using moodle to support academic research for wikimedia foundation

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.

@epictalk @maberdour #mootie13

Moodlemoot Dublin 2013

Resulting changes



Wikipedia Quality Strategy



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.”



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.



Key aims

A small-scale preliminary project to determine a sound research methodology.



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



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



Why Moodle for research?



?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



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.



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



Links

epiclearninggroup.com



using moodle to support academic research for wikimedia foundation

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