Keerthana S
| Tags | Contributors, Machine Learning |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Advancing the Contributor Experience |
| Secondary Sessions | Research, Analytics, and Machine Learning |
Breaking the ice and catering to the could be Student Wikipedia contributors
Most of the valuable contributors especially in technically advanced articles comes from people in academia. So my paper is going to discuss why it can be valuable to expose University students about contributing to Wikipedia and give enough guidance for them to stick around, existing infrastructure that helps this cause and some points on how this can improve. As the infrastructure of mediawiki evolves and becomes a platform where beginners to Open Source find it easy to contribute to the project with a really well documented code base, a friendly community and the many outreach programs we should also think about introducing to the University Students about contributing to WIkipedia.
Wikipedia serves as an invaluable tool for students worldwide helping them to assimilate their course content. They write term papers as a part of their course work so it only makes sense that giving an awareness to students about contributing wikipedia and giving them guidance can be a source of reliable and high quality contributions to Wikipedia.
Existing Infrastructure
WikiEduDashboard which is a project of the WikiEducation Foundation caters to universities where students are required to contribute to Wikipedia articles as part of their course assessment and provides tools for the instructors to guide the students in it.
Machine Learning tools for Guidance
There are existing automatic mechanisms in wikipedia to find out plagiarism/promotional content or any form of spam in the edits. Automatically rating wikipedia articles is to an extent achieved by the Scoring Platform Team. This is being utilised by many bots in wikipedia to spot potential vandalism. This score prediction tool can also be used to give some immediate feedback to the newbie editors in a more friendly manner and point out to the faux paus in their edits.
