The Wikimedia Foundation’s program to get Wikipedia editing into university classrooms – the Public Policy Initiative – has wrapped up its first term of work, and we’re already working hard on the next term! Over the last two weeks, I’ve been posting profiles of students who participated in the Public Policy Initiative last fall: Peter Elliot, Nicole Anderson, Graham Rogers, Abbie Taylor, and Adrian Bien. Each of these five students wrote Wikipedia articles for a grade last term and really enjoyed the experience.

Campus Ambassadors at the Washington, D.C. training get into the editing spirit by editing a quote on Georgetown University's campus.

As I listened to their stories, common themes emerged: how the Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors had eased their transitions into Wikipedia, how they felt much more invested in the assignment when writing for the global Wikipedia community rather than just for their professor, how honored they felt to share their knowledge with the world. We’ve seen these themes echoed across the students in all of the 14 classes we worked with last term.

“It was a good way to make our class-related research useful to the public,” Kristin Broughton, a master’s student at George Washington University, said.

“I love the idea that you do something that is actually real,” added a Harvard University student during an open forum.

“I feel a little silly being so excited,” wrote another student to her professor after learning her article would be featured on the Did You Know? section on Wikipedia’s front page.

Overall, the students were able to get 20 articles featured in Did You Know?, and our 207 participants combined to contribute more than 2 million bytes to Wikipedia — that’s the equivalent of more than six printed pages per student. We at the Wikimedia Foundation learned a lot in the process, too. Many of our biggest challenges and problems from the fall could have been ameliorated if interactions between students and Online Ambassadors had occurred sooner and more frequently; for the spring term, it’s now a requirement that every student be paired with an Online Ambassador “mentor” throughout the term. We’ve also worked more closely with professors on syllabus design to space milestones throughout the term, so students’ learning curve for Wikipedia-editing is smoother and so students have fewer opportunities for procrastination.

These changes are on display in our spring batch of classes. Twenty-nine courses – to date – are participating in the Public Policy Initiative in the spring, spread all across the United States. The Wikipedia Ambassador Program is growing rapidly, with 51 Campus Ambassadors and 59 Online Ambassadors supporting students this spring (all of these numbers are likely to go up in the coming months). We’re still recruiting more Online Ambassadors, and we encourage anyone with an interest in helping newcomers with content development to apply.

With every step of the way, we’re looking toward sustainability. The Wikipedia Ambassador Steering Committee is a volunteer-run group that ensures the continuity of our work in university classrooms. Already, Wikimedia chapters and volunteers around the globe are starting to form their own Ambassador programs, and we look forward to watching organic growth of Wikipedia’s use as a teaching tool.

Come be a part of our project! Join WikiProject United States Public Policy, help with the article quality assessment team that’s measuring our impact, become an Online Ambassador, sign up here if you’re interested in being a Campus Ambassador, or just subscribe to our weekly newsletter. We look forward to your ideas and contributions.

LiAnna Davis, Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

Note: This blog post is the fifth in a series of profiles of students’ experiences on Wikipedia when participating in the Public Policy Initiative during the fall term.

Georgetown University junior Adrian Bien was excited when he first heard he’d be editing Wikipedia for his “Theorizing Culture and Politics” class last fall. But as the Cleveland, Ohio, native started to learn wiki markup and the guidelines for articles, he realized how much work it would be, which dampened his enthusiasm.

That didn’t last long. Once Adrian’s Campus Ambassadors, Rob Pongsajapan and Yonatan Moskowitz, gave an overview of editing and answered questions, he was delving in to the intricacies of Wikipedia.

“It was definitely a pleasant surprise,” Adrian says of his experience. “I was very pleased overall with the Wikipedia assignment instead of writing another dull paper. As I see it, I’d rather spend thirty hours putting work into a project that will be available for public consumption upon its completion than putting 10 hours into a project which gets graded, returned, and then either thrown out or forsaken and forgotten. Turning in a paper and getting it back with a letter on it is far less rewarding than submitting an article onto one of the world’s most renowned knowledge bases for all to see. It makes putting all those hours of work into a project seem far more relevant and practical.”

Adrian hopes he’ll be able to use Wikipedia in a forthcoming assignment at Georgetown. Now that he knows how to write for Wikipedia and has experience with the markup, he thinks the assignment will take a lot less time – and he’e eager to continue to participate in useful assignments while at college.

“I applaud the effort—and courage in many cases considering the ridicule Wikipedia often receives in the scholarly community—of university professors working with the Wikimedia Foundation on this project,” Adrian says. “Whether students like it or not, these sorts of assignments (not necessarily with Wikipedia per se, but similar) are increasingly looking to be the way of the future.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

Note: This blog post is the fourth in a series of profiles of students’ experiences on Wikipedia when participating in the Public Policy Initiative during the fall term.

Scotland native Abbie Taylor hadn’t envisioned Wikipedia being part of her grad school curriculum at Georgetown University. But the first year Master of Arts in Arab Studies student found herself converted from a skeptic to a Wikipedian as she crafted an article on Women’s literary salons and societies in the Arab World for Professor Rochelle Davis’s “Introduction to the Study of the Arab World” class.

Abbie’s Campus Ambassadors, Rob Pongsajapan and Yonatan Moskowitz, gave her a copy of the “Welcome to Wikipedia” brochure, which opened her eyes to the extensive nature of the Wikipedia community and its guidelines. But it was her interaction with the Online Ambassadors that made Abbie’s experience on Wikipedia great.

“For me, the Online Ambassador mentors were a godsend,” Abbie says. “I was extremely impressed with their dedication, willingness, and ability to help – literally at all hours! There were times when I would be working at weekends, or very late at night, and yet there was always someone on hand to answer my questions and to review my article.”

Using IRC, Abbie contacted Online Ambassador Rock_drum, who provided great suggestions on her first draft of the article. Other Online Ambassadors chimed in with suggestions, including the key point that Abbie’s article was too academic — she took that advice to heart and says her revised version is much more readable.

“I thought the online chat with the Ambassadors was a great idea, and the Ambassadors deserve much praise for their patience, insight and commitment to the project,” Abbie says. “I greatly appreciated their technical advice, being a bit of a technophobe and new to Wikipedia. My mentor helped me with providing captions for my uploaded pictures from Wikimedia Commons, and another Ambassador made a couple of grammatical edits. When my article was nominated to appear on Wikipedia’s ‘Did You Know’ page, I logged on 24 hours later to find that there had been a problem with my article’s hook, which had been solved by one of the Online Ambassadors. For this, I was extremely grateful.”

Abbie says she liked the fact that she was writing for a global audience with her article. With traditional assignments, she says, she writes for one person (the professor), but the Wikipedia assignment forced her out of her academic comfort zone.

“It was difficult at first, but a great technique to master, and one that will no doubt help me in my future place of work,” Abbie says. “For example, in writing the ‘Intro’ section to my article, I had to consider its readership. What would be useful for someone doing some quick research on my topic?”

Abbie says she felt a larger sense of personal investment in her article than she does with traditional assignments. And she felt a duty to keep adding more information she thought people would find interesting and useful. “Making edits and additions did get quite addictive after a while!” she says.

She is looking forward to taking another course in the spring that will also have a Wikipedia assignment component, as she’ll be able to continue contributing to freely shared knowledge about the Arab World — an area that she feels has a wealth of culture and history, but has suffered from negative, and at times inaccurate, media coverage.

“Now that I feel like a fairly seasoned and competent Wikipedia user,” she explains, “I hope to contribute and edit articles on the Arab World, in order to promote objective, accessible, and well-sourced information on the politics, cultures, and societies within the region.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

Greetings,

With the annual fundraiser wrapping up, two sections of Wikimedia engineering are going to start moving more quickly: Mobile and Offline. The offline ecosystem has a lot of moving parts and it’s easy to get lost. The Wikimedia Foundation is currently focusing on three main areas of intervention: selection tools, file formats and offline apps.

Right now, “Offline” refers to supporting read access to Wikimedia content without an internet connection; increasing reach was identified during the Wikimedia strategic planning process as one of the movement priorities, and the first recommendation of the Offline task force was to “Simplify reuse of content from WMF projects”.

The first step in making Wikimedia content available offline is to select it. The Wikipedia Version 1.0 Editorial Team has been steadily releasing new versions of their beta Wikipedia collections, but technical limitations have hampered how quickly those can be finished. We’re going to evaluate the team’s tool set to see how to support them.

For example, we’re looking at extending the Wikipedia Release Version Tools to add features like sub-selection and comments (see an example of how the tool works for the Physics project).

Once the content has been selected, it needs to be packaged into a standard file format. The openZim format is an actively developed format for offline Wikipedia content, and we want to facilitate its integration into our general architecture.

Our first step is going to be the enhancement of the Collections extension to support openZim. This will be done by our partners from PediaPress, who have already started to work on it. They will need help from other community members to help test the new openZim files created by the extension.

After selection and packaging, the last remaining piece is the application that allows readers to access the content. Over the last many years, there have been lots of Wikipedia offline apps: BzReader, MzReader, WikiTaxi, WikiFilter, Kiwix, Okawix, etc. Some have come and gone, while others continue to thrive and are actively releasing new updates.

One thing we’ve learned looking at this ecosystem is that there is a strong need for a featured, easy-to-use and well supported offline app.

During the strategic planning process, one app emerged as a good candidate for the WMF to actively support: Kiwix. Kiwix has been around since 2007 and, through the great work of its lead developer Kelson, has steadily improved its feature set, platform support and overall stability.

In order to support this work and to help make the application even easier to use, we’ll be conducting a usability study on Kiwix, focused on search and browse, during the first quarter of 2011. Later this year, we’ll be focusing on an easier update cycle using openZim as the underlying storage format.

We hope 2011 will be full of exciting news about offline Wikimedia content. If you’d like to get involved, please participate in the strategic product discussion about Offline, or contact me if you’d like to help with development.

Tomasz Finc
Engineering Program Manager – Offline, Mobile, & Fundraising

Note: This blog post is the third in a series of profiles of students’ experiences on Wikipedia when participating in the Public Policy Initiative during the fall term.

Little Falls, New York, native Graham Rogers had used Wikipedia frequently to look up information that he was interested in — but he’d never clicked the edit button.

That changed when Graham enrolled in Syracuse University professor Carol Dwyer’s course, “Wikipedia and Public Policy.” Graham, a sophomore studying public policy and economics, was excited about the opportunity to give back to the site he used so frequently. The opportunity to collaborate with other editors was the best part of the assignment, he says.

“If I had to pick one main advantage of a Wikipedia assignment, it would be the peer editing between Wikipedians that often doesn’t take place with traditional assignments. The feedback from other users and students in my class really helped me improve my articles,” he says. “I really appreciate the peer editing and reviewing that is constantly taking place because it helps articles continue to evolve and improve.”

His fellow classmates and other Wikipedia editors helped as he improved articles about the Fair Sentencing Act, Reorganization Plan No. 3, and Say Yes to Education. Graham says it took a while to figure out the technical side of editing Wikipedia, and he struggled at first with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view policy — as he is often encouraged to discuss his own opinions and explain them in traditional assignments. It took some practice and feedback to be able to present multiple viewpoints on a topic without placing too much emphasis on one of them, he says. He found support on these tasks from his Online and Campus Ambassadors.

“My online mentor, Ssilvers, was unbelievably helpful and informative,” Graham says. “He made the process much easier for a brand new contributor to Wikipedia like me. He would always provide copy editing for any information I added to my articles. He provided suggestions on areas that my articles needed improvements and showed me helpful shortcuts for adding references. Whenever I had a question or asked for help, he responded in a timely manner with thorough and helpful support.”

Campus Ambassador Gabriel Mugar was also a great resource for Graham. Gabriel came to the class meetings and was available via email to help the students with any questions or concerns. Graham says he was very helpful in explaining Wikimedia Commons, how to place images in articles, and the concepts of public domain works.

After his positive experience in the fall term, Graham wants to continue writing for Wikipedia.

“It is really exciting to be published to such a wide audience, and I definitely support Wikipedia’s goal of providing the sum of all human knowledge to anyone with access to the Internet,” he says. “Contributing to Wikipedia is a way to help that cause.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

Note: This blog post is the second in a series of profiles of students’ experiences on Wikipedia when participating in the Public Policy Initiative during the fall term.

When Georgetown University master’s student Nicole Anderson first discovered she’d be writing a Wikipedia article for class credit, she was excited.

“I thought it was a cool idea,” she says. “It’s one easy way to get your work published. It’s also a forum that is accessible to everyone who has access to the Internet. Being able to reach that broad of range of audience with academic writing is rare, but I have had the chance to do it!”

Nicole was a student in Professor Rochelle Davis’s “Introduction to the Study of the Arab World” class. Nicole contributed the article Obesity in the Middle East and North Africa.

While crafting her article, Nicole relied on the help of two Campus Ambassadors who were present in her class, but at odd hours, she sought help from the Online Ambassadors, whom she found especially helpful.

“It was great having the Online Ambassadors available at almost all hours of the day,” she says. “All too frequently I would spend Friday nights asking technical questions or formatting questions. I had issues with my title and asked them for assistance, as well as with initial editing requests. Their edits more concerned how Wikipedians would see and critique my article, not necessarily grammar mistakes. Overall, the Online Ambassadors were very helpful.”

While Nicole enjoyed the experience of getting to write for such a wide audience, she says she now appreciates the finality of turning in a term paper. With her Wikipedia article, she says, she never felt done. She was constantly monitoring and improving the content, and she says she’ll continue to do that even though her course is finished. She found that it was difficult to write without analysis or opinion, both of which are more typical for term papers but not appropriate for an encyclopedia.

Despite the challenges, she ultimately appreciated the attention her article got, especially after it landed on Wikipedia’s main page in the “Did You Know” section.

“I liked that I was able to reach a lot of people with my article through Wikipedia,” Nicole says. “I had quite a few hits (I think it was close to 5,000), which meant that at least that many people learned something new about the region and about obesity. I was able to at least share my knowledge with others in a positive way.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

Note: This blog post is the first in a series of profiles of students’ experiences on Wikipedia when participating in the Public Policy Initiative during the fall term.

Syracuse University junior Peter Elliot had made a few edits to Wikipedia, but he became a Wikipedian after taking a class this fall from Professor Carol Dwyer. The class, “Wikipedia and Public Policy,” was one of 14 participating in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative. Students in these classes edited Wikipedia articles as an assignment from their professor, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors.

Peter, an economics major and global enterprise technology minor from Brooklyn, New York, admits he was initially indifferent when he learned his assignments for the semester would consist of writing articles for Wikipedia. But once he had some hands-on experience, he became more excited.

“The assignments were quite different [than a traditional assignment], and what made it invaluable was the practicality of it all,” Peter says. “I’m a strong believer that true education is education put into practice and that is what the assignments through the Wikimedia Foundation offered.”

Peter’s first Wikipedia article was Cyber ShockWave – a U.S. wargame conducted in early 2010 – which contained merely a short description and list of participants before he started working on it (see the version immediately before his first edit). Peter clarified the opening paragraph, added sections on background, the simulation, and the results, and added images and more references to the article (see the current version). Next, he took on the article Homeland Security Act, which was similarly short before he started editing. The current version, which Peter contributed a great deal to, explains the history, facets, and criticism of an important piece of U.S. policy.

Peter says he preferred writing for Wikipedia instead of a typical term paper, especially with the support of his Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and the Wikipedia community.

“It gives me a voice box for others to view my work and become informed,” he explains. “A Wikipedia assignment provides greater motivation due to features such as ‘Did you know’ and the constant monitoring by Wikipedia administrators. It is sort of having the Professor or TA there all the time, which most students do not get the luxury of.”

Peter didn’t just write articles for class, however. He’s contributed to articles about non-profit organizations, famous people, and his school, Syracuse University, among other topics, and he’s still contributing to Wikipedia, even though the term is over.

“My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia was both the competition involved and the idea of people outside viewing your work,” he says. “I think the competition among schools motivated students to achieve their maximum potential in writing each article.”

Ultimately, Peter’s involvement in the Public Policy Initiative has led him to see Wikipedia in a new light – as a source that college students can use to to find sources about a topic by consulting the references section of any Wikipedia article. In an essay about his experiences, Peter says he hopes that more professors make use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool.

“Wikipedia along with the public policy class has not only improved my research and writing skills, but changed the way I make use of online information,” Peter wrote. “As a registered Wikipedia editor and contributor (username:SoAuthentic), I will continue to not only add to the wealth of knowledge, but make greater use of the knowledge that is already provided.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

Wikimedia fellow, Liam Wyatt

Following in quick succession from the recent announcements of fellowships for both Achal Prabhala and Lennart Guldbransson I am pleased to announce our sixth fellow, Liam Wyatt, based in Sydney. During this one year project Liam will be working to build the capacity of the Wikimedia community to undertake partnerships with cultural institutions – known as GLAMs [Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums] a term he popularized.

Liam has been a board member of the Australian Wikimedia chapter and was a longtime panelist on the Wikipedia Weekly podcast. He is a Wikipedia historian, having won the university medal for his 2008 thesis ‘the academic lineage of Wikipedia.’ The focus of his Wikipedia work for the last two years has been the GLAM sector – he was the convener of the GLAM-WIKI conferences in Canberra and London and last July became the world’s first “Wikipedian in Residence” at the British Museum (previous blog entry).

Several different types of collaboration with the cultural sector have been successfully run with institutions across the world over the last few years – including multimedia content donations, “backstage pass” tours, residencies, and editing and photography events. These collaborations increase the quality and reliability of Wikipedia and also meet the goals of the GLAM institutions: to share their expertise with a wide audience – especially for those that do not have a web presences of their own.

The priorities for Liam’s fellowship include building communication channels so the existing community of Wikimedians working with GLAMs can better share their knowledge; applying learnings from the university “campus ambassador” system to create a global network of Wikimedia GLAM ambassadors; creating clear how-to documentation for common GLAM project with real-world case studies to match; and improving the metrics tools available to measure the usage of GLAM content.

If you would like to join in any aspect of the cultural partnerships initiative please visit the project pages at glamwiki.org. If you represent a cultural institution and want to engage in a project please write to glam@wikimedia.org.

Daniel Phelps, Human Resources

Earlier today the Washington D.C. based creative agency JESS3 posted the video above, and an informative web case study, www.thestateofwikipedia.com – a follow-up to another recent case study they did on another big idea, the Internet. JESS3 (also donors to the Wikimedia Foundation) folks Leslie Bradshaw and Becca Colbaugh on the inspiration for the work:

In a collaborative effort to capture a historic moment in time for Wikipedia, we announced this morning “The State of Wikipedia,” a digital short aimed at teaching the layperson Wikipedia’s initial concept and consequent evolution into becoming one of the most visited web sites across the globe.
…
We look forward to see what the next 10 years hold for Wikipedia and how it will continue to help add contours, diversity and permanency to information the world over.

They were supported by long-time Wikipedian William Beutler, and the voice you might recognize is none other than the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. The video is CC-BY-SA (it can be downloaded from Vimeo – Commons link as soon as we have it), which means anyone around the world can use, re-use, and share this great work that tells the story of our project and our movement.

A big thanks to JESS3 for taking the considerable time to put this story together. We think it will make a big difference in helping people talk about our big projects and the complex world of the Wikimedia movement. A great Wikipedia 10 birthday gift!

Jay Walsh, Communications

People throughout the world are gathering at more than 450 events in 120 countries to celebrate Wikipedia’s 10th birthday.  I’m amazed and thrilled and humbled by the significant support Wikipedia has in every corner of the world.  When I started Wikipedia a decade ago, I  never imagined that everyday people in places like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Bolivia, Ethiopia and Algeria would come together to celebrate Wikipedia in such an extraordinary way.

In ten years, Wikipedia has become so much to so many people.  Millions of people came together because they believed that access to free information was important and needed.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed. Thank you to the editors, donors and supporters. Thank you to those who believed in our mission and helped us along the way.  It’s because of you that Wikipedia exists: thank you for believing in the power of ordinary people to come together to do something remarkable.

It’s my hope that more people are now inspired to join the movement and help us reach our mission: a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.  I look forward to working with all of you over the next ten years to reach our goal.
Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

–Jimbo