Using ORES to assign articles in Basque education program

Summary: When we launched our Education Program we wanted to rise the quality of a list of basic articles. Measuring quality is tricky, but ORES system can help us choose what must be improved and what can be difficult to assign to students. Integrating ORES Articlequality system in Basque Wikipedia has made students choose wisely and center their effort in what really matters.

Basque Wikimedians User Group's Education Program's aim is to improve the quality of basic articles for secondary students. We are doing it with university students, institutions and wikimedians alike. After our first year, we saw that students didn't know what to improve when a list of articles was given, and usually they chose new articles, instead of improving existing ones.

Our goal is quality, and quality is something difficult to measure. Wikipedians have been creating quality standards since wp1.0 program was launched, deciding what was a good article or a featured article. This usually change in every language, but he have better articles day by day, and we could imagine that readers want them.

Having quality as a goal, we decided to use ORES articlequality system to measure our articles. This system wasn't ready in every language, so we had two computer science students working with us in the implementation. After working with the ORES team in the Barcelona Hackathon and Wikimania, we developed a system to automatically asess any article's structural completeness.

This system is not perfect (it doesn't know if the article is really well-written, for example) but it gives us some interesting clues when we have to assign articles to students. This term we have started to use it, and students love it. It helps them choose which article is qualified as low quality at a glance, an they can even track their improvements live if they install the gadget.

It would be interesting to have some future improvements. Full dashboard integration and deploying the gadget automatically to all users could help us improve articles and look after stubs easily. This term will be a good test for us, as structural completeness will give better statistics and in-depth focus on what has been improved.

Tags: ORES, quality, education program, basque country, assignment