Hi Ambassadors,
I wanted to bring your attention to two great stories about our project that
have recently come out.
Georgetown Campus Ambassador Rob Pongsajapan and his coworkers at the Center
for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at GU have put together
a video of Professor Rochelle Davis talking about assigning her students to
write Wikipedia articles through the Public Policy Initiative as part of
their "Teaching Commons" site. Many thanks to Rob and crew! I encourage you
to watch the short video to see how excited professors are about our
project.
https://commons.georgetown.edu/teaching/examples/wikipedia-project/
Second, I pushed a blog post live on the Wikimedia Foundation's Community
blog today profiling our Montana State University pod, Mike Cline and Bonnie
McCallum. Bonnie and Mike have done an exceptional job this term, and I
encourage you all to read about the great stuff they've been starting on the
Bozeman campus:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/05/25/montana-campus-ambassadors-recruit-new…
I'm always on the lookout for great stories -- these will be sprinkled
throughout our final report to our funder -- so if you know of any, please
send them my way! I'm also happy to have you tell me you think you'd be a
great person to profile; don't be shy! If you've had a great interaction
with a student or if you know of any great work that you think is worth
highlighting, let me know.
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
Hi Ambassadors,
We are at a pivotal point in the development of the Wikipedia Ambassador
Program. Your feedback will help shape the program and role of Ambassadors
in the future. Please take this 10 minute survey to help inform and improve
the Wikipedia Ambassadors.
WMF will de-identify results and make them available to you. According to
KwikSurveys' privacy policy: "Data and email addresses will not be sold,
rented, leased or disclosed to 3rd parties." This link takes you to the
online survey http://kwiksurveys.com?u=WPAmbassador_email<http://kwiksurveys.com/?u=WPAmbassador_email>
Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments, Thank You!
Amy
--
Amy Roth
Research Analyst (Public Policy
Initiative<http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative>
)
Wikimedia Foundation
Knowledge is the true organ of sight, not the eyes. - Panchatantra
Hi Ambassadors,
In our continued efforts to showcase the impact your work having on
Wikipedia, I wanted to draw your attention to a blog post we put out
today:
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/05/11/berkeley-undergrad-gets-hooked-on-wiki…
The blog post features Kevin Gorman, an undergrad at UC Berkeley who's
taking the "Politics of Piracy" class. Kevin was really drawn to
Wikipedia once he created his user account for class, and he spends
his free time editing the content of articles about mushrooms and
patrolling newly created pages to ensure they meet Wikipedia's
policies. A big thank you goes out to all the Ambassadors who've
worked with Kevin, especially the UC Berkeley campus crew!
If you've worked with other students who have ventured into editing
non-class topics, please let me know who they are (off-list) so I can
continue showcasing your awesome Ambassadorial work!
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
Hi Ambassadors,
We've heard from a few of you that it's hard to see the effect your
work is having, especially when individual students are unresponsive.
So I wanted to show you the attached chart. The chart tracks the
contributions, by month, of all students in the Public Policy
Initiative classes -- the students you are helping in class or
mentoring online. The chart measures bytes our students have
contributed to the article namespace alone (so it doesn't count talk
page content).
In short: last month, our students contributed 2.9 million bytes of
content to the English Wikipedia article namespace. That's the
equivalent of about 1,944 printed pages of work.
This incredible amount of high-quality contributions is due in large
part to your volunteer efforts -- the presentations you make in class,
the messages you exchange on-wiki with your mentees, the help you
provide in IRC. Our program is having a quite noteworthy impact on the
rate at which content on the English Wikipedia grows, and you are
front and center in that effort.
On behalf of the entire Public Policy team: THANK YOU! It would be
impossible to achieve this without you.
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
Hi Ambassadors, and welcome to the new Ambassador-announce-l mailing list.
This new list is not a discussion list like the Google Group, it is an
announcement list in which important information will be emailed to you.
That means:
1) Posts here will be infrequent (likely not more than 1-2 messages a week).
2) Anything posted here is critical information, and thus you should read it
carefully.
As a member of the Ambassador program, you are expected to be subscribed to
this list. All messages sent to it will be publicly archived.
We've made this decision based on the on-wiki discussion prompted by our
moderation change and based on a random survey that went out to a selected
group of ambassadors who hadn't weighed in on-wiki. There is a strong
feeling among several Ambassadors that the Google Group is effective at
being a discussion group for Ambassadors, but many others feel the volume is
too great and they'd like to unsubscribe. Since we're trying to both foster
Ambassador discussions while convey important information, splitting the
group into two seemed like a logical step.
We encourage you to discuss things we post to the announce list -- but
please do so on the Google Group or on-wiki, which are our discussion
spaces. We have turned off moderation for the Google Group; if you feel like
a discussion is dragging on too long, we encourage you to attempt to move it
on-wiki organically as the list has functioned in the past. Going forward,
all members of the Ambassador Steering Committee will have management rights
over the group, and it will be up to you, the Ambassadors, to decide if any
more changes are warranted.
>From this moment on, subscription to and participation in the Google Group
is entirely voluntary. If you'd like to unsubscribe to the Google Group, you
are welcome to do that. Here's three ways you can unsubscribe:
1) In the email you received when you originally were added to the group is
a unique URL that you can click to unsubscribe from the group.
2) If you have a Google account associated with the email address you're
subscribed to, log in at groups.google.com and you'll be able to unsubscribe
yourself through the web interface. You can also simply change your settings
to "no email" so that you can log on and read messages through the web
interface if you'd like.
3) If you can't figure either of these out, please email LiAnna at
ldavis(a)wikimedia.org to be removed from the list manually.
Many thanks to all Ambassadors who participated in the discussion
surrounding email communications!
The Public Policy Initiative Team