Students at universities in the United States and Canada found that contributing to Wikipedia as a class assignment through the Wikipedia Education Program improved their media literacy and technology skills, according to survey results from the fall 2011 term. In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign students to contribute to Wikipedia, usually in the form of expanding a stub article, in place of a traditional research paper grade. At the end of the fall 2011 term, we asked students who participated in the U.S. and Canada program to fill out a survey on their experiences. A total of 132 students took the survey, with a little over three-quarters of the respondents from the United States. About 61 percent of the respondents were enrolled in undergraduate courses, while the remainder were enrolled in graduate courses.

Learning outcomes

A series of questions were designed around assessing student learning outcomes. About two-thirds of the respondents agreed that doing a Wikipedia assignment was a beneficial experience, with almost 20 percent of them strongly in favor of a Wikipedia assignment in place of a traditional term paper. Students from the United States and graduate students all reported higher beliefs in the benefits of a Wikipedia assignment. More than half of the respondents felt that doing a Wikipedia assignment improved (1) their ability to identify poor quality Wikipedia articles and (2) their ability to identify bias in documents. In addition, more than half the respondents felt their ability to write a neutral (i.e., balanced point-­of-­view) document improved through a Wikipedia assignment more than through a standard term paper.

These findings indicate that students recognize the media literacy benefits in doing a Wikipedia assignment. As professors have noted, when Wikipedia is not the destination of the student’s research on a topic, but is instead the road, students are forced out of their research comfort zone. Students are required to evaluate the reliability of sources, find journal articles, and write from a neutral point of view to meet Wikipedia’s policy requirements.

Support resources

Student participants use a set of resources when they have questions about editing Wikipedia — online text, Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and professors to name a few. Online text is the most commonly used resource, followed by printed materials. Nearly 93 percent of students who consulted their Campus Ambassador found him or her to be helpful, and 74 percent of students who consulted an Online Ambassador said he or she was helpful.

We’ve found that having that support makes a big difference to students. Students can chat with their Campus Ambassadors in person on campus or on wiki, and they can interact with Online Ambassadors on-wiki and through an IRC chatroom where they can get immediate help for quick questions.

Students had a positive interaction with the Wikipedia community of editors when they interacted with them. Students were asked to pick two adjectives to describe their views of the Wikipedia editing community; top responses included “helpful” (72 percent), “collaborative” (39 percent), and “intelligent” (27 percent).

Motivations

We asked students to identify the key motivations for their contributions to Wikipedia. Important factors students reported were getting a grade, interest in their Wikipedia article topic, and the usefulness of their work (i.e., it wasn’t another throwaway assignment). Graduate students reported a broader variety of motivations, when compared to undergraduates. In particular, more than 60 percent of the graduate students gave a high ranking to the fact that their work contributes to a freely accessible knowledge base.

Final comments and looking ahead

Although converting students into longterm editors is not an explicit goal of the Wikipedia Education Program, as many as 46 percent of our respondents expressed interest in continuing to edit Wikipedia.

When students were asked to share the hardest thing about their Wikipedia editing experience, some common themes emerged. Many students mentioned the challenges of learning how Wikipedia works, and how editing an article was a lot more work than they imagined. Almost universally, they talked about how hard it was to learn wiki syntax. The Visual Editor will help alleviate many of these concerns.

To sum up, here’s what one student had to say when asked about any memorable experiences:

“Overall, a great learning experience. Having to really validate anything you say by backing it with a reputable source is incredibly beneficial and students should be exposed to this, especially if they have not had a research methods course in their undergraduate career.”

Ayush Khanna
Data Analyst, Global Development

We received 63 proposals for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and several mentors put many hours into evaluating project ideas, discussing them with applicants and making the tough decisions. We’re happy to announce our final choices, the Google Summer of Code students for 2012:

• Ankur Anand, working on integrating Flickr upload and geolocation into UploadWizard. WMF engineer Ryan Kaldari is mentoring Ankur as they make it easier for Wikimedia contributors to contribute media files and metadata.
• Harry Burt, working on TranslateSvg (“Bringing the translation revolution to Wikimedia Commons”). All readers and editors benefit when we can use a single picture or animation in different language wikis (example, use). Harry aims to allow contributors to localize the text embedded within vector files (SVGs). WMF engineer Max Semenik is mentoring this project.
• Akshay Chugh, working on a convention/conference extension for MediaWiki. Wikimedia conferences like Wikimania often use MediaWiki to help organize their conferences, but it takes a lot of custom programming. Under the mentorship of volunteer developer Jure Kajzer, Akshay aims to create an extension that a webmaster could install to provide conference-related features automatically.
• Ashish Dubey, working on realtime collaboration in the upcoming visual editor.  You may have seen “real-time collaborative editing” in tools like Etherpad and Google Docs.  Ashish (with WMF engineer Trevor Parscal as mentor) will work to bring this functionality to MediaWiki.
• Suhas HS, working on improvements to the OpenStackManager extension. We use OpenStack in our new Wikimedia Labs infrastructure. Suhas, with the mentorship of WMF engineer Ryan Lane, aims to improve MediaWiki’s ability to support the new Openstack API, which provides an interface to manage the virtualized environments.
• Nischay Nahata, working on optimizing the performance of the Semantic MediaWiki extension. In wikis with unusually large amounts of content, Semantic MediaWiki experiences performance degradation. With the mentorship of volunteer developer Markus Krötzsch and Wikidata developer Jeroen De Dauw, Nischay aims to find and fix these issues; this will also reduce SMW’s energy consumption, making it greener.
• Aaron Pramana, working on watchlist grouping and workflow improvements. Aaron aims to make it easier for wiki editors and readers to use watchlists, and to create and use groups of watched items to focus on or share.  Aaron will be working with volunteer developer Alex Emsenhuber.
• Robin Pepermans, working on Incubator improvements and language support. This project aims to improve the usability, performance, and coverage of Wikimedia’s Incubator. WMF engineer Niklas Laxström will mentor Robin.
• Platonides, working on a desktop application for mass-uploading files to Wikimedia Commons.  The application will make it much easier for participants in upload campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments to upload their photos (and it’ll work on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS). I, Sumana Harihareswara, will be mentoring Platonides.

Congratulations to this year’s students, and thanks to all the applicants, as well as MediaWiki’s many mentors, developers who evaluated applications, and Google’s Open Source Programs Office. The accepted students now have a month to ramp up on MediaWiki’s processes and get to know their mentors (the Community Bonding Period) and will start coding their summer projects on or before May 21st. As the organizational administrator for MediaWiki’s GSoC participation, I’ll be keeping an eye on all nine students and helping them out.

Good luck!

Sumana Harihareswara, Volunteer Development Coordinator

The average age of the MediaWiki developers is quite young. They often started contributing to the MediaWiki code while still in school or university. When their contributions show promise, they are sometimes asked to contribute to particular projects. This has resulted in the hiring of students and they continue to do professionally what they at first did as a hobby.

While the Wikimedia Foundation is happy with the talent it gains in this way, it feels strongly that finishing formal education is very important. Some students only work for the WMF in their holidays while others manage regular contributions in their free time as well. Such relations are often strengthened through programs like the Google Summer of Code or through summer internships.

Niklas Laxström recently finished University and this happy occasion is reason enough to interview him. As you may know, he works for the WMF Localisation Team and his claim to fame is that he started what became translatewiki.net. Niklas has been instrumental in much of the internationalisation and localisation development for the MediaWiki software.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Congratulations, master Niklas. You finished university !! What did you study and what is your exact title (in Finnish)
I studied language technology with minors in Finnish language, Computer Science, East-Asian studies and collection of Russian language courses. I’m now Master of Arts, filosofian maisteri.

You started with what became translatewiki.net before you started university. How did your study influence the development of translatewiki.net
Before university I had a hobby project for inflecting Finnish nouns. It wasn’t successful nor had it a good design, but it started series of events, which caused me to start studying language technology.

My studies were pretty heavily biased in hard language processing: for instance syntactic parsers, finite state technologies and morphologies.  however, the open source language technologies are not yet in a level where that kind of processing can just be plugged into any software.

Learning about variation in languages has been very useful to me. It helps avoiding solutions that only work for limited number of similar languages. I learned most of that in linguistics courses but also by studing several dissimilar languages. l also liked the isolated courses about copyright, terminologies and string processing, which turned out to be useful in different situations.

On the other hand, working with MediaWiki and translatewiki.net has given me enormous amounts of practical experience all over computer
engineering, which helped me to perform better in engineering related courses.

(more…)

The Tamil Wikimedia community recently conducted the Tamil Wiki Media Contest (TWMC), generating 15,000 files from a total of 307 contributors. 

This hugely successful effort was organized by user Sodabottle along with Logicwiki, Natkeeran, Kalaiarasy, Sanjeevi Sivakumar and a dozen other community members. The story of TWMC began when Sodabottle attended the Wikimania 2011 conference, having been requested by a long-standing Tamil Wikipedian, Natkeeran, to scout for ideas and resources to support Tamil projects. Sodabottle suggested a media contest supported through a Wikimedia Foundation grant, as an article writing contest had already been done in the previous year. He recollects, with a wry smile, that he initially thought a photo/media contest would take less time and effort!

Sodabottle discussed the idea with Natkeeran and after brainstorming with two other community members, Logicwiki and Kalaiarasy, they initiated an RfC (request for comment) on the Tamil Wikipedia village pump.  There was unanimous backing from the community. In these two weeks, what started out as a simple proposal – “Shall we have a Media contest this year?” – was fleshed out with the suggestions of over a dozen contributors. Subsequent discussions focused on prize money, type of prizes, outreach strategy and a host of other operational details, after which the grant application was made.
Volunteers were going to be required and this presented both a unique challenge and a great opportunity for Tamil Wikimedians.  The Tamil Wiki community is spread across continents and timezones, and to reach out to everyone, coordinators with specific skill sets were chosen across diverse geographical locations. Although the number of coordinators was limited to 5 to keep the project manageable, more volunteers pitched in at every stage. Logicwiki provided extensive technical support throughout the event.

Indeed, Tamil Wikipedians from countries as far off as Malaysia and Australia spread the word in their respective countries!
TWMC has been an avenue for many MediaWiki software enthusiasts to chip in as well. T. Shrinivasan, an open source enthusiast and convener of the Chennai Linux Users Group, developed a brand new open source tool for easier uploading of images.

What was TWMC’s biggest feat then? Sure, it generated a lot of participation, new content and some new tools. But it was also important for community mobilization – the brilliant way in which a community took every step, small and big together, overcame hurdles through team solutions and managed to connect with people across the planet. Incredibly, this was done over 3 long months!
Further, two long time editors returned from their wikibreaks to help, and four new regular editors are now contributing to Tamil Wikipedia.  TWMC is also an excellent example of sustained outreach, since newbies were given an opportunity to contribute easily and from there explore other facets of Wikimedia projects. It was also a wonderful opportunity to get professional photographers to use Commons and upload their work to it. The community (Tamil and others) now uses almost 8000 of the contest images on different projects.  A Norwegian user has used images from this contest in Norsk Wikipedia.

On prizes, Sodabottle adds, “A contest and prizes are just the right attraction to stop people from leaving after a [quick] look over [a project], and goad them into doing something concrete.” He cites his own example: He started contributing to Tamil Wikipedia only because of an article writing contest. Although he didn’t win a prize there, it lured him in and he has been a regular editor since then. Sodabottle also has a few tips specifically about Commons: “Commons, like any of our projects”, says he, “is undermanned.” So, it is crucial to have your own maintenance workforce for any media contest. Massive effort is require to copyvio check, tag, template, move and categorize  in such volumes. He also suggests a MediaWiki extension to help similar initiatives.

(You can view the the other prize winners or read the detailed Tamil Wikimedians Grant report)

Noopur Raval, Consultant (Communications), India Program

Wikipedia Education Program participants from the United States added more than three times as much quality content as regular new users, a quantitative analysis shows.

In the Wikipedia Education Program, professors assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles as a grade for class, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. In fall 2011, 55 courses participated in the program in the United States, with students editing articles on the English Wikipedia. On average, these students added 1855 bytes of content that stayed on Wikipedia, compared to only 491 for a randomly chosen sample of new users who joined English Wikipedia in September 2011. These numbers establish that students who participate in the Wikipedia Education Program contribute significantly more quality content that stays on Wikipedia than other new users.

Examining the distribution of content that survived on Wikipedia for both of these groups, we found that almost half of the Wikipedia Education Program participants added 1,000 or more bytes that stayed on Wikipedia in the first six months. In contrast, more than half of the random sample of new editors added no content that stayed on Wikipedia in the first six months. The targeted recruitment of students, combined with the support provided by the Ambassador Program and instructors, results in a much larger percentage of new editors who contribute quality content to Wikipedia.

To understand the collective impact of the Wikipedia Education Program in fall 2011, we compared the amount of content students added to Wikipedia to the content added by the random sample of new editors. The numbers show that the 920 student editors who participated in the program in fall 2011 added the same amount of content as 2250 typical new editors (editors are defined as users who made at least one edit to an article). In terms of new content, students have twice the impact as typical new editors.

An important consideration for any outreach project is editor retention. Data showed that students who are introduced to editing Wikipedia through the U.S. Education Program are just as likely to continue editing as any other newcomer.

The Wikipedia Education Program has now grown to Egypt, Brazil and other regions beyond North America. With an increased global presence, measuring and understanding the contributions of new student editors (and how they differ from other new users that join Wikipedia) has gained importance. Establishing a common metric for measuring the impact of the Wikipedia Education Program on various Wikipedias is another key motivation for a quantitative study.

There’s a lot more work to be done on measuring the program’s impact. So, stay tuned for more information about these metrics.

Methodology for this research can be found at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Education_Program_evaluation#Methods

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

(with input from Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research)

For MediaWiki, the CLDR or Common Locale Data Repository, is a primary source of information. The information about languages Unicode maintains in this standard is what is most relevant to us. It registers its name in English, as well as the autonym or the name in its own language, as well as information like what a date and a number look like,  the script or scripts used for a language and the names of other languages in that language.

We prefer to use standardised information, not only because it is stable and reliable, but because we do not have to collect the data ourselves and also because the data is used by many other organisations and in many other applications. We love the CLDR and we want it to be even better. To make it better we need your help.

Many of the languages that have a Wikipedia and many of the languages that want to have a Wikipedia are not represented in the CLDR. Many Wikipedians know their language really well. They can provide the information about their language and they can verify that the existing information is correct. When there is a need to change things, you will need to create a user.

When a language is not yet supported, you will have to request for the new locale or language to be added. It is expected that you provide at least the core data when you make your request and that you at least complete the minimal data required. One of the questions is: where the language is official, it may be that a language does not have any official status. This does not prevent people from reading or writing that language and it does not mean that information about such a language is not important to us.

When a language is already supported, we want you to verify if the names for other languages exist and are correctly written. There can be issues in any language including English; using the Auracana name for the Mapundungun language is considered an insult.

When you are able and happy to help us in this way, you may be interested in joining our “language support team.” Because of your interest you belong to the group of people we first want to turn to when we have questions about supporting your language. More structured information and room for your reports can be found here. When there are any issues, do not hesitate to report them.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

While strolling through the Portland Japanese Gardens on a vibrant spring day back in 2010, Jeremy Reding was struck by the magnificence of this particular maple tree. He halted mid-stride as he passed by, drawn to the tree’s amazing branch structure.

Reding noticed, “the sun backlighting the canopy beautifully,” but he struggled to find a position where he could get enough of tree in the shot. Using his Canon PowerShot SD750, he had to “essentially lay on the ground to capture the canopy and the branch structure.”

His focus was including as much of the canopy as possible while still framing enough of the trunk to ground the image. He noted that it was particularly tricky doing so without a tripod.

Reding succeeded, and the remarkable photo of the Japanese Maple became a finalist in the 2010 Wikimidia Commons Picture of the Year process. The tree has also garnered its share of attention: there is even a special Flickr group called “Under ‘That’ Japanese Maple Tree at Portland’s Japanese Garden.”

In his general shooting, Reding said he is interested in the “banal changes that occur around us everyday.” He often studies the “quality of light throughout the day, the way materials age, or seasonal variations in landscape.”

Reding has had all sorts of cameras as far back as he can remember, but it wasn’t until he spent a semester studying outside the U.S. in 1999 that he began to take photography seriously. Seizing this unique chance to “capture the world” around him, Reding brought along a Canon Rebel SLR, as well as a Sony Mavica, which took 3.5 inch disks. Because he was abroad for an entire semester, he brought along 300 disks in his backpack.

“I use photography as a means of capturing a moment in time, something I can refer back to and immediately be transported back to the place where I took that photograph,” he said.

Reding feels honored that so many people found this image to be as inspiring as he did. He hopes this picture will motivate viewers to “get out and explore the world around you. Go to the same place multiple times to see it at different times during the day, different seasons, etc.”

Story by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern
Reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern

Life in the small town of Jodie, West Virginia, revolved around coal mining. Opportunities were scarce and young men like Ken Thomas were expected to get a job in the mines.

He remembers sitting in his 4th grade class, listening to the responses of classmates as their teacher asked them, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Most of the girls said housewife, while the boys agreed that they wanted to become coal truck drivers.

Thomas said he wanted to be an astronaut.

When he graduated high school, Thomas worked a short stint mining coal. He liked it so much he soon joined the Army, where he spent four years. After trying a number of professions, including radio broadcasting, he eventually got into construction safety, which he does currently in North Carolina.

“Because of where we were and the low income nature, we had schools that weren’t always great, teachers that weren’t always great,” said Thomas. “We did not have access to resources, libraries, learning opportunities that I think people might have elsewhere.”

The lack of educational opportunities led Thomas to embrace open access to knowledge, and he supports organizations that promote it like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation.

“When I first got involved in the Internet and with Wikipedia, what I kept thinking about was myself when I was 7 or 8 years old and logging on and finding a resource like that, how huge that would have been and how transformative that could have been for me as a child,” he said.

He added, a “free education as a way to break what remains of our class system in the US, or an economic class system.”

For Thomas, Wikipedia is “the most important experiment going on right now.” He also calls it a mirror that reflects, “the best of us and the worst of us. If we can’t make it work, then maybe we’re not worthy of our technology.”

Thomas first began contributing to Wikimedia projects by way of Wikimedia Commons. His passion for photography was cultivated by combining it with his love for, as he describes it, “typical redneck pastimes,” such as fishing, hunting and kayaking, among other activities.

Thomas recalled a particular event that marked a “weird point in [his] evolution” from a casual hobbyist to passionate photographer.

“I was deer hunting one year, saw what I thought was a nice deer, and there was this flinch, do I go for the camera, do I go for the rifle?” he said. “You know, which am I going to do? If he steps out of there, the light’s perfect, and I got the 300 mm lens on… man it would be such a good photo.”

Thomas does sell prints of some of his amazing images through his personal website, including a very nice calendar, but he is committed to giving away his photographs for the public good. While most photos on Commons are licensed Creative Commons Share Alike, which allows re-use so long as the original photographer is credited and derivative works are licensed under the same terms, Thomas donates his photos to the public domain.

“What I have told people in the past is putting a photo on the web is an act of generosity,” he said. Emblazoned on the bottom of his userpage is the simple phrase: Give freely or don’t give.

“I don’t own the bird. I don’t own the light. I don’t own the tree branch that the bird was sitting on,” he said. ”I take these pictures because I want people to see how beautiful these things are. Who am I to charge for that?”

(View more of Ken Thomas’s photos)

Story by Jordan Hu, Communications Intern, and Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager
Reporting by Victor Grigas, Storyteller

For the past year and a half we’ve been working on a project named Wikimedia Labs, which enables us to invite our community to contribute to how our sites are run. Labs is a cloud computing environment using OpenStack for development, testing and deployment of Wikimedia’s infrastructure as a whole, enabling us to treat our infrastructure as an open source software project.

The problems we’re solving

When Wikipedia and its sister projects started, volunteers had root level access on our infrastructure. They were the only roots and most of the infrastructure they built is still in use today. Our lenient access policy made us flexible, so changes could happen quickly. Also, the sites were smaller, had far fewer users, and large, fundamental changes could be made in production.

Growth has made us less willing to give out root access to volunteers. Because of the size of our sites, downtime is less acceptable. But having fewer volunteers means we have less ideas, and due to that, our ability to make changes quickly is decreased. We haven’t had a new volunteer root in years. We haven’t even had a new volunteer with shell access. Engaging volunteers and enabling them to easily contribute is a wider problem as well.

Our software development community scales with volunteers. Unfortunately, operations doesn’t scale in a similar way right now. We’re limited to the staff operations engineers we currently have. The staff is great, but the fact that operations can’t scale to meet the needs of a large growth of developers means that operations is a bottleneck. Furthermore, our access policy prevents volunteer developers from learning how our infrastructure works.

This leads to a situation where our staff developers and volunteer developers can’t easily collaborate. Our volunteers also have no way of appropriately testing their changes, since our infrastructure is complex and difficult to replicate. This means it’s harder to take contributions, which further slows the pace of changes on our sites.

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The Commons Picture of the Day is a moment most professional photographers dream of capturing. It’s especially notable given that User:Dr.Haus is not a pro and he captured the photo on a point and shoot camera that he bought two years ago.

The photo is from a vacation he took in the Patagonia region of Argentina. The day he shot this photo, he woke early and boarded a boat with his group to head out from coast of the Valdés Peninsula in the Chubut Province, a nature preserve and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Within a few minutes of being on the water, they saw a southern right whale and its calf. The whales spent about 40 minutes swimming near the boats.

“This species of whale isn’t really shy,” said Dr.Haus, who hopes people who view the photo are as awed by the animals as he was. “I can say that this was one of the most impressive moments in my life.”

Dr.Haus started shooting photos on a trip to London in 2004, when he was ten, with a camera his parents got him as a birthday present. He has been a regular contributor to Commons since early 2011 and he has enjoyed his experience interacting with other photographers. He said he had often used photos from Commons for school projects, so he thought, “it would be fair to give something back and share useful photos.”

He enjoys sharing his photos under a Creative Commons license, as much as he enjoys taking a virtual tour around the world through others’ photos. “I think it’s awesome to see all these beautiful pictures, often from places of the earth you’ll unfortunately never be able to visit,” he said.

(View more of Dr.Haus’s photos)

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager
Reporting by Elaine Mao, Communications Intern