Jump to content

Education/News/February 2019/Basque Education Program: 2018 in review

From Outreach Wiki

Basque Education Program: 2018 in review


Author: Galder Gonzalez




Summary: At the end of 2017 we began our Education Program. Its purpose was to improve, with the help of university students, the content that students between the ages of 12 and 16 need. 2018 has been an intense year, in which more than 1,500 students have participated in more than 80 courses, adding 1.5 million words to Basque Wikipedia.



It has been an intense year, convincing university professors of the importance of their students contributing content to Wikipedia. Our challenge was complex: we needed content in each and every subject, from A to Z, letters and sciences, popular culture and philosophy, astronomy and music. We have held meetings with more than 200 university professors, explaining the project to them, and we have managed to get the project off the ground in some 75 university courses.

We have created material for these students to know how Wikipedia works, including video tutorials and printed material. We have used Dashboard intensively. We have travelled thousands of kilometres, even though our country is small.

But the result is good, very good. Although the improvement of articles never stops, it is time to take stock of what has been achieved this year:

Improvements in the number of bytes

[edit]

Our 1.700 scoped articles in the Education Program has grown in the last year clearly. When we started the program mean article size was 5.950 bytes, so we decided that having articles over 5.000 bytes should be a goal. 332 articles were non-existing, 841 were (48,95%) were below 5.000 bytes and only 31,72% were above it. 203 articles were below 1.000 bytes, and the median size was 2.439,5 bytes.

When we measured again in June, the global situation was clearly better. Article's mean size had risen to 7.372 bytes, the median size was 3.325 bytes, only 258 were non-existing and 674 articles (39,23%) were above 5.000 bytes.

We have measured it again and we thing that the results are great. Articles mean size is now 9.395 bytes, median size is 4.366 bytes, near the 5.000 bytes goal. 216 articles are non-existing, but 804 articles (46,8%) are over 5.000 bytes.

Improvements in article quality

[edit]

Basque Wikipedia was the first to implement an automatic ORES article rating in every article. This has been of great value when students are creating their assignments, as they can see live how they are doing and what we would expect from them. Article quality measurement has been important since we started, and ORES prediction gives us insights on this goal. We have six ranges: stub, start, C, B, good and featured. We want to make all articles at least C class, but this could be impossible with some topics. Nevertheless, we are working with this goal in mind.

Arloa Stub Start C B Good Featured
Jun Dec Jun Dec Jun Dec Jun Dec Jun Dec Jun Dec
Math 13 7 47 43 25 32 6 10 4 4 0 0
Biology and geology 3 1 86 62 51 63 21 29 21 33 2 3
Physics and chemistry 3 2 80 54 39 51 16 28 5 15 1 1
Geography and history 14 12 99 96 52 53 18 45 30 30 8 9
Scientific culture 2 0 15 14 13 12 9 6 4 7 3 11
Information technology 1 0 17 8 10 13 7 14 3 4 1 1
Languages 5 5 15 13 9 10 9 9 6 6 0 3
Literature 2 3 58 40 29 52 35 27 6 12 0 1
Economy 19 13 42 48 19 19 5 6 4 5 1 1
Classical culture 11 12 49 49 9 10 7 8 7 6 0 0
Philosophy 4 4 22 22 10 11 1 3 3 1 0 0
Arts 5 5 58 58 37 41 13 11 5 6 0 0
Music, dance, theatre 11 10 63 63 42 43 22 22 3 3 0 0
Sports 10 13 13 13 12 12 4 5 0 0 0 0
Women and gender 0 0 23 23 10 9 5 7 1 1 2 2
Total 103 87 688 606 366 431 178 229 102 135 17 32
C or better 663 827

Improvements in page views

[edit]

During 2017, the articles in the list had 1,899,241 views, is to say, 5,365 views per day.

This year we had 2,143,988 views in the same time range, is to say, 6,056 views per day. This is an increment of a 12% in page views.

You can easily see how articles are viewed during the school-year, and how visits are mostly done from monday to friday. This statistics reinforce our idea that this articles are mostly consumed by students, to help them learning concepts or, sometimes, copying for their assignments.


Tags: basque wikipedia, oer, education program, university, curriculum, content creation