Hi Ambassadors,

Thanks to all of you who have participated in a number of discussions on the U.S. Education Program talk page[1] or Mike Christie's incredibly useful Signpost article [2] over the last few months. Every term with the Wikipedia Education Program brings new challenges and opportunities to learn what works and what doesn't. We know there's been a lot of frustration over the last term as we grew faster than we were able to support at this point, and we're sorry about that -- so we wanted to let all of you be the first to know that we've just instituted a new set of Participation Requirements across all country versions of the Wikipedia Education Program in operation this term (which is the U.S., Canada, and Egypt), so that we are explicitly focusing on quality over quantity.

The requirements are here[3], but to summarize the high points, we're enforcing a 1:15 Ambassador:Student ratio, requiring each course to be supported by at least one Wikipedian, and making an orientation for professors mandatory. This affects Ambassadors most in the fact that we're making a concerted effort to limit the number of students you are expected to support. Our hope is that we will be able to provide better levels of support to participating professors and students next term, and that professors will have a greater understanding of Wikipedia thanks to the orientation (thanks as well to all of you who offered input on suggested topics for that orientation).

Unfortunately, the downside to these requirements is that for the U.S. and Canada program, we've had to turn down interested professors this term (hence the reduction of quantity in favor of quality). We hope this will not continue to be the case in the future, but this will mean attracting more Ambassadors to the role, so we can continue supporting professors at the 1:15 ratio with at least one Wikipedian present. We're sad to turn away interested professors, but we want to ensure that we can support classes well, so the quality level of student contributions remains the same as it was during the Public Policy Initiative pilot.

Look for a more practical email next week with information on supporting courses and a few minor changes, once we've finalized the course roster.

Thank you for all your amazing work -- the Wikipedia Education Program's successes are thanks to you!

The Wikipedia Education Program staff: Frank, Annie, LiAnna, Jami, and Ayush

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:United_States_Education_Program

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/Opinion...

[3] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Education_Program/Participation...