Comparison with experts
We expected that students’ contributions would be as good
as those made by expert psychologists since they receive direct
feedback from their faculty who are experts in the field.
However, a priori, it was not clear whether the quality of their
work would match that produced by expert PhDs. We therefore
compared the contributions of students writing as part
of classroom assignments with the contributions of PhD psychologists
who are writing by themselves. Because students
had well-defined goals (e.g., to improve an article to “Good
Article” status) and because they were working for an external
incentive, their classroom grade, we also expected them
to have contributed more to the articles than the PhDs, who
had no externally imposed goals or incentives. As shown in
Table 3, students added 3.4 times more words to the articles
than the PhDs, and their contribution had the same survival
rate as those made by PhDs. These results support our expectation
that classroom training and socialization can help
relatively naive students to contribute high-quality content to
Wikipedia