Students around the world have returned to classes this term to learn that they will be contributing to Wikipedia articles for their coursework.

Now in its second year, the Wikipedia Education Program is modeled from the learnings of the Public Policy Initiative pilot. Volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors help students learn how to contribute to Wikipedia articles as part of their course assignments. Campus Ambassadors help students in-person with basics of Wikipedia editing, while Online Ambassadors serve as virtual mentors for students on-wiki.

New Campus Ambassadors from the U.S. program use their bodies to spell "Wikipedia" during an orientation in Indianapolis, Indiana, in January 2012.

Programs have already started in the United States, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Czech Republic, Macedonia, and Mexico, and programs will start in 2012 in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

United States

The program in the United States is off to a strong start, with more than 40 classes participating. In both the United States and Canada, a new set of Participation Requirements is in place for this term. The requirements limit the Ambassador:student ratio to 1:15 and require that each class has at least one experienced Wikipedian supporting it. Although the new set of requirements has limited the number of participating courses this term, we hope they will ensure that every student participating in our program has adequate support to complete a Wikipedia assignment successfully.

Canada

The Canada program is in the second phase of a small pilot, with eight classes participating this term. Like the U.S. program, the Canada program is limited by the new Participation Requirements, meaning we’ve purposefully chosen to focus on quality over quantity.

Faculty members from two universities in Egypt pose for a group photo during an instructor orientation in Cairo in January 2012.

Egypt

The Cairo Pilot is our first venture into the Arabic language countries (see previous blog post for more background information). Local Arabic Wikipedians led a training of 10 new Campus Ambassadors in Cairo in mid-January, and another 10 Campus Ambassadors will be trained later this month. In addition, 16 Online Ambassadors have signed up to help students on-wiki. Seven classes are participating, and all of the professors participated in a faculty orientation in January led by two local Arabic Wikipedians and U.S. program professor Rochelle Davis. Between three and fifteen of the best students from each class will be taking part in the project this term, limiting the total students to a manageable number.

Germany

Wikimedia Deutschland has trained “tutoren” to assist professors and students who are editing Wikipedia for the first time in their pilot program, with five classes participating.

Czech Republic

The Czech WikiProject Protected Areas project ran during the 2011-2012 winter semester in cooperation with Jiří Reif, a university teacher at Institute for Environmental Studies, a part of the Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. During the semester, 30 students were involved in adding content to the Czech Wikipedia. They had to visit one protected area of their choice, take several images of the area, write an article for the Czech Wikipedia and give a public presentation for other students in the class. According to the results of a survey, the project was popular with the students. A full report with results from this cooperation is available in English on Czech Wikipedia. And as a result, the Czech Wikipedia was enriched by 30 high quality articles about protected areas.

Macedonia

Four universities in Macedonia are already on board with a Macedonian Education Program that began in 2011, including a class that is translating English Wikipedia articles to the Macedonian Wikipedia. The program is led by volunteers from Wikimedia Macedonia.

Mexico

The program in Mexico began in Fall 2011 at ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México with a Club Wikipedia and several independent study students using Wikipedia as the base for their advanced English-as-a-foreign-language course (see this blog post for more details). It was shortly followed by the establishment of a second club at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). For the Spring 2012 semester, ITESM has started a pilot with the International Baccalaureate program to allow these students to work on Wikipedia projects to fulfill their “CAS,” or community service requirements. To date, these students have been working on articles related to the Teylers Museum Challenge. They are also editing articles related to Mexican handcrafts and folk art in preparation for the upcoming edit-a-thon at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City on 3 March. UNAM’s Facultad de Letras y Humanidades has permitted students to create six articles of “good” or better quality to fulfill of Mexico’s social service requirement of all undergraduate students.

A new visual identity for the program lets anyone create a regional logo for their project.

Other countries

Several other programs are being planned for academic terms starting later in 2012.

• After a small pilot in 2011, the Brazil Education Program plans to expand the number of Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors to help a growing number of students who will be contributing to the Portuguese Wikipedia when the next term begins in March.

• Wikimedia U.K. is doing ground research to find supportive professors and potential Ambassadors for a forthcoming project. They’re also planning an EduWiki Conference in September 2012.

Get involved!

More programs around the world are starting every month. If you’ve started a program, add it to the Wikipedia Education Program page. Want to become an Ambassador or a participating professor in your region? Check out the Get Involved page on our program portal.

We look forward to seeing the amazing work that students put out this term.

CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg was drawn into editing Wikipedia like many subject matter experts are – by editing pages in his area of expertise, art and design. As Michael began to tinker around with Wikipedia more and more, he started to think of ways to incorporate it into his coursework for his History of Design and Digital Media course at the College of Staten Island.

“Traditionally for term papers, students go and do some research about a particular topic, and they demonstrate their mastery by regurgitating some facts about it. Hopefully there’s a thesis, but sometimes it’s just a summary. Reading these papers is pretty boring, and the ritualistic production of those papers is kind of useless and in a way tedious for the students as well,” he says. “I decided to harness some of that creative energy for the greater good by channeling that work into something that has a utility beyond just the ritual of the classroom.”

Michael was no stranger to useful assignments; for previous courses, he’d had students redesign local nonprofits’ websites. In another assignment geared toward understanding licenses, he had asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Past students had also contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated. In the fall 2011 term, he wanted his students to write Wikipedia articles on designers or design principles referenced in the course’s textbook. Michael spent some time conceiving the course project, and then stumbled across the Wikipedia Education Program.

He recruited a reference librarian at College of Staten Island, Mark Polger, and asked one of his students, Nicole Boffa, to become Campus Ambassadors.User:SMasters filled out Michael’s pod as an Online Ambassador. Mark handled teaching students how to use the library and the basics of how to use references on Wikipedia, while Nicole helped students understand editing basics. User:SMasters was there to help when disputes arose, which did a handful of times, including twice in which the individuals where the subject matter of the Wikipedia articles students were writing reverted some of their edits.

Students from Michael Mandiberg's class got a personalized tour of a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, then worked with Wikipedians from the Wikimedia New York chapter to write Wikipedia articles on the works.

That experience in itself – students’ relationship to power – is one of four reasons Michael is glad he asked his students to edit Wikipedia for class. He gave students extra credit for contacting the subject of their Wikipedia article to request they release a photo of themselves or their work under a CC-BY-SA license, and gave bonus points if the subject actually did so.

“These students are suddenly engaging with the subject of their writing directly,” Michael says. “Is it okay to email someone you’re writing a research paper about? No. Is it okay to write somebody you’re writing about on Wikipedia for your class? Completely. You can write them and say, ‘I’m writing for Wikipedia for my class. I would really like it if you could give me an image of your work or an image of you to put on that page.’ I watched the students who followed through on that become transformed as students. And many of them used the word ‘empowering’ in their reflective papers to describe the experience.”

The second reason, Michael says, is that students gained valuable research skills. He asked students to write reflective papers at the end of the term, and students reported that the work they did with Mark to prepare to write their Wikipedia articles was extremely valuable.

“They almost all said that it was the most research they had ever done,” Michael says. “They used the library more than they’d ever used, and they learned substantially about research.”

Third, Michael says, was that students were more motivated because they felt like their assignments were working toward a good cause or the greater good of society.

The fourth and final of Michael’s reasons for liking the Wikipedia assignment is that students who are used to getting by on college papers by close paraphrasing or outright plagiarizing works discover they simply can’t do that with a Wikipedia assignment, since students had to cite every sentence. Writing for Wikipedia made it easier for him to catch students’ plagiarism early, and he was able to help students understand why they needed to use original voice.

“This assignment was really hard for the students,” he says. “I asked them to write at least 1,200 words, and most of them ended up somewhere around 900 because writing for Wikipedia is different from the writing they’re used to and requires so much more work. They’re used to just filling up 5 pages and getting credit for it.” But, he adds, students came around to the idea. “In their reflection papers, almost all the students said they really didn’t want to do the assignment, that it was really hard, but they were glad they did. It was highly productive.”

Michael’s students also got the chance to see the real-world impact of their work through an event organized by the Wikimedia New York chapter, including Ambassador Richard Knipel. Ten of Michael’s students joined him and some Wikimedia New York editors at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where they received a tour of the Talk to Me exhibit with educators from the MOMA. Students then worked with Wikipedians from the chapter to create articles about the exhibit and its works. Michael says it was transformative for the students who went, as the museum educators and the Wikipedians treated students with respect, encouraging them to share their views and contribute to Wikipedia.

“For these students, it was mind-blowing that they could sit down and collaborate with these experienced Wikipedians. What the students realized was they had valuable knowledge, and that was really amazing for them,” he says. “The students who did that field trip came back to the classroom with much more confidence.”

Michael is excited by the experience his students had on Wikipedia last term, and he’s looking forward to giving his Ph.D. students at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2012 an assignment on Wikipedia as well. And just like his students, he’s glad their contributions are helping the greater good, enhancing the content freely available about design.

“We did something worthwhile,” he says. “This section of Wikipedia is a little less of a blind spot.”

If you’ve been to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the last 10 years, chances are you’ve admired the Milwaukee Art Museum’s building, especially its brise soleil, whose wing-like span closes at night. But until recently, the Wikipedia article on the museum lacked a video of the brise soleil in action.

Alverno College student Katy Lederer created this video of the Milwaukee Art Museum's brise soleil as an assignment for her class, which was participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

Katy Lederer changed that in November. Katy is finishing up her final year of school at Alverno College, a women’s college in Milwaukee, and her professor this term joined the Wikipedia Education Program. Professor Jennifer Geigel Mikulay’s Advanced Media Studies course required students to create a video to add to a Wikipedia article. Longtime Wikipedians User:OrangeMike and User:Protonk served as Wikipedia Ambassadors for the class, offering students information about how Wikipedia works and how to add their videos to articles. Katy chose to make a video of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s brise soleil.

“Ever since the announcement about the addition to the art museum was made I have been captivated by the work. With every stage of its construction I waited anxiously for the next and could not wait to see it finished and working. I am very surprised a video didn’t exist already [on Wikipedia],” Katy says. “I don’t know if Milwaukee understands the magnificence of the brise soleil. I am truly shocked by the number of people–friends, peers, classmates, Milwaukee residents–who told me they had never seen the wings move before watching my video.”

Katy, a lifelong Milwaukee resident, has been thrilled by the reception her video has gotten since she uploaded it in mid-November. The video appeared as the Wikimedia Commons Media of the Day on November 26, leading to hundreds of people viewing her video. Katy says she really enjoyed putting the video together, and she was especially moved that her work for class would appear on a resource like Wikipedia that she uses often.

“I consider myself to be generally non-traditional so doing this assignment was a breath of fresh air. Stressful air, but fresh none the less!” she says. “I am grateful that we had this opportunity. With online resources being so prevalent in our lives today–and Wikipedia being such a valued resource–it’s important to understand how it works.”

Next up for Katy is finishing her degree in Professional Communication, but she says she hopes to create more videos for Wikipedia in the future. She and a classmate are talking about taking a river tour in Chicago of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and Katy’s already scheming to create a narrated video for Wikipedia of the trip.

“I’m drawn to visual work, so the appeal of working with a camera always takes precedence over books,” she says.

Not only had Karl Wahlen never edited Wikipedia prior to September 2011, he didn’t even know he could. That all changed when Karl enrolled in a University of Pittsburgh class called Sociology of Marriage, taught by Wikipedian Piotr Konieczny, a graduate student and a Teaching Fellow from Department of Sociology, and the Pittsburgh native found himself having to write a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework.

“When I learned on the first day that that I was going to be doing a Wikipedia project, I was rather confused,” Karl admits. “Honestly, when I first thought about it, I wondered how you worked on it, as I did not know at that point that you could even have an account on wikipedia, much less how it worked or how you used it.”

Karl Wahlen is an avid dog lover along with being an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh (pictured with his dog JJ).

Karl’s a busy student. He’s majoring in psychology, sociology, BPhil (BPhil is an honors degree where he does the equivalent of a master’s thesis in his undergraduate years), and biology, while also getting a certificate in the conceptual foundations of medicine, and a minor in economics and chemistry. His multidisciplinary interests led Karl to want to work on the article on Joint custody in the United States, which had elements of psychology and sociology. The article had languished for years without many sources or without being particularly well-written (you can see the version before Karl and his classmates started working on it here. Karl’s input helped bring the article up to meet the Did you know requirements, which landed the article on Wikipedia’s main page in late November. By early December, the article had passed the Good Article review process as well.

Karl credits help from his professor, Piotr Konieczny, for forcing students to write Wikipedia articles for class. A longtime supporter of the Schools and universities projects on Wikipedia, Piotr is also an Online Ambassador and instructor in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States. Piotr’s course was the first to participate in the American Sociology Association’s new Wikipedia Initiative.

“Our instructor really helped on every step of the way, especially when showing us how to interact with the community,” Karl says. “You occasionally get people who are not the nicest when they disagree with you, but in general individuals tend to remain respectful with each other, and for the most part all criticism ends up leading to a higher quality article in the end, which is a good thing.”

In fact, the research skills he gained through doing the Wikipedia assignment actually helped him tremendously in another class he’s taking this term on research methods. Learning to cite every sentence and making sure that every claim he made could be backed up to a reliable source for Wikipedia taught him valuable research and writing skills.

“I still maintain that this Wikipedia project made a world of difference in being able to write well,” Karl says. “And unlike a term paper, which is thrown away at the end of the semester, all the work that goes into a Wikipedia article continues to help people even after the class ends. I like knowing that the joint custody (United States) article is being read by 80+ people a day.”

Karl’s research for the Wikipedia assignment led him to want to add more to Wikipedia. He’s already created stub articles on Split custody and Sole custody, which he intends to expand in the near future.

“I will absolutely continue to edit after the class is over,” Karl says. “My instructor was outstanding and it will be a nice way to keep in touch with him. And not only can I do this to keep providing new information to others, but it also looks pretty darned good on a resume to say you spend your free time working on making articles to help people than sitting around watching TV. Thankfully, I enjoy doing this, so it is not like a chore to do.”

The first generation of Wikipedia Ambassadors participated in a survey when the Public Policy Initiative wrapped up this summer. More than 80 respondents (over half of the 2010-2011 Ambassadors!) provided input about their experiences and how to improve the program. Many Wikimedia Foundation blog followers are probably familiar with the Initiative’s development of the Ambassador Program to open Wikipedia to the academic community. Ambassadors come in two flavors: Campus Ambassadors, who provide a face for Wikipedia on university campuses, and Online Ambassadors, who support the new student editors on wiki as they make their first contributions.

The graphs illustrate the Ambassadors’ role and motivations, based on the survey results.
 

While both Campus and Online Ambassadors identified their role as helping newcomers, their motivations diverged. Online Ambassadors were strongly motivated by helping newcomers, and Campus Ambassadors were strongly motivated by increasing Wikipedia credibility and use on university campuses. Both Campus and Online Ambassadors felt responsible first to the students they were working with and second to the Wikipedia community. Ambassadors agreed on the Public Policy Initiative outcomes:

1. Wikipedia content improved.
2. Use of Wikipedia as a teaching tool increased.
3. Ambassadors provided support for college-educated newcomers.
4. There was an increase of Wikipedia’s credibility among academia.

Through the survey, many Ambassadors shared their most memorable experiences in the program. Some of the highlights include:

• “I showed a student how to check the page view statistics. Hundreds of people had seen his article since he created it. What an immediate impact he had! He was blown away.”
• “For me it was an honor to have a student participant who was also a US Congressman and to help improve his Wikipedia article.”
• “My favorite story is of a non-traditional age student telling me that her son’s 8th grade teacher told the class not to use Wikipedia because it can not be trusted. Our student told her son what she had learned about neutral-voice and verifiability and community scholarship. At the end of the semester her son told her that his middle-school teacher now says it’s okay to use Wikipedia as a place to start looking for information… I sure would like to know what that 8th grader told his teacher about his Mom’s academic Wikipedia experience.”

Check out the pages for the Wikipedia Ambassador Program and Global Education Program to find out more about our program.

Amy Roth
Research Analyst, Public Policy Initiative 

As we make the transition from the Public Policy Initiative to the Global Education Program, we are relying more on volunteers to keep our project sustainable. In the United States, some of the Global Education Program’s most hard-working volunteers this summer are the Regional Ambassadors.

As we expand the U.S.-based offerings in the Global Education Program, the Regional Ambassadors play the critical role of recruiting for campus-based activities. They help instructors interested in having their students edit Wikipedia for class learn more about what the program can offer, and they work to recruit people for the Campus Ambassador role and also coordinate getting the Campus Ambassadors all adequately trained. At the moment, Regional Ambassadors are taking the main leadership role in planning nine different Campus Ambassador trainings that will happen across the United States over the next few weeks.

Regional Ambassadors plan activities to encourage professors in their regions to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool in higher education classrooms.

Meet the current crop of Regional Ambassadors:

• Chanitra Bishop (User:Etlib) is the Instruction & Emerging Technologies Librarian at Indiana University Bloomington and an experienced Campus Ambassador who has helped with two terms of classes at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a co-leader of the Great Lakes region.
• Tom Cloyd (User:Tomcloyd) is an experienced Wikipedian with professional training in human psychology (which he has found highly useful in his recruitment efforts!). He leads the Great West region.
• Derrick Coetzee (User:Dcoetzee) is an experienced Wikimedian, a Campus Ambassador who supports San Francisco Bay Area classes, and the unofficial photographer for recent Wikipedia Global Education Program events. He is a co-leader of the Pacifica region.
• Bryan Cox (User:Manumitany) is a law student with extensive experience in community/political organizing and in coordinating volunteers. Bryan leads the Skyplains region.
• Max Klein (User:Maximilianklein) participated in the Public Policy Initiative as both a course instructor and a Campus Ambassador in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has contributed many creative ideas to the program. He leads the New England region.
• Richard Knipel (User:Pharos) is actively involved with the Wikimedia New York chapter, and served as a Campus Ambassador to New York University in spring 2011. He leads the Metropolis region.
• Rob Pongsajapan (User:Pongr) is a new media designer at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University, where he has also been a Campus Ambassador for two terms. He leads the Nation’s Capital region.
• Rob Schnautz (User:Bob_the_Wikipedian) is an experienced Wikipedian with stunning organization abilities. He’s a co-leader of the Great Lakes region.
• Matt Senate (User:Mattsenate) has, like Max, served as both a course instructor and a Campus Ambassador in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is very active in the free culture movement. Matt co-leads the Pacifica region.
• Dylan Staley (User:Dylanstaley) is a peer mentor at Louisiana State University’s Communication Across the Curriculum office, while also serving as a Campus Ambassador at that university. Dylan leads the Texarkana region and is serving as the interim Regional Ambassador for the South as well.
• Alex Stinson (User:Sadads) is an experienced Campus Ambassador at James Madison University, a longtime Wikipedian, an Online Ambassador, the founder of a Wikipedia student club at James Madison University, and a key player in outreach activities to universities in the U.K. He leads the Greater Chesapeake region.

We honestly couldn’t do it without them, so a HUGE round of thanks to our Regional Ambassadors!

The Regional Ambassador model is debuting with the United States, but as we start to grow our programs in Canada, India, Germany, Brazil, the U.K., and other countries around the globe, we anticipate developing Regional Ambassadors for those locations as well. In the U.S., the plan is to gradually reduce the size of each region so that activities in each region are more local and less time-intensive.

If you’re interested in learning more about using Wikipedia in higher education classrooms, fill out this interest form and the appropriate Regional Ambassador will get in touch. Fill out the form, too, if you’re interested in becoming a Regional Ambassador yourself.

–
LiAnna Davis
Global Education Program Communications Manager

Joseph Lapka was unsure what to expect when he signed up for Professor Sheldon Gen’s Environmental Policy course at San Francisco State University. The course description indicated that Joseph, who is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s civil and environmental engineering program and who is currently in the master of public administration program at SF State, would be writing a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework. Joseph is also working full time as an environmental engineer, so he is familiar with policy briefs, but he wasn’t quite sure how Wikipedia would fit in the classroom.

Joseph Lapka is a master's student at San Francisco State University.

“A lot of the policy work I do professionally involves applying existing policies to new or unique situations and that is in some ways different than the encyclopedic type of writing that is appropriate for Wikipedia,” Joseph says. “Having completed the course, I think the overall experience was a good one. The Wikipedia project fit well with the structure and content of the course and I think that contributed to the positive experience.”

Another positive part of Joseph’s experience was the presence of his Wikipedia Ambassadors. The face time with his Campus Ambassadors, Derrick Coetzee and Max Klein, made them his first point of contact whenever he had a question.

“My Campus Ambassadors regularly visited my class to guide us through the technical aspects of preparing and posting our articles,” Joseph explains. “Both of the ambassadors were very knowledgeable and eager to help with what was a new experience for many of us. I think our Campus Ambassadors are another aspect of this project that made the experience a positive one.”

Joseph chose to write his article on the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. It’s a topic of considerable current public policy debate, and Wikipedia’s coverage was limited. Joseph says he saw the assignment as a chance to use his knowledge as an environmental engineer to make Wikipedia better.

“I always give all of my assignments my best effort,” he says. “However, knowing that my article would be posted online for others to read gave me an even greater incentive to seek out differing points of view, be more critical of my sources of information, and document those sources more thoroughly.”

Joseph says this is the first course assignment that hasn’t ended with the end of term. Instead, other Wikipedia editors are making contributions to the article, and Joseph is watching to see what changes get made. He says he’s very interested in seeing how the article evolves over time.

“With a traditional assignment, your only audience is often your professor, or at most your professor and your classmates,” Joseph says. “I really liked the fact that this assignment gave me an opportunity to write for a broader audience and make a valuable contribution to a resource that I often use myself.”

–
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

The first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit was held last week on the campus of Simmons College, a women’s college that participated in the Public Policy Initiative in the spring. More than 125 professors, students, and Wikipedia Ambassadors gathered for 2 1/2 days to talk about their experiences and plans going forward for using Wikipedia in the classroom.

Advanced editing workshop at Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit.

The Public Policy Initiative is a 18-month pilot program to bring Wikipedia editing into university classrooms. Participating professors assign their students to write articles in place of a paper for the course, with assistance from Wikimedia Foundation-trained Campus Ambassadors (in class) and Online Ambassadors (virtually). In the 2010-11 academic year, we worked with 47 classes whose 821 students added more than 8.8 million characters of quality content to the English Wikipedia.

Attendees

The conference brought together 33 Campus Ambassadors, 11 Online Ambassadors, 49 professors, 9 students, 15 local professors, and 12 WMF staff/board members. About half of the professors had used Wikipedia in their class in the past, and the other half were interested in using it in the future.

It would be hard to underestimate the energy in each session for the use of Wikipedia in higher education. We even scrapped a planned icebreaker in the agenda because everyone was already excitedly chatting with their new Wikimedia friends.

Sessions

Wikipedia Governance workshop at Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit.

The full agenda is available online, but sessions at the Summit focused on making connections among attendees and documenting our learnings from the pilot academic year. Speakers included Archivist of the United States David Ferriero, Public Policy Initiative team members, and Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner. Chief Global Development Officer Barry Newstead talked about plans for the global expansion of the higher education program, and our Regional Ambassadors led sessions with attendees from their region.

We at WMF learned a lot about the experiences of the various participants in our program. You can read more about the event in The Signpost, Inside Higher Ed, and one attendee’s blog, or check out photos at Wikimedia Commons. Full documentation, including links to photos, videos, and presentation slides are also available.

The Future

Preeti Mulay will be using Wikipedia in her class in Pune, India, next term.

The Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit really crystalized for the team that all the work we’ve put in to making Wikipedia and academia blend has been incredibly useful. We’d invited representatives from Canada, the U.K, Germany, Brazil, and India, who were all there to talk about how they will be using Wikipedia in classrooms in their countries in the next term. But while we were there, we also had professors approach us and say they wanted to be the liaison between the WMF’s global university program and other parts of the world, including the Middle East, North Africa and Chile.

If you’re interested in using Wikipedia in your classroom or joining the program as an Ambassador, reach out to a Regional Ambassador in the United States or consult the Education Portal for more information. The whole team is very excited to see where the global university program heads — one thing is for certain, there is a lot of enthusiasm for Wikipedia in higher education!

–
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

When people research a topic for school, work or personal interest, they often turn to Wikipedia as their starting point. Many of those visitors then continue their research by following one of the millions of footnotes to the original resources held in libraries around the world that are used to verify Wikipedia’s content. This is a symbiotic relationship – Wikipedia becomes more reliable and libraries’ treasures are made more accessible.

Many librarians are also eager to hear how they can work with Wikipedia more – which is why the Wikimedia Foundation is speaking at two events this weekend. Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner will be delivering the president’s program address at the American Library Association conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. On the same day, Cultural Partnerships Fellow Liam Wyatt will be a keynote speaker at the EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) General Assembly in Minsk, Belarus. EIFL is a group dedicated to supporting libraries in developing countries.

"The Librarian", 1566, by Arcimboldo, Skokloster Castle, Sweden

“Libraries are, ultimately, about helping people find the information they need,” says Rachel Slough, the teaching and learning librarian at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “Wikipedia often has that information. Both libraries and Wikipedia support learning and the efficient dissemination of accurate information. In academic libraries, there is an emphasis on the teaching roles of libraries; Wikipedia supports and enhances that mission.”

Rachel is one of a handful of university library staff serving as Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. Campus Ambassadors are trained on teaching newcomers how to contribute content to Wikipedia, either as students whose professor assigns them to edit an article for class or as people on campus who want to share what they know with the world.

Librarians are a natural fit for this role. They have been urging students for years to start with a reference like Wikipedia that can provide a general overview of a research topic and a list of sources at the bottom – and then use that source list to dig deeper into the topic.

“You need to start where the students are at and bring them along to appropriate scholarly resources,” says Tony Garrett, a Campus Ambassador who is the head of reference and access services at Troy University.

Rachel agrees. She works in a freshman residence hall teaching students about the library, and she says she’ll often use Wikipedia as a hook to grab students’ attention. Wikipedia, she says, is a part of students’ reality, so it’s something familiar.

“Part of effective service in any profession is being accountable and authentic with those we serve,” Rachel says. “Wikipedia forces me to challenge my assumptions, to meet my users where they are, and to embrace the changing information landscape.”

Many libraries are also reaching out to Wikimedia projects in the form of partnerships with Wikimedia Chapters. The GLAM-WIKI program (GLAM is an acronym for Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) connects institutions like libraries with people in the Wikimedia movement to build on the symbiotic relationship between the two communities. To name just a few library-related programs:

• Wikimedia France has partnered with the Bibliotheque National de France on a project in which the French national library provides high-quality scans of old documents, which are placed on Wikimedia Commons and transcribed on Wikisource.
• The British Library has hosted several “edit-a-thon” workshops with Wikimedia UK. Specialist librarians from the British Library, who have access to the original materials in the collection, work alongside Wikimedians in private reading rooms.
• The National Library of Australia‘s digitized newspaper search engine allows users to easily obtain code to create a footnote in Wikipedia simply by clicking “cite” in any article in any edition of any newspaper.

The Wikimedia Foundation will also have a booth at the exhibit hall at the American Library Association conference. If you’re at either the EIFL or the ALA this weekend, come talk with us about how libraries can have a proactive and mutually-beneficial relationship with Wikimedia projects.

–
LiAnna Davis, Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative
Liam Wyatt, Cultural Partnerships Fellow

As part of his Master of Public Administration coursework at Western Carolina University, Kasey Baker enrolled in Professor Christopher Cooper’s “Policy Analysis” course – one of 33 courses to participate in the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative in the spring term. Kasey was surprised to hear that his work for the course included writing a Wikipedia article on a course-related topic.

One of Kasey’s first tasks was to select a mentor from the available Online Ambassadors.

“Let me sum up my online mentor, Alex Dunkel (AKA VisionHolder), in two words: ‘Amazing Rockstar,’” Kasey says of his choice. “With 26 GA articles and 16 Featured articles under his belt, there was almost nothing he did not know about Wikipedia. From the onset, we realized we both were huge nerds that liked HTML formatting and well-cited materials. After spending what was close to 30+ hours on Skype, we not only produced a fantastic article, but we became friends as well. Without his help, my article would have not been anywhere near the quality it is currently nor would I have enjoyed the experience as much as I did.”

Kasey Baker is a master's student at Western Carolina University.

Kasey’s focus in grad school is on environmental policy, and he’d recently become interested the United States’ nuclear policy. After extensive research on Wikipedia, he discovered that there was no unifying article that summed up U.S. policy; instead, there were several smaller articles that often carried neutrality warnings at the top of the page. Alex, in his role as online mentor, warned Kasey that it would be a difficult undertaking – but Kasey wanted to ensure that this important facet of U.S. policy had a Wikipedia article, so he accepted the challenge.

“This assignment was probably the most intense and heavily researched assignment I have ever done,” he says. “When I was looking at my graduate writing on the nuclear policy history, I realized that many sources were biased or did not meet the quality standard that Wikipedia expected. This was not saying they were unreliable sources, I simply felt that they might not pass the scrutiny of all those who would be looking at them. Moreover, properly citing the materials on my Wikipedia page was far more extensive than that of any other academic writings I’ve ever produced.”

As Kasey began to work on his article, the Fukishima nuclear disaster struck, bringing increased attention to Kasey’s fledgling article. His submission to the Did You Know process brought more attention to his article – including more than 3,000 views on the day his article appeared on Wikipeda’s main page. And Kasey started understanding more and more why so many of the nuclear articles had that neutrality tag applied.

“At every step of the process, I’ve had people fight my article in some way,” he laments. “Fortunately, it has usually been over the title and other minor details that people blew out of proportion. Because I kept my information strictly about policy and made sure it was 100% accurate from reputable sources, no one could accuse the information in my article as being inaccurate or biased.”

He feels some more recent additions to the article’s current events section have the potential to detract from the article’s quality, if other authors do not refine the changes and improve the updates, but it hasn’t caused Kasey to stop working on Wikipedia. Part of that is thanks to his mentor, Alex, who helped him every step of the way. And Kasey realizes that the next topic he tackles on Wikipedia will be one that is less controversial – and he hopes to have another class where the course assignment is to write Wikipedia articles.

“I wholeheartedly prefer writing a Wikipedia article to a traditional paper,” Kasey says. “Most papers, even in graduate school, are almost never shared with the academic community, much less with the general public. With this project, I feel that I am not only able to share my research, but can have a real conversation with others about nuclear policy. Not to mention by creating a Wikipedia article, it expands the information available to anyone curious about the topic. I honestly wish that other classes would involve the submission of Wikipedia articles like this more often.”

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LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative