Presentation for MoodleMoot Dublin 2013

1. Using Moodle to support
academic research for
Wikimedia Foundation
Dr Chris Davies
University of Oxford
Mark Aberdour
Head of Learning Platforms

2. 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.

3. Resulting changes

4. Wikipedia Quality Strategy

5. 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.”

6. 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.

7. Key aims
A small-scale preliminary project to determine a sound
research methodology.
Explore the opinion of Compare the Explore the viability of the
expert reviewers accuracy, quality, style, r methods used in respect
regarding attributes eferences and judgment of the first two aims for a
relating to the of Wikipedia entries as possible future study on a
accuracy, quality and rated by experts to larger scale.
style of a sample of analogous entries from
Wikipedia across a range popular online alternative
of languages and encyclopaedias in the
disciplines. same language.

8. 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

15. 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

16. Why Moodle for research?
Assign users to
individual
articles
Feedback -
flexible and
configurable
Feedback -
data export
Source code
available for
scrutiny

17. Conclusions
Moodle worked well and would scale up for a larger project
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

18. Conclusions
A series of Consistent Shared: Course
manageable, small- methodology will backup file and
scale studies of be required across feedback surveys
quality in the future those projects.
would be worthwhile.

19. Links
Full Report:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EPIC_Oxford_repo
rt.pdf
Course template:
http://hub.moodle.org

20. epiclearninggroup.com