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Wikipedia Learning Analytics editathon

Apr 17, 20136 min read

At #category/conference/LAK13 I raised this issue again, so I’m just going to publish this blog even though I haven’t actually managed to organise a formal editathon.  I’d really encourage academics from all disciplines to look at their subject discipline pages – these reflect on us, and especially where the field is new people will use them widely (including people we want to work with!).  I’ve spent a reasonable amount of  time on the mooc page, and the Learning Analytics page (although here more of that time has been on the ‘talk’ page). I don’t feel qualified to add stuff alone, and I’m much keener to work with people on talk pages to move stuff into the article than trying to write whole chunks myself. # The Problem Motivation

The current Learning Analytics page is a) pretty sparse, and b) of very mixed quality, with a lot of sections explicitly marked as “draft” or incomplete.  The Educational Data Mining page is in a similar state.

In so far as I think these things are interesting, the current page rating averages are (pretty low) at:

Trustworthy: 3.1 ( 8 ratings)

Objective: 3.0 (6 ratings)

Complete: 2.3 (8 ratings)

Well-written: 2.5 (11 ratings)

(by way of some sort of comparison, from a similar number of raters the EDM page rates higher, although it is even more sparse than the LA one – I’d encourage people to edit both if possible!)

Given that LA is a rich and diverse area, with a strong (and growing) research and theory base the wikipedia page should reflect this.  It is the first port of call for many who might hear the term in passing, and it should therefore illustrate the breadth and depth of LA as well as concerns related to it, and its relationship to other fields.  This should not be about promoting our own field of study, but about putting our expertise into the page to ensure it reflects the status of the community, its knowledge base, and challenges.

Language Versions of Learning Analytics Wikipedia Page

There is a French page http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_analytics – 4 lines long…to my knowledge there are no other language equivalents. Just a translation would do (I think…there must be guidance on wiki-language versioning somewhere).  Note the left panel on Wikipedia at the bottom includes:

Autres langues

These are used to link together language versions…this may also mean other language versions DO exist but I can’t find them because they’re a) not linked and b) not called “learning analytics” in other languages (unsurprisingly eh?).  Again here, this reflects on how people perceive the discipline…

Proposal

If anyone would like to try and organise a formal edit-a-thon there are some nice links:

Whether through a formal edit-a-thon, informal distributed events or just general editing I’d suggest editing:

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_analytics – main page
  • EDM page
  • Academic Analytics page (mostly empty)
  • Any other related pages?
  • Methods pages – e.g. SLA may deserve it’s own page?  We need to be careful here not to distort the article to the expertise of the group contributing to it, so we should discuss in advance what aspects there are and their weighting, people may need to write outside of their own area or we could encourage other experts to contribute where necessary
  • People pages – I know George has a page, which looks ok to me. If anyone wants to edit it (e.g. to put in something about learning analytics) that might be useful, but if you work directly with George (or, are George) then please don’t (unless there’s anything defamatory or uncontroversial edits such as correcting grammar) – the edits will only get reverted.  I’m not sure if there are other people who “should” have pages but currently don’t, this might be worth looking at but we need to be careful to maintain Neutral Point of View NPOV and avoid conflict of interest COI.
  • One thing we might want to do is add a page distinguishing between EDM, LA and AA?

For co-ordinated effort – whether distributed or not – it would be very useful to record suggested edits, get involved in the conversation on the talk page – if you’re not sure an edit is appropriate, or you want to link to your own work, do it via the talk page.

Issues

Conflict of Interest

It’s my area of expertise, I (/SoLAR) can’t be NEUTRAL:

Try not to add citations to yourself.  Add these to talk and someone else can add them

Try not to unbalance the article – unfortunately this happened on the EDM page with a large section on one area, the removal of which caused some conflict and the partial locking of the page. I think that was probably an unfortunate rarity resulting from an inappropriate merge of stuff into the EDM page…but it’s something to be aware of.

Organisation versus individuals

I talked to WikiMedia UK about this (but you know, they don’t speak for the community, they can just advise).  It’s probably wise to not over promote SoLAR or any other organisation who might’ve published reports on LA, equally though – try not to over-report your own citations particularly where there are other people working in the same area. If in doubt, whack it in the ‘talk’ page and someone else can compile stuff to include it.

I don’t know how to edit!!

See help above, or/and get in touch with me and I’ll see if I can help/direct you to someone who can. Again – the talk pages (and, your own username talk page) are a better place to play than the main article namespace…

Too many chef-book-authors…how will we manage the shopping/ingredients/recipe?

Tortured analogy?  Well, I’d ideally have liked to live chat and plan together then create a spreadsheet (to make sure all the chefs in the kitchen knew where they were supposed to stand 😉 )…I don’t think this’ll be an issue though unless loads of people edit together.  The talk page has some suggestions for edits.

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