I believe lenthy quotes are discouraged on WP and as a teacher, I would not do this. Too easy for students to see lenghty quote as a way to get away with copy/paste. We also should not encourage student contributions that rely on substantial volunteer intervention later.
This is one reason why our students work first with translation (generally English to Spanish) along with the fact that my school does a good job of getting student to decent mastery of at least one other language. While they are contributing content right away, they are also learning how Wikipedia articles should be generally structured as well as comparative rhetoric as one of the first questions we always get is "do we have to express it in Spanish the way it is in English" (answer is a hearty "no"), not to mention the concept of citation (which often get confused with quotation).
One major problem with writing articles is that because so many education systems either have never taught the basics of rhetoric (paraphrase and synthesis) or its teaching has gone seriously downhill over the past decades... many students are not ready to write articles from scratch.
We have probably focused too much on the creation of new articles and ignored other student opportunities such as in illustration, programming and even just starting out by revising and updating existing articles.
My understanding of student retention is that it is very very low, so even though I belive that 40% number has more to do with participating classes, Im not sure it makes an impact on the male/female ratio in Wikimedia.
Leigh
> Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 09:51:45 -0700
> From: jsalsman@gmail.com
> To: education@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wikimedia Education] gender balance of WEP recruits and guidance on lengthy quotations
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1. What is the gender balance of long term editors who started editing
> in a WEP class? I have second-hand information that it is over 40%
> female.
>
> 2. What is the WEP guidance on lengthy quotations? Do we encourage
> students who, say, don't have the time or confidence in their ability
> to summarize a passage they think would be a substantial improvement,
> to insert it as a properly cited and quoted excerpt, or just not make
> the edit?
>
> I talked to a college professor who has never heard of the WEP but has
> interesting guidance on plagiarism which doesn't really assume that
> improvements are preferred even when they are lengthy quotations. How
> can we get teachers to understand that as long as they are clearly
> quoted and cited, other editors will come along and summarize the
> salient points of important source passages later?
>
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