Ask a Researcher: Using the Wiki Quality Instrument in Other Settings

Here's a question about using the Wiki Quality Instrument to measure quality in individual wiki projects:

I currently have a course wiki (using wikispaces) between our preservice teachers and ninth graders in a remote secondary school. We used the wiki for a specific project, so it won't fall under your longevity categories but I am interested in citing your work and in rating the quality of the educational wiki.

I'm not sure if you have any advice for me, but I would love to be able to rate and report the quality of the wiki that was created by this collaboration.
My Response
One of my hopes in this project is that our national survey of K-12 wiki use would help design researchers, such as yourself, identify how individual projects compare to the distribution of wikis learning environments across the nation.
One simple way to do that would be to take the items of the Wiki Quality Instrument (WQI), published online and freely available, and apply them to your own project. The Educational Researcher paper provides a detailed distribution of Wiki Quality Scores from our random sample, and I'm happy to help you make comparisons. If you use the whole instrument, you would be able to compare how the opportunities for 21st century learning on your wiki project compare to opportunities found throughout wikis used across the U.S.
One thing that you will need to remember, is that every instrument is calibrated to measure the range of a quality within it's environment. A pipette is good at measuring the volume of water in a small test tube, and not so good at measuring the volume of water in the ocean. The WQI is designed to measure quality throughout an incredible diverse population, and so it's not well designed to capture variability in wikis used in, for instance, English classrooms in remote secondary schools. It's a good tool for making basic comparisons across lots of wikis, but your teachers may be doing something novel, exciting, innovative that wouldn't be found on many other types of wikis and therefore won't be measured by this instrument.
By the way, there were no "longevity categories" per se in the paper. You can evaluate how long your wiki "lived"--the number of days from creation to its final edit--and compare that to the distribution of wiki lifetimes presented in the paper. That won't tell you anything about whether the wiki was "good" or "bad" but it can tell you how typical or atypical it was in terms of persistence.
I wrote a white paper about Adaptation Guidelines for Researchers, which may provide some more ideas about how the WQI could be modified for other kinds of projects. Thanks for the question, and good luck with your project.