Hi all,
I wanted to point your attention briefly to a blog post we made live today
on the WMF blog, with some preliminary results from this year's Public
Policy Initiative pilot:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/06/08/public-policy-initiative-wraps-up-pilo…
The blog contains a chart of the contributions to the article namespace of
the English Wikipedia that our students made -- over the 2010-11 academic
year, they added more than 8.8 million bytes of high-quality content. We're
really excited with the results, and we're looking forward to expanding our
reach even more in the forthcoming academic year. We're hoping to work with
even more classes, universities, countries, and languages.
Our success is due in large part to our amazing corps of Wikipedia
Ambassadors, who help students and professors in class and on-wiki. If
you're interested in mentoring new Wikipedia editors to improve the content,
we'd love to have more Ambassadors to meet the needs of our growing
participant list, or if you know of (or are!) a professor who is interested
in assigning students to contribute to Wikipedia, let us know, or take a
look at the new Education Portal on the Outreach wiki:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/For_educators
Over the next few months, look for more formal research results on the exact
improvement in article quality contributed by our students.
LiAnna
--
LiAnna Davis
Communications Associate - Public Policy Initiative
Wikimedia Foundation
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative
(415) 839-6885 x6649
ldavis(a)wikimedia.org