Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-04-01/Recent research


 * I read with interest: "During lookup tasks, tables and graphical representations were preferred (but illustrative/decorative images were almost never looked at. As the authors point out, their test question, about the number of passengers on the Titanic, focused on textual information)." How do I correctly quote the first half, when the bracket is closed only after the second? I tried here. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 07:10, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
 * This is a translation/summary/paraphrase from German, as noted elsewhere in the review. For reference, here is the corresponding text in the German original, with surrounding sentences:
 * "Werden bei Look up eher Tabellen und grafische Darstellungen genutzt, konzentriert sich der Nutzer bei Learn-Aufgaben mehr auf Einleitung und Listen. ... Bei den Aufgabentypen Learn und Casual-Leisure werden Bilder sehr viel häufiger verwendet. Hier geht es um die Aneignung von Wissen, nicht aber um das Nachschlagen ganz konkreter Informationsstücke (siehe Look up). Bilder stellen dabei eine zusätzliche Informationsquelle oder eine Visualisierung des Textes dar (Bsp. Spielfeld des Spiels Lacrosse). Beim TaskTyp Look up werden Bilder fast nie betrachtet."
 * Back to your question: If you just want to the English text from the review, how about simply using an ellipsis ;) - "During lookup tasks, tables and graphical representations were preferred (but illustrative/decorative images were almost never looked at. [...])."
 * Alternatively, ref 4 contains some of the same observations in English . Quoting alongside other interesting bits:
 * "In learn tasks, users prefer headlines for scan actions, presumably as headlines are better for detecting the topic of the focussed section of the page than text passages. Furthermore, in casual-leisure tasks introductions are much more important than in learn tasks – from that observation we conclude again that in learn tasks users do not feel a need to find out whether a web page could be interesting to them, but are seeking a certain pieces of information. Interestingly with pictures it is the other way round. We assume that users need textual information in order to understand what the web page is about. In learn tasks however, they prefer to get information from any (type of) content element available."
 * "In lookup tasks, we observe that – contrary to both other task types – users prefer content elements that provide quick access to information. They focus on introductions, charts, tables, and lists more often than on text passages, which are just scanned briefly. The same observation holds for look at actions which are applied to charts and tables only – again elements facilitating quick access to small pieces of information. Finally, in contrast to both other task types, in lookup tasks we observed a very high proportion of navigate actions [...]"
 * It is not stated explicitly in that passage that pictures are not looked at in lookup tasks. But can be inferred from Table 1 there (the content element "BI" for images is not present in the actions recorded for lookup tasks).
 * Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 08:47, 2 April 2016 (UTC)
 * PS: I see you are interested in infobox usage as well. Their use was tracked in the experiment too, see the "IB" columns in table 1 in ref 4 (with the caveat that some of the other publication cited in the review may contain later results based on more data). Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 08:53, 2 April 2016 (UTC)


 * I am one of the alleged "infobox warriors" who try to make data more accessible, especially now that Persondata is deprecated, - thus making life on Wikipedia hard for editors who like a plain picture as aesthetically more pleasing. See Busoni, 150 years yesterday. The topic is also up for arbcom clarification. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:00, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

I also had two of my own academic articles on Wikipedia published in March, but for obvious COI reasons I am not reviewing them. If anyone enjoying this newsletter would, however, like to return the favor and review my works (feel free to be critical), I'd appreciate it :) --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 04:29, 4 April 2016 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your constructive feedback on our article, “Employing Wikipedia for good not evil: innovative approaches to collaborative writing assessment.” We do appreciate you commenting on the article but some of your comments, though understandable, do not take into account the audience that this article seeks to address.

I hope that the following responses address some of your concerns, which centre on the inclusion of only five works from the larger corpus of “teaching with Wikipedia” literature, the fact that the paper does not report on any “groundbreaking” activities, and that the authors don’t seem to have connections with major support structures, don’t seem to have a Wikipedia account, and so forth.

As our purpose was to promote the efficacy of using Wikipedia to assess students’ performance, we wrote our article for scholars interested in higher education assessment pedagogy and so our focus was quite narrow. The article passed peer review and was accepted by a respected higher education journal that has only every published one article on the use of Wikipedia in Education: ours. A keyword search shows that of the 6 others, 3 mentioned Wikipedia twice, 3 mentioned it 4 times and only one of those did not reinforce common negative perceptions about Wikipedia.

Perhaps not groundbreaking, it was nonetheless a breakthrough to have such a high-ranking journal in the field accept our article for publication, particularly as we were advocating something that is not appealing to many conservative academics. In order to be accepted by such a high ranking journal, it was essential for us to show the ways our practices hinge on the theories of scholars renown in the field of higher education assessment pedagogy. We were also limited by a word count that included the bibliography and therefore could not afford to expand our literature review to cover scholarship in the broader field that sits outside our area of focus.

Lastly, I have been a Wikipedia editor since 2012, and listed my courses on the Wikipedia:Education noticeboard in May 2013, and in September and October 2013 (See for example ). I am listed as one of the University of Sydney Contacts on the Wikipedia Education Program’s page for Australia and have worked on initiatives with Wikimedia AU, and received support from Wikipedia volunteers and Wikipedians at my institution. My coauthor, Rebecca Johinke, developed an interest in teaching with Wikipedia in 2013 and has used it in teaching since 2014. To be fair to the Wikimedia Foundation, their support has been invaluable, as has the support of our local chapter, Wikimedia AU. Frances Di Lauro 08:54, 4 April 2016 (UTC)