Talk:Submissions/Wikipedia + universities + Estonia = ?

Copyright, other national programs

University outreach is unpopular and controversial on the English language Wikipedia because of a particular unsuccessful program that had major copyright problems. Has the Estonian program done things to learn from the problems of unsuccessful programs elsewhere, and will this be covered in your talk? WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:03, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Copyright problems have also emerged in Estonia. Specially in subjects where articles are on topics where it is rather easy to find Estonian language texts, as then some students attend to copy big chunks from there and think it is totally ok when they add reference. Now we are trying educate students in this and get rid of that problem but it doesn't seem to be possible to eradicate all of it.

I have do admit that I am not a person who likes to read manuals. That means I have tested all sorts of possible ways and not looked so closely on what exactly have others done as I don't believe that this could be copied one-on-one anyway (already between different subjects it is possible to get very different results with the same approach). It's more like about finding out what suits you best in and doing that fast to minimize problems. So this talk will also point out what have tried in Estonia, what have worked and what haven't.

I see this university outreach to be much more important outside English speaking world and I do think that English language Wikipedia should have a bit different approach than other language versions. Kruusamägi (talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Translation

To what extent are these articles translations from other language versions of Wikipedia? WereSpielChequers (talk) 19:03, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Some students prefer to make translations from English version so they are allowed to do so, but when it is possible to add new materials then it is recommend for them to do so. As the direct translations are mostly not of a very high quality (as many genetic engineers or chemist etc. don't have the perfect language perception) and they attend to ignore materials in Estonian when focusing to translation then this is not the best choice. Making it mandatory to add Estonian materials helps.

When students write about what they are working on in a laboratory then that makes it much easier to get original work. Kruusamägi (talk) 23:01, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

OK I can understand that if the students are on a course other than a foreign language, otherwise you need part of the work to be relevant to their course. The comments re updating and incorporating material from the language that the wiki is in are interesting and I hope you include them in your presentation. In the long run if the project succeeds then as all the obvious articles have been created for particular subjects then I would assume you will need to move the project from creating encyclopaedic articles to maintaining and hopefully improving them. When that happens if not before you are likely to encounter some of the tensions that are common to the Academic outreach programs, in particular getting students to communicate with other editors, and avoiding the temptation to delete a whole article and restart from scratch. WereSpielChequers (talk) 20:06, 8 January 2013 (UTC)