot of cleanup work for the community and very little in the way of useful content or new long-term contributors."

Other editors echoed her post: MER-C believes that the program "needs a massive haircut to bring it back to a scale where it is a net positive for the encyclopedia—i.e. similar to the Public Policy Initiative. Developing a formal, self-justifying bureaucracy around the program to further expand it is exactly the wrong way to go." At least one further oppose believed that spinning the program off from the WMF as planned would lead to less accountability for the program as a whole.

This contrast in views begs the question: is the education program worth the effort? The WMF published a US–Canada results page a few days after Fluffernutter's oppose, detailing the effects of the education program on Wikipedia over the first half of 2012 and including detailed graphs of the changes in quality. As assessed by a volunteer group of Wikipedia editors, 87.9% of articles were improved by student editing. On a 26-point quality scale, the articles were improved on average by 2.94 points; only eight articles saw a decrease in quality, with the worst dropping by two points. The report notes that existing articles were usually improved from the equivalent of weak Start-class articles to strong Start-class or C-class articles. New articles fell into the same area.

Another supporting view has come from a previously published and highly publicized op-ed written by English Wikipedia editor and current working group member Mike Christie for the Signpost last December. There, Christie concluded that the education program was necessary, because "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. We need to accept our respectability, and plan to learn from—and teach—the academic community."

Opposing arguments mainly stem from experiences with the Indian pilot. The most notable document produced after its closure was by consultant Tory Read, which the Signpost covered in January. The results were stunning: a quantitative analysis done simultaneously with the report showed that only 21% of student-produced content survived after the necessary clean-up. The report itself chronicled the failures in communication and scale; the Indian pilot was five times larger than the Public Policy Initiative. Wikipedians voiced their opposition on the talk page, such as Theo10011:

With the sole exception of [Frank Schulenburg, the Global Education Program director], there isn't a single person who designed and implemented this program that I would be confident about editing themselves. They barely know how to edit themselves, who to ask for help, or how, what is the right and wrong practice. ... they are not versed in the en.wp policies and general editing culture, they were hired as consultants by WMF. ... This is a really important point, when the students and CAs they are overseeing, have the same or more experience than them, that is likely to be a bad start. I honestly believe they need more experience and time to learn the ropes first, before they design and run any future iteration of the education program here.

Yet while the opposition stemming from the Indian pilot is based on solid facts, it does not account for modifications made to the program over the last year. The Working Group RfC is still open for comments from the community, and the Signpost welcomes comments on the Education Program as a whole on the talk page.

Ed. note: the author volunteered with the Education Program as an Online Ambassador in late 2010 and early 2011.