Dear fellow Wikipedians:
This is to let you know about my most recent article, co-authored with former student Kate Rattray. We’re especially proud of this piece, in which we make a pedagogical and public-service case for writing and editing Wikipedia articles for law school credit. The article has just been published in the Journal of Legal Education, which, appropriately, is an open-access journal. The current volume can be found here: http://jle.aals.org/home/. You can also read an abstract and download the article from my SSRN (Social Sciences Research Network) website, here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2729241.
Yours truly,
John Kleefeld
Associate Professor, College of Law
University of Saskatchewan
15 Campus Drive
Saskatoon SK S7N 5A6
tel: (+1) 306.966.1039
email: john.kleefeld(a)usask.ca
skype: johnkleefeld
twitter: @johnkleefeld
web: http://law.usask.ca/find-people/faculty/kleefeld-john.php
Good evening, Professor Christie. My name is Lixxx235, and I'm a Wikipedia
editor and an Online Ambassador with the Wikipedia Education Program. (
userpage <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lixxx235>)
It's come to my attention (through a student's request for help via
Wikipedia's live chat) that you have given your students assignments
relating to editing Wikipedia. While the Wikipedia Education Program fully
supports such assignments, and endorses a number of courses at various
universities around the world, according to one of your students, an
assignment you've given seems to have students confused and is causing
submissions in violation of some Wikipedia policies and wasting volunteer
and student time. For example, this
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Fuel_controlled_fires_…>
is an entry one of your students tried to get help on from our live help
chat. This submission does not meet Wikipedia guidelines such as notability
policies, policies requiring verifiability of material, and policies
requiring a neutral point of view (NPOV) to be kept. In addition, it was
not in Wikipedia's standard format.
We'd love to get in touch with you. Please reply back to
lixxx235wikipedia(a)gmail.com and education(a)lists.wikimedia.org to see how we
can help you develop good assignments for editing Wikipedia and how we can
resolve some issues with your current assignment.
All the best,
Lixxx235
English Wikipedia
Fellow Wikimedians,
Wiki Education (the organization that runs the education program in the US
and Canada) has been working on a campaign to improve Wikipedia's coverage
of climate finance topics. As part of this campaign, we want to create
articles on climate finance around the world. Climate finance encompasses
investments to address climate change mitigation and adaptation. These
investments are desperately needed globally, but financial flows to the
developing world, and African countries in particular, have fallen short of
what is needed. But documentation is difficult to find for the average
reader, and difficult to interpret.
That's where you come in! If you're already convinced to help us, sign up
here:
https://wikiedu.org/courses/global-approaches-to-climate-finance-for-wikipe…
Please join us for a free virtual four-week Wiki Scholars course focused on
improving the article on climate finance in your home country. Our goal is
to fill gaps in Wikipedia's coverage by creating "Climate finance by
[country]" to document financial flows related to climate change mitigation
and adaptation for as many countries as possible, especially in the
developing world. Led by longtime English Wikipedian Ian Ramjohn, the
course will focus on:
- Just what is climate finance, and why it is an important piece in the
climate crisis puzzle
- Where to find sources on climate finance in your country
- How to create an article on English Wikipedia, including tips and
tricks on English Wikipedia policies
- Using the content translation tool to create it in another language
Wikipedia that you speak
The course will meet via Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays @ 14:00 UTC, from
June 24 to July 19, 2024.
If you join us, you'll receive:
- Guidance from an English Wikipedia expert (Ian's an admin who's been
editing for 20 years!)
- Getting to know a cohort of other Wikimedians around the world who
care about how the climate crisis affects their country
- A certificate of completion that can be added to your LinkedIn profile
Sign up here:
https://wikiedu.org/courses/global-approaches-to-climate-finance-for-wikipe…
Want to see what an article might look like? Ian's started drafting the
article on climate finance in his home country of Trinidad and Tobago here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guettarda/Sandbox_55
We hope you can join us!
-The Wiki Education team