From February 6-12, the fifth Campus Party Brasil took place, hosted in São Paulo, and we (the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Brasil) had the great opportunity to represent the Brazilian Wikimedia community through our attendance. Fifteen volunteers from the community got tickets to attend and worked alongside Kul Wadhwa, Pats Peña, and me (Jessie Wild), who came in from San Francisco. We had and accomplished a few specific goals:

• Motivate Brazilians towards collaborative knowledge! Kul gave a keynote presentation which highlighted the importance of asking why you are choosing the direction of your life.
  

  Wikimedia Brasil @ Campus Party

• Determine the plausibility of a MediaWiki Hackathon in Brazil! The verdict: we should do it! There is obviously a lot of interest across communities in Brazil, and Pats, Mateus, Jonas, and others helped network with key organizations and development communities which were also present at the event. They got many tips, formed some collaborative partnerships, and raised awareness for the upcoming event. So get your hacker-hands ready and stay tuned for details…
• Recruit new editors and member for Wikimedia Brasil! The volunteers led a “Mutirão,” or an activity designed to teach people how to set-up a user account and do a quick one hour editing sprint. As a result, we had three winners who contributed to articles which are part of the “Grand Prix” editing sprint currently taking place on the Portuguese Wikipedia, and were awarded T-shirts.

In addition to the above, we were all able to make a lot of new friends! We had the privilege of sharing a table with the Mozilla community and the Garoa Hacker Club community (we also adopted one Angry Bird). This led to great connections for us all, and we are excited about the potential to work together more, as compatible communities going forward.

Sleepy

There are certainly things we can improve on. Primarily, though we had a lot of volunteers sign up for tickets, unfortunately not all came or did not participate in the outreach event. Next time, it may help us to be more explicit in the different roles each of us can have in supporting Wikipedia/Wikimedia while at the conference, so that everyone knows how they are to be involved in promoting Wikipedia.

But – all in all, another great event in São Paulo (although very exhausting)…

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

Yesterday, we wrapped up our visit to Tunisia, which comes as part of our Arabic language initiative that WMF launched earlier in October 2011 with the Doha convening. Our initial outreach activities mainly rely on meetings with the small Wikipedia community scattered in Arabic speaking countries and exploring the possibilities of expansion of those communities, by connecting them to like-minded groups/communities that can help facilitate on ground activities and workshops in their geographies. Our first stop in this tour was Tunisia. Our first day included a lecture that was hosted by the national school of engineering. A Wikimedia staff and two Arabic Wikipedia volunteers (Ciphers and OsamaK) were part of the lecture organized by WMF on open licenses, free acess to knowledge and the use of Wikipedia in education. It was a good chance to answer questions and misconceptions related to the use of Wikipedia in education and the general status of the Arabic Wikipedia. It was also a great opportunity to meet with students of open source clubs who will form a starting point of Wikipedia clubs in their schools. Tunisia has an internet penetration of nearly 35%; with 3.5 million people having access to the internet, the country contributes 1.4% of Arabic Wikipedia content, which comes as the 3rd most viewed language after French and English. The current numbers aren’t high, however, with regard to support of open source policies (such as opengov) and the expansion of open source and open content activities that have grown recently (thanks to the revolution!), it looks like Tunisia has a good potential to increment Wikipedia contributors on Arabic and other languages, especially on mobile, which has 105.5% penetration rate.

Our visit was promising on many levels: In addition to kicking off the start of Wikipedia awareness activities in universities and other independent spaces (thanks to Nawat that agreed to host Wikipedia workshops), and helping connect current editors with new enthusiasts, we also met with the managers of the national library of Tunisia and agreed on a numbers of steps, including releasing the collection of digitized old books, periodicals, postcards and magazines to Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, adopting a system on all their public computers that displays Wikipedia as the default search option, and on a longer term, release all their collection of digitized Arabic books (nearly 3000) to be used as sources for Wikipedia articles. In line with adding content to Commons, we also met with a consultant to the president for cultural affairs who is excited about releasing the presidential photography collection under a CC license, however, still pending digitization of the material themselves.

Wikimedia’s visit was recognized by Radio Maliss, which interviewed our WMF staff (interview is in Arabic)

Tunisia came first in our tour, and it was a good start with lots of promising steps that need our follow up, which we will keep you updated with. Coming up next will be Jordan then Algeria, please drop us a line if you will be there. :-)

Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

The Wikipedia Education Program has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception last year, as part of the Public Policy Initiative. In 2011, the program ventured beyond the United States into Canada and India, making the measurements of the program’s impact even more important. We want to use these metrics (some of which are outlined below) as tools that help us understand and improve the Wikipedia Education Program as a whole, while also understanding individual pieces of the system better.

a. Fall 2011 Numbers and Growth

b. Gender Representation

c. Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting

(more…)

Professor Jonathan Obar

I was never a fan of Wikipedia. In fact, I was quite skeptical when I first heard about the Wikipedia Global Education Program. How things have changed.

About a year ago, I remember hearing that some folks from the Wikimedia Foundation were planning to visit our College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University to try to recruit faculty for the Wikipedia Education Program. I remember walking to the meeting thinking, hmm, well I guess as a professor in a communication school it’ll be cool to meet some people who work for a major social media site. I’m not a fan of Wikipedia though, I don’t trust it… (puff up chest here) I’m an academic after all; my work is well-researched, credible, trustworthy, not like that amateurish stuff on Wikipedia. Just let me find one of my students citing Wikipedia in a paper so that I can write on their submission in big, red letters YOU DO NOT CITE WIKIPEDIA IN MY CLASS.

The dirty little secret of course was that I was using Wikipedia all the time. Whenever I would begin a research project I would type a concept into Google and of course a Wikipedia article would come up. I’d take a quick look, check out the references, begin to map the concept in my mind, all the while feeling unsure that I could trust what I was reading. I did this all the time. As an academic, this was my dirty little secret.

One year later and how things have changed. I am now a Wikipedia Teaching Fellow as well as a volunteer member of the Wikipedia Education Program’s outreach team helping to connect universities in Canada to the initiative, determined to change the minds of skeptics all over the world who see Wikipedia as I once did.

So what’s changed? Look, I’ve used Facebook in the classroom, I’ve used Twitter. I’ve used closed wikis, blogs and other new media technologies and I am convinced (and I don’t think I’m overstating things here) that Wikipedia is among the most innovative tools for e-pedagogy and e-learning currently available.

This “Wikipedia in the classroom” project begins where most “traditional” research assignments leave off. Students are still researching topics related to course content, they’re still synthesizing sources, they’re still writing; that’s where most “traditional” research projects leave off. What the Wikipedia project then adds is new media literacy development. Students learn the technical and social skills needed to work with wiki-technology, they’re pushed to collaborate and engage with Wikipedia’s social network, they are thrust into a thriving open-source movement, and they are exposed to a growing and increasingly relevant wiki-culture. Students experience all of this, while simultaneously learning course content.

That’s just the beginning.

As I teach my students about new media literacy, I often refer to new perspectives that I’ve been exposed to while working with the Wikimedia Foundation. Lessons about what it means to understand the nature of the evolving information source, how knowledge is generated through debate (some would go so far as to say that we’re working with a dialectic process here… perhaps an overstatement) and most importantly, how it is essential the we be critical of our information sources, no matter what they are or where we find them. You are not safe anywhere when it comes to information sources. There is bias everywhere. There are mistakes everywhere. No information source is the source. Research widely and research often. Be an informed consumer of information.

Wikipedia is so many things. It’s an encyclopedia, it’s a social network, and it’s also an idea. When I first began using Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool for innovative e-pedagogy, I quickly realized that not only was I teaching students new media literacy, not only would I be providing them with a unique opportunity to collaborate online and receive feedback from a multitude of individuals, forcing them to reflect on their work from a variety of perspectives. Not only would students be leaving something behind, contributing to the amount of information available online about their area of interest – have you heard about the Georgetown student’s Wikipedia article – National Democratic Party (Egypt) – that’s received more than 100,000 hits since the “paper” was turned in? Not bad for a term paper that would in years past end up in the file cabinet or the garbage, seemingly lost forever. When we introduce Wikipedia into the classroom as a teaching tool, not only do our students enjoy these benefits, we provide them with a space to reflect and learn about the nature of knowledge, how it is created, built, shaped, learned, and how it evolves. Taken a step further, perhaps we are also providing them with a place to question the normative ideals of participatory, direct democracy, and how our information sources contribute to our societal system of knowledge.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. What is this Wikipedia project anyways? How does it work? Well, for more information, have a look at the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Global Education Program outreach page. To put it simply, professors replace “traditional” writing assignments with the Wikipedia assignment, requiring students to research and write material that then gets placed in Wikipedia articles. At the same time that students conduct research and edit Wikipedia (learning the social and technical components of the site), students also learn about wiki-culture as they connect to Wikipedia’s social network. This all happens while professors simultaneously teach course content. It’s two-courses in one in many respects.

Clearly I’m gushing, clearly my views have changed, and for good reason. As an educator I’m being given a tremendous opportunity to offer my students something relevant, cutting-edge, intellectually challenging and fun. Oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s free?

Come check out what the Wikimedia Foundation has put together, I promise that you’ll never feel dirty about your Wikipedia use again.

-Jonathan Obar
Michigan State University

Torre de Belém, Portugal. Photo: Joaomartinho63

Wiki Loves Monuments was a crazy idea: ask people to get out of their houses and take a picture of the cultural heritage around them, of monuments and buildings!
In September 2010, however, the idea proved far from crazy – 250 people participated in the Netherlands and submitted 12,500 photos. Last month, during the pan-European 2011 contest, we crushed that number.

In the past few months, volunteers throughout Europe have worked hard to organize this public photo contest in 18 countries throughout Europe – from Portugal to Estonia – and with great success. More than 5,000 people participated, submitting an amazing 165,000 photos– all available under a free license, and usable on Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia and other places on the internet. As a comparison, the current record for the largest photography competition according to the Guinness Book of World Records stands at 126,501 images.

This project has been a success in so many different ways already. Not only 5,000 people participated, but an estimated 4,000 of these are ‘new users’ to the Wikimedia projects and through this contest they made their very first contribution to Wikimedia as a registered user. Now it is up to the community to cherish and welcome these people and help them find their way on the projects, supporting them and encouraging them to further contributions.

In 14 cities, related ‘Wiki takes the City’ events have been organized, and two of those are most interesting. Thanks to Wiki takes Andorra (a very small country between Spain and France) and the work of Amical Viquipèdia, we have now over 1,000 images of Andorra’s cultural heritage – covering 100% of the listed buildings! And in Wiki takes Cologne the organizational skills of the German chapter and volunteers were once again proven; the event was highly successful with more than 70 participants.

A young participant of Wiki takes Cologne. Photo: Elke Wetzig

Wiki Loves Monuments is not finished yet – it’s a continuous project, but the contest that ran through the month of September is now over. The national juries will deliberate in the coming month over the best photos from their countries, and submit 10 winners to an international jury by the end of October. By the beginning of December, the winners of the European contest will be announced, and the 2011 edition will come to an end. But the volunteers who have been working so hard on this will keep working to check, categorize and use the images in Wikipedia, write the articles, improve the monument lists and do all the other work that still lies ahead.

I would like for all of us to take a minute and thank all the people who have worked so hard to make Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 a success. Our partners on both the national and European level – cultural heritage organizations, chapters, sponsors and others – have worked hard to enable us to pull this off. But even more importantly, all the volunteers who have worked so hard to connect with the partners, create the monument lists, write background materials, write manuals, prepare contest rules, find jury members, find sponsors, prepare press releases, answer press enquiries, help with technical challenges, set up the wizards and banners, help the uploaders where necessary, check the incoming files and make sure that everything keeps on going – they deserve a big cheer and hug.

I really  hope this has not worn you out, and that you consider helping to organize and support this crazy idea again next year.

Lodewijk Gelauff – international coordinator of Wiki Loves Monuments

As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or don’t speak the local language?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.

A QRpedia code for the Wikipedia article about the artist Joan Miró. 1 code, 40 languages. Try this one for yourself!

When you scan the code the language setting of your phone is also transmitted. QRpedia uses Wikipedia’s API to determine whether there is a version of the chosen Wikipedia article in the language your phone is using, and if so, displays the mobile-friendly version. If there is no article (yet!) in your preferred language it will show you the most relevant article instead.

Launched in April this year, the open source QRpedia was developed out of the partnership between the Derby Museum and Gallery, England and local Wikimedia contributors Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK, and Terence Eden, a mobile web consultant. As “Wikipedian in Residence” at the Derby Museum, Roger capitalised on this system by hosting the hugely successful Multilingual Challenge (map of participants) to ensure that content of key importance to the museum was translated into as many languages as possible. Terence built the system and the museum was kind enough to install object labels incorporating the codes.

In an era when cultural funding is very constrained, the combination of QRpedia and the global Wikipedia community enabled the Derby museum to produce a multilingual visitor experience at virtually no cost. Easy mobile access to Wikipedia articles allows visitors to the museum to access unprecedented detail about the objects and their context – information that didn’t make it onto the exhibit label.

Jimmy Wales scanning the QRpedia code at the working antique carousel in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

This system is now in use in other museums around the world. These include exhibitions at the on-site museum of the the National Archives of the UK, in the permanent signage of key objects at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and in a major traveling exhibition of Miró’s work in association with the Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona.

To generate your own QRpedia codes visit http://qrpedia.org/
and simply paste the URL of any Wikipedia article into the box.
The freely licensed sourcecode can be viewed at http://code.google.com/p/qrwp/

—-

Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow

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 

In June, I travelled to India to kick off the Global Education Program‘s pilot in Pune. There, I met people who said: “I am a big fan of Wikipedia, but I am not good at writing. I always wondered if there are other ways I could help Wikipedia to improve.”

Ram Shankar Yadav volunteered to be the Campus Ambassador Coordinator in Pune.

We invited those people to become Wikipedia Ambassadors to teach others how to start editing. The beauty of the Wikipedia Ambassador Program is that it provides Wikipedia volunteer opportunities that don’t involve editing. People who aren’t article writers might be good at teaching others. They might have skills that we desperately need to get more people excited about Wikipedia and to fill the many gaps in content that still exist. Just look at the enthusiasm of the new Pune Campus Ambassadors that comes through in these video interviews.

Ram Shankar Yadav is a great example. Ram had never edited Wikipedia before. He was always a fan of the free encyclopedia, but he wasn’t drawn to editing the content. When he heard about the opportunity to become a Campus Ambassador, he jumped at the chance to volunteer his teaching skills in support of the encyclopedia he loved. Now, Ram has stepped into a leadership role in the India Education Program, serving as a key on-the-ground organizer of the Pune Ambassadors.

It was openness that made Wikipedia a success story. With a simple click on the edit button, you could change its content. That’s what distinguished Wikipedia from Nupedia back in 2001 and that’s how it became the biggest encyclopedia ever. Openness is critical for our future, too.

To stay successful, I firmly believe Wikipedia needs to be open and welcoming to newcomers who want to edit, but also to people who fill in other roles in our movement. People who are not part of the editing community, but who are eager to help Wikipedia in other ways – people like Ram.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director

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

Our new Global Education Program brings with it a lot of new terminology. What better way to organize an overview than in A–Z?

Ambassadors: When we started thinking about how to involve universities in the improvement of Wikipedia articles back in 2009, it became clear that we won’t be successful without offering various kinds of support. We decided to create a new role for people who are both eager and qualified to help new contributors to get around the many difficulties of editing Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Ambassador Program started in the summer of 2010, when we recruited the first Campus and Online Ambassadors for the English Wikipedia. Today it’s a great way for people to become engaged even if they don’t have a long history of Wikipedia editing. All you need is an affinity to teaching, the willingness to help others and a friendly attitude. That opens the Wikipedia movement up for people who are eager to help and who had few opportunities for doing so in the past.

Bookshelf: Teaching students how to use Wikipedia is hard without instructional materials. Back in 2006 we only had the “Wikipedia Cheatsheet,” a one-pager that listed the most common wiki markup tags. That’s why we started the Bookshelf Project in 2009. Now, it contains a wide variety of brochures and videos that explain how to start editing. Most popular among teachers are the “Welcome to Wikipedia” and “Evaluating Wikipedia article quality” brochures. By the way: all printed materials have been created with Scribus, an open source desktop publishing application, so they can be translated and adapted by people all over the world.

Campus Ambassadors: Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support on the university campus. They get a 2-day training to learn all the nuts and bolts of what they have to teach. Our Campus Ambassadors come from a variety of different backgrounds. Some of them are librarians, some are students, and some are teachers. They all share a common goal: to help newcomers with their first steps on Wikipedia.

Fellows: We started a Wikipedia Teaching Fellows Program for educators participating in the Public Policy Initiative in 2011. Professors who fulfill the Teaching Fellow requirements are able to put the distinction on their C.V. to indicate the work they’ve done with Wikipedia in their classrooms. At our Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in July 2011, we were able to honor the first 20 official Wikipedia Teaching Fellows.

Global Education Program: The class-based university program as explored in the Public Policy Initiative has been highly successful in turning students into Wikipedia contributors. We have built a strong knowledge base about running a class-based program as well as the tools needed to implement it (training handbooks, brochures on how to start editing, how-to videos, sample syllabi, etc.) We are now at a point to make these investments pay off. That’s why we are starting a Global Education Program. The Global Education Program will support the Foundation’s strategic goal to grow and strengthen the Wikipedia editor community.

Higher Education Summit: Our first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit took place on July 7–9, 2011. More than 120 teachers, librarians, Wikipedia Ambassadors, and Foundation staff members came together in Boston to celebrate the successes of the Public Policy Initiative. For the participants, the three days were a great opportunity to share their skills, best practices and success stories with each other. We received a lot of positive feedback and we hope that this was the first of many Wikipedia Higher Education Summits to be held in different countries around the globe.

India Education Program: In June 2011, we started our India Education Program in Pune, Maharashtra. Pune is a vibrant university city with more than a hundred educational institutes. We quickly learned that the interest from Indian teachers in our program is as big as the interest in the U.S. That’s why we are estimating that more than 700 students will participate in Wikipedia-editing activities in the first semester. Most of them will edit the English Wikipedia, but some of them are also planning to write articles on the Maharati Wikipedia.

K-12: We know that university students make great contributors to Wikipedia. Some say, “students are the fuel of Wikipedia.” But what about high school students? We’ve received some inquiries from high school teachers who would like to adopt our model and let their students edit Wikipedia as part of the classroom activities. That’s why we will run a small pilot in the spring term 2012 to see whether this idea is worth further exploration.

Numbers: In the first two semesters of our educational program activities, more than 800 students contributed about 5,600 pages of high quality content to the English Wikipedia. Our research has shown that Wikipedia articles written by those students improved by an average of 140 percent. By 2013, we are planning to have more than 10,000 students enrolled in our Education Program.

Online Ambassadors: Whereas the Campus Ambassadors provide in-person support, the Online Ambassadors help students on wiki and on a dedicated IRC channel. Most of our Online Ambassadors are long-term Wikipedians who can answer almost every question related to the technical aspects of editing, Wikipedia culture and processes. Students have told us that the mentoring from Online Ambassadors has been “tremendously helpful” for understanding Wikipedia and for making the first edits.

Public Policy Initiative: A 17-month experimental pilot program that started in the summer of 2010. We decided to run our pilot with a narrow topical focus (“If we can do it with public policy, we will be able to do it with any other topic as well”) and limited to U.S. universities. Now, as we are flooded with requests from educators outside of public policy, and we have a model that works effectively, we are transitioning the Public Policy Initiative to the new Global Education Program. Our goal is to apply our learnings in the U.S. to other disciplines and countries and to expand the use of Wikipedia in higher education globally. We see this as a continuous effort to strengthen and diversify Wikipedia’s editing community.

Regional Ambassadors: When we started the Public Policy Initiative, one of our main goals was to make the program self-sustainable. That’s why we created the role of Regional Ambassadors. Whereas Foundation staff members recruited professors and Campus Ambassadors in the beginning, it’s now up to the volunteers. The Regional Ambassador role is a leadership role with great opportunities for developing team management, community organizing, and public outreach skills. It also provides participants with significant professional-networking opportunities, especially in the education community and the open-source community.

Student clubs: Wikipedia student clubs pretty much emerged without the Foundation being involved. The first student club in the U.S. started at the University of Michigan in June 2010. Most student clubs hold monthly meetings where students can have a place to both learn and teach each other how to edit Wikimedia projects, and to discuss their edits with each other.

Trainers: Some of our Campus Ambassadors get an additional 2-day training so they can train the next generation of Campus Ambassadors. Those Campus Ambassador Trainers play an important role in our program activities: as volunteers they organize and lead local training events to ensure that the next cohort of Ambassadors acquires the same skills as they did. They also provide valuable feedback that helps improve the training.

Women: One of our strategic goals is to encourage more women to start editing Wikipedia. Our activities at universities offer a great opportunity to do so: more than half of the students in the U.S. (as well as in a large number of other countries) are female. And, of course, we are proud that more than 45% of our Campus Ambassadors are women as well.

Join the discussion about Wikimedia and education by subscribing to the Education listserv.

Frank Schulenburg
Global Education Program Director