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Research:Wikipedia Primary School SSAJRP programme/Articles

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Wikipedia Primary School SSAJRP programme Timelines & progress

Links between topics related to the South African curriculum and Wikipedia articles and content. This list is meant to provide a first list of articles the project will concentrate on. We expect to focus on 100 Wikipedia articles (there are no linguistic restrictions but we are starting our analysis on existing Wikipedia articles in English). The list is available in a wiki format at the English Wikipedia.

Legenda
  • EX = Review by experts
  • JO = Call for articles - journal
  • CO = Review by WP community
  • new = missing article, missing section or article needs to be rewritten.

Method

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Notes about the process of evaluation of potential articles of interest for this project. The evaluation was previously tested on a first list of topics. Further work by the team has later lead to narrowing the focus to a single country's curriculum (South Africa), which meant the list of topics was changed.

Content has been evaluated mainly based on a limited set of criteria, the main one being discoverability.

Discoverability

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There are several main articles and templates on the English Wikipedia providing access (mostly through wikilinks) to more specific articles:

Country-related articles do exist and present titles in the form of "X in/of South Africa", where X is usually a broad topic.

Categories were not considered as an effective way of discovering content, because they are hardly findable themselves and because their usage is not regulated enough to exclude elements which are not entirely on topic, thus confusing the average reader.

Impact

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The second criterion followed was impact.

Articles on Wikipedia may be subject to evaluation at any time, by single Wikipedians or by a wikiproject’s "task force". When an article has issues, it is tagged accordingly with warning notices which will inform the user about said issues, that might be related to its length, accuracy, completeness and so on. This means that any action aimed at fixing these issues won't go unnoticed, and that it will actually be more appreciated since it reflects the collaborative spirit of the encyclopedia, so focusing on areas which the community has already identified as inadequate is recommended.

The first analysis was performed on the list of topics provided by Luca Botturi; to link the topics the attention was on these which currently offer more space for improvement, which are missing or where related content is scattered among many pages.

As one could imagine, almost all of the suggested topics present at least a related article on the English Wikipedia; the lack of a comment for a given article doesn’t necessarily mean that article is perfect as it is, but it doesn’t show blatant gaps either. A question mark means that the topic needs to be narrowed or defined better.

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Please notice the *Outline* article is a good place to start to collect ideas about new articles as it features several interesting red links.

Other topics

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During the course of the project, new articles were added to the list because they appeared relevant in general and allowed to test additional methodologies.

Results

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Documentation

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Credits

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  • Erica Litrenta led the evaluation of Wikipedia articles (existence, general articles, specific articles) and their status, related to the selected topics, until October 2015.
  • Florence Devouard is leading the program part related to the English Wikipedia, mainly communicating new calls for articles or reviews, from October 2015 on.