June traditionally marks the end of the academic year in the United States, which means that the first year of the pilot project to bring Wikipedia editing into university classrooms, the Public Policy Initiative, has come to an end. Over the next few months, we’ll be reflecting on the successes and the challenges of our program, but here’s an initial overview of all we’ve accomplished.

Student contributions

This chart shows the number of bytes students participating in the Public Policy Initiative added to the English Wikipedia's article namespace each month.

Over the two terms of the Public Policy Initiative, more than 800 students were introduced to Wikipedia editing as part of their coursework. In the fall term, we worked with 14 classes. In the just-completed spring term, we worked with 33. The chart at right shows the number of bytes our students added to articles. All told, students contributed 8.8 million bytes to the English Wikipedia this academic year. That’s the equivalent of more than 5,800 pages of content to Wikipedia. Put another way, that’s 11 reams of paper filled with new content.

The best part is, the content students are adding is of high quality. On average, public policy articles within the project improved by 140 percent, based on a numerical weighted ranking as assessed by Wikipedia experts and public policy experts. The articles went from an average score of 6.88 before the project to a score of 16.54 after the students completed their work. Our research analyst, Amy Roth, is busy crunching numbers, so look for an expanded report to be published on the Outreach wiki this summer.

Wikipedia Ambassador Program

Wikipedia Ambassadors work with Professor Aaron Frank's class at the University of San Francisco.

One of the biggest successes of the Public Policy Initiative is starting the Wikipedia Ambassador program. Two types of Wikipedia Ambassadors have been trained: Campus Ambassadors, who teach students how to edit Wikipedia through in-class presentations, and Online Ambassadors, who serve as virtual mentors for students on-wiki.

Nearly 60 people have been trained as Campus Ambassadors, and they’ve had success in growing Wikipedia’s presence on university campuses around the United States. Some Ambassadors are even taking on responsibilities beyond in-class work (see this feature on the Montana State pod). One great feature of the Campus Ambassador program is that it opens participation in our projects to new people. Not all Campus Ambassadors are traditional Wikipedia editors, but they have all shown tremendous enthusiasm in their roles of spreading the word about Wikipedia editing to new people. The Campus Ambassador role lets us put their outreach skills to use in supporting our projects, even if they choose not to contribute content.

Online Ambassadors are experienced Wikipedians with a track record of good content development and newbie assistance. More than 90 Wikipedians are available to serve as wiki mentors for the students, answering questions on-wiki, through the IRC channel #wikipedia-en-classroom, and via email. Online Ambassadors have helped guide their students through the Did You Know process, which we’ve found to be a huge motivator for students, who really enjoy having their articles featured on Wikipedia’s main page.

Resources for instructors

Alex Jones, a professor at Harvard, used Wikipedia in his class in the spring.

The professors we worked with often asked for a sample syllabus, hints on assignment design, and materials they could distribute to students that would help them learn. We developed a new Education Portal that serves as a clearinghouse for all the information we’ve collected that’s of use to instructors. The education portal contains reasons why Wikipedia assignments are useful for professors and students, case studies of successful courses, and support materials professors need as they plan their courses. If you’ve seen other syllabi that incorporate Wikipedia assignments, we encourage you to add them to the Education Portal.

Looking forward

The Public Policy Initiative was a pilot project that had two aims: (1) improve the content of U.S. public policy articles on the English Wikipedia, and (2) see if the Wikimedia Foundation could enhance the relationship between Wikipedia and academia. We’re excited to say we’ve accomplished both, and we’re eager to broaden the work we’ve already started with our new Global University Program.

Volunteer Regional Ambassadors will continue the work of recruiting Campus Ambassadors and professors in the United States, with training support from the Wikimedia Foundation. We have ambitious goals to increase the number of courses participating in the United Sates to 50 in the fall term and 80 by spring 2012. Already, our Regional Ambassadors are working to recruit new professors, across any discipline.

Campus Ambassador Trainer PJ Tabit explains a facet of working with professors to new Campus Ambassador trainees in Pune, India.

As the name global implies, we’re also eager to get the program started in other countries and on other Wikipedias as well. For the next academic year, we expect to see universities in India, the U.K., and Canada (and maybe more) using Wikipedia in the classroom with the support of Wikipedia Ambassadors. Last week, Wikimedia Foundation staff trained the first cohort of Campus Ambassadors in Pune, which will be the location of our pilot in India, and the classes these Campus Ambassadors will be supporting are starting in a few weeks.

With our global expansion, we’re looking forward to working with community members around the world to get university programs going in every country. Interested in helping? Become a Wikipedia Ambassador, or point a professor you know in the direction of the new Education Portal. Start a discussion on our talk page. Join us as we explore the next chapter of Wikipedia’s partnership with academia.

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LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

Mike Cline is a long-time Wikipedia contributor, and Bonnie McCallum is a long-time Wikipedia evangelist — together, they form the Campus Ambassador pod at Montana State University. And over the course of the last five months, Mike and Bonnie have transformed Bozeman, Montana, into a Wikipedia hub.

They’ve supported MSU Professor Kristin Ruppel’s class, “Federal Indian Policy and Law,” this term, as she assigned her students to edit Wikipedia articles as part of the curriculum. They are starting a Wikipedia student club on the Bozeman campus. They had a Wikipedia information table set up in the student union building. They’ve set up office hours in the university library, where they answer student questions related to Wikipedia. They’re preparing to present about their Wikipedia experiences to the Tribal College Librarians Institute in June, and they’ve already registered for a Wikipedia booth at Catapolooza, a campus-wide festival in August.

“I believe it’s important to demonstrate to academics that Wikipedia is a place of scholarship and that academia should be engaged and participating in Wikipedia,” Bonnie says. “So far, I’ve not met, or talked to, or emailed a single person who does not use Wikipedia, and it is fun for me to be able to tell folks that MSU-Bozeman has a graduate class that instead of writing term papers writes articles to Wikipedia.”

The Wikipedia Ambassador Program originated with the Public Policy Initiative, but it’s been growing ever since. Volunteer Campus Ambassadors like Bonnie and Mike work in class with students who have been assigned to edit Wikipedia for part of their course grade. Online Ambassadors are their virtual counterparts, helping students on-wiki and through IRC. Campus Ambassadors can be either experienced Wikipedians like Mike or new editors who have a lot of enthusiasm for teaching others about Wikipedia like Bonnie.

“The best part about being a Campus Ambassador is the opportunity to work with young students and adults on interesting academic subjects and the opportunity to convince academia that Wikipedia is indeed a valuable and reliable source of scholarship,” Mike says. “Students who took their Wikipedia assignment seriously were sincerely appreciative of the mentoring and help provided by the Ambassadors.”

Mike and Bonnie supported Professor Ruppel’s students via in-class presentations on Wikipedia editing and culture, Q&A sessions, pep talks, weekly office hours in the academic library, one-on-one counseling by appointment, and a class-time lab session in the library computer classroom. Bonnie, on staff at MSU Bozeman, got the library blog to post an item about their project, and the student newspaper covered their activities as well. Each of Bonnie and Mike’s outreach activities brings more people on board to their new Wikipedia student club, whose activities will begin in the fall term.

“Everyone, students and staff alike, always respond with ‘I use Wikipedia!’ Then they immediately add something like ‘That’s cool!’ or ‘How does that work?’ or ‘I had no idea that was going on,’ or ‘But I thought Wikipedia couldn’t be trusted,’” Bonnie says. “Telling people about being a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador opens up a door to conversations about their own Wikipedia experiences, and we can explain about neutral point-of-view, tertiary source, verifiability, notability, the history tab, and other projects at Wikimedia besides Wikipedia. Most folks are surprised to find out they’re already empowered to become active Wikipedians. They’ve just never thought about Wikipedia from the collaborative, participative perspective before.”

As the spring term wraps up, Bonnie and Mike are busy meeting with Professor Ruppel to debrief about how the first term went. Professor Ruppel is already planning to use Wikipedia again in her class next term, and Bonnie and Mike are identifying what worked best and what they should do differently next time around. They’re also trying to recruit more Campus Ambassadors on the MSU-Bozeman campus. And they’d like to expand Wikipedia Campus Ambassador presence to the entire Montana University System: all Montana State University (MSU) system campuses, all University of Montana (U of M) system campuses, all seven Montana Tribal Colleges and three Community Colleges, and all three Montana Independent Colleges. They want to see Wikipedia editing as part of the curriculum in every college in Montana.

It’s an ambitious goal, but if anyone can do it, it’s Bonnie and Mike. In Mike’s regular job, he teaches and mentors groups of corporate leaders and teams on a variety of business processes, so expanding his teaching to Wikipedia is a logical step. Bonnie’s professional experience in the semiconductor and IT industries gave her a deep appreciation for open-source, shared knowledge, tools, and applications.

“Volunteering my time and energies in support of a worldwide free-access, neutral point-of-view, and verifiable information repository such as Wikipedia is a path I am willing to travel,” Bonnie says. “Wikipedia Campus Ambassadorship is for those who like a challenge, are comfortable working with unknowns, like working with others to solve problems, and enjoy constantly learning new stuff. Nothing is written in stone. In fact, there are no stones. The upside to the days when one is feeling like you’re walking around in a wiki-daze is that you know you’re building something wonderful for the whole world to use for free. You just steady-on.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

UC Berkeley undergrad Kevin Gorman started editing Wikipedia as part of his coursework, but he's become a Wikipedian in the process.

Prior to January 2011, University of California at Berkeley undergraduate Kevin Gorman‘s contributions to Wikipedia were a few edits to geology-related articles, but he’d never bothered to register for a user account. Then Kevin, a Scandinavian studies major, enrolled in a classed called “Politics of Piracy,” participating in the Wikimedia Foundation’s new University Program in the spring 2011 term. As part of the class, Kevin was required to register for a user account and make substantive contributions to a Wikipedia article as part of class.

Kevin’s instructors and Campus Ambassadors gave him and his classmates an introduction to how to edit Wikipedia, and Kevin was hooked – not just contributing to the article on the court case Perfect 10, Inc. v. Google Inc. – his chosen article for class – but also contributing to articles on mushrooms and becoming involved with the team that patrols new pages.

“The way I got interested in mushrooms to begin with was that I realized there was not a single species of mushroom I could identify by sight. I’ve been working on fixing that ever since – and now I’m applying my new-found knowledge to Wikipedia,” Kevin says. “The relationship between different kinds of mushrooms is becoming a lot clearer now that we can do genetic comparisons, so the field is changing rapidly. Due to this rapid change, a lot of the information on Wikipedia currently is out of date. I’ve found contributing to Wikipedia’s mushrooms articles to be an interesting application of what I’ve learned and also an interesting way to learn more things. I can look at an article and say ‘I know that name is out of date, but I’m not sure what the right one is,’ and then I can go through the literature to find what the current name is and update the Wikipedia article with that citation.”

In addition to his article editing contributions, Kevin’s also become part of a team of editors who monitor newly created pages to ensure the topics meet Wikipedia’s notability requirements. He was perusing an article one day and noticed a sentence that seemed strange. There was a wikilink in the sentence to an article about a company.

“I Googled the company, and they didn’t exist, so I deleted the reference in the first page, and nominated the article about the company for deletion,” Kevin says. “The creator of the page ended up responding to me in about 20,000 words. It got me sucked into deleting things that don’t follow Wikipedia’s policies.”

Sucked in he is: Kevin intends to keep contributing to Wikipedia long after his class ends. In fact, Kevin will be taking over teaching the “Politics of Piracy” class — it’s part of a student-led courses program at Berkeley called DeCal — next term, and he will be integrating Wikipedia throughout his version of the course as well.

“In general, I like Wikipedia assignments more than doing something like a traditional paper,” Kevin says. “When you write a final paper for a class, it’s useless after the class – it can be a good reinforcement of the course material, but nobody will ever read it again. Doing something on Wikipedia, we are making a lasting contribution, and it has the potential to get people a bit more sucked into their topic than say writing an 8-page paper would.”

And Kevin’s looking to recruit more than just current students to become Wikipedia editors. He’s been attending mycology society meetings and hopes to eventually entice some of their members in to contributing to WikiProject Fungi.

“I’d like to convert some of the mycologists from making jokes about Wikipedia and mushrooms to actually contributing to Wikipedia’s content about mushrooms,” he says. “And it’s a useful thing to not just contribute what you already know, but to find what you should know. You can expand your own base of knowledge by contributing. The more people who contribute to Wikipedia, the more useful it will become.”

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate – Public Policy Initiative

A key piece of Wikimedia’s strategic plan is to close the gender gap by encouraging more women to participate in projects. One area where we already see progress is the Wikipedia Ambassadors program, developed in conjunction with the Public Policy Initiative. During the 2010-11 academic year, university students across the United States are writing Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework, and they learn the Wikipedia basics from trained Campus Ambassadors who come into the classroom to teach students how to start contributing.

These Campus Ambassadors are the first face of the Wikimedia movement that most students have seen, and 27 of the 59 Campus Ambassadors this term (that’s 46%) are women. At Indiana University Bloomington, for example, six Campus Ambassadors assist three classes of students — and five of them are women.

“I think I am putting a face on Wikipedia instead of it just being a web site that people use,” says Chanitra Bishop, a librarian at IU and one of the five female Campus Ambassadors there. “Hopefully, if students and professors have thought about becoming involved, they will see that they can and that they have unique knowledge to contribute.” Likewise, Indiana Library and Information Science master’s student Beth Brockman was drawn to becoming a Campus Ambassador because of her desire to make Wikipedia a better resource for anyone to use, but she thinks seeing women teaching about Wikipedia in university classrooms can be an inspiration to the female students in the class.

Chanitra’s and Beth’s views are echoed across their cohort. They don’t focus on being role models for female students. Instead, they try to ease all students into the joys of editing Wikipedia — and closing the gender gap is a nice side effect of their work.

“I would hope that I am providing a model for any new editor, not just women, and I would hope that I am contributing to making Wikipedia a professional and respectful environment,” says Adrianne Wadewitz, a longtime Wikipedian. “Being a Campus Ambassador allows me to join together two things about which I’m passionate: Wikipedia and teaching. It allows me to show professors how useful Wikipedia can be as a teaching tool and it allows me to learn, in turn, from students and other teachers about a variety of subject matters and techniques for communicating.”

Campus Ambassadors were trained in five regions across the United States in January, including a training in Indianapolis, pictured here.

Ellie Dahlgren is a staff member at the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning at Indiana, and she agrees with Adrianne that her primary focus as a Campus Ambassador is on what the students get out of the Wikipedia assignment.

“I like challenging instructors to think about teaching and learning in different ways,” Ellie says. “I like being part of a team that creates unique and practical (i.e., real-world) experiences for students.”

And it’s not just Campus Ambassadors closing the gender gap. More than half of the 600 students contributing to Wikipedia through the Public Policy Initiative this term are women. Two classes feature an all-women roster: women’s college Simmons’ “Public Relations Seminar” and Georgetown University’s “Women and Human Rights.”

Brenda Burk is a librarian at nearby Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), and she travels to Bloomington to assist in the classrooms there. Becoming a Campus Ambassador has given Brenda a new way to connect with students, she says. Brenda says the principles librarians support — understanding resources, determining source reliability, and verifiability — complement Wikipedia well. And she’s particularly excited to see the students in her class continue contributing to such an important resource.

“Seeing me use Wikipedia and edit encourages them to jump in,” Brenda says of her students. “In the class, the women are a bit more cautious starting to edit and create articles. Once they start and become comfortable in this environment they get excited about it. Hopefully the enthusiasm continues.”

Learn more about the Public Policy Initiative, the Wikipedia Ambassador program, and the classes involved so far at WikiProject United States Public Policy.

LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate, Public Policy Initiative

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

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