Using Moodle to support academic research for
Wikimedia Foundation
Dr Chris DaviesUniversity of Oxford
Mark AberdourHead of Learning Platforms
Back to 2005...Wikipedia articles on scientific topics contained just four errors per article on average compared to three errors per article in the online edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
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Resulting changes
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Wikipedia Quality Strategy
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Follow-up study
“Conduct a study which analyses articles across both languages and subjects to allow differences in levels of accuracy and quality across language and subject domains to be identified. The results could inform editor recruitment efforts and the design of expert feedback mechanisms.”
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Assessing the Accuracy and Quality of Wikipedia Entries Compared to Popular Online Alternative Encyclopaedias: A Preliminary Comparative Study Across Disciplines in English, Spanish and Arabic.
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Key aims
A small-scale preliminary project to determine a sound research methodology.
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Explore the opinion of expert reviewers regarding attributes relating to the accuracy, quality and style of a sample of Wikipedia across a range of languages and disciplines.
Compare the accuracy, quality, style, references and judgment of Wikipedia entries as rated by experts to analogous entries from popular online alternative encyclopaedias in the same language.
Explore the viability of the methods used in respect of the first two aims for a possible future study on a larger scale.
Research methodology
Pairs of 22 articles
English Wikipedia vs Encyclopaedia Britannica
Spanish Wikipedia vs Enciclonet
Arabic Wikipedia vs Mawsoah and Arab Encyclopaedia
Four broad disciplinary areas
Blind assessed by 2-3 native speaking academic experts
Qualitative and quantitative assessment
This formed the Moodle requirements
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User management
Email notifications sent after batch enrolment
Each academic assigned 2 articles
Article = course (amended Moodle language files)
Tracked progress through Moodle course reports
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Why Moodle for research?
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?Assign users to individual articles
Feedback - flexible and configurable
Feedback - data export
Source code available for scrutiny
Change: add automated reminder notifications
Change: build custom report for Feedback progress across all courses
Change: test out feedback criteria better
Logistics blocker: researcher recruitment
Logistics blocker: article consistency
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Moodle worked well and would scale up for a larger project
Conclusions
A series of manageable, small-scale studies of quality in the future would be worthwhile.
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Consistent methodology will be required across those projects.
Shared: Course backup file and feedback surveys
Conclusions
Full Report: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EPIC_Oxford_report.pdf
Course template: http://hub.moodle.org
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Links
epiclearninggroup.com
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