Hello Everybody,
The problem with Wikimania is the lack of clarity of what it is, even in
Wikimedia communities this event is not fully understood and supported. I
know a lot of French speaking wikimedian thinking that Wikimania is just
wasting money to make parties between wikimedians.
It's not the subject of the thread, but if already at wikimedians level
Wikimania is not something totally understood, I don't see how we could
convince Academics to take it 100% seriously.
But I think that Academic world could join Wikimedia events, if the topic is
clearly announced, and linked to academic activities. In Switzerland we have
done the opposite, we have join a 100% scientific congress, and it was quite
easy when we have shown to the organizers that in fact a part of the
European project associated was dedicated to outreach activities, and that
they have done nothing except an out of date website.
In my field (Professor in Biology) Wikimedia project and Academic (in term
of researcher) have converging interest in outreach activities, Wikimedia
need to find new contributors with a high skills, and researcher need to
communicate efficiently to the public.
For European funds research project, outreach activities are always needed,
but most of the times Europe only ask for a website. One point of entry in
Academic world could be that Wikimedia project could be a component of the
research project (public information). It could change the game, because in
this case we are talking to all researcher and not only those committed to
education.
Sorry if my message is the mess :-) My point is that we should design some
Wikimedia Events for academics to attract them, and after we could bring
Academics to general Wikimedia Event .
Charles
___________________________________________________________
Charles ANDRES, Membre du Comité
Wikimedia CH - Association pour l'avancement des connaissances libres
www.wikimedia.ch
Skype: charles.andres.wmch
IRC://irc.freenode.net/wikimedia-ch
-----Message d'origine-----
De : education-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:education-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] De la part de Everton Zanella
Alvarenga
Envoyé : lundi 26 mars 2012 05:52
À : education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Objet : [Wikimedia Education] Bringing academia to Wikimedia projects and
events (it was Education Digest, Vol 10, Issue 3)
(Adapting the subject to an adequate one)
Hi all,
this is a very important issue and we all involved in the global efforts to
involve universities to improve Wikipedia - and, if I may add, raise
awareness on the Wikimedia movement, which we could go deep, but let's
retrict ourselves to the apparently solely goal at the moment.
Wikimania is far from an academic event. Fact. Only a few academics would be
interested in attending to it or, if they would be interested, would have
time for it. Fact.
The first time I've heard about Wikimania was during my masters studies, in
2005. I was already somewhat involved with Wikipedia, but even as a masters
student, I would never think about going to what I've read at that time what
is this event about. Instead I would go to a summer school (as I did in a
previous year) or an academic conference that would be regarded by funding
agencies. This is the view of a MS student, you can imagine a researcher who
has to give number of papers/conferences/books and so on to survive inside
the academic world (well, the well know publish or perish
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish>)
Frank has asked me to see with the five professors in Brazil who joined the
Wikipedia Education Program if they would be interested in a meeting in the
mid of the semester to share their, his and ambassadors experiences with the
program. I've asked three of them until now (one is Juliana who raised the
subject we are discussing here, who already gave the nice idea to transform
the event in an academic meeting) and my feeling is that they will attend
when they have time, which is not that much - waiting other professors
answers and reactions to Juliana's proposal.
I don't know very much about Wikipedia Academy
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Academy> and I'd love to hear more
details about it and if it's aligned to the purpose of bringing attention of
the academic world to Wikimedia projects, not only as a research field
(indeed, a very interesting one, as Benkler teach us, for instance), but
maybe as a source of inspiration from interesting peer production process
that academia has a lot to learn - I believe that in a ideal world, if most
forms of knowledge was freely shared, raw reserarch data, for instance [1],
the processos of building new knowledge would be much faster (this is far
from happening, if it will).
I belive that professors joining these global education efforts are usually
those commited to education. Those I've choose are.* I thnk one way to bring
more attention from academia would be to invest more thoughts (I am not
saying it was not invested) on how would professors, key figures in this
program, together. The program is expanding now. How will professors, with
such scarce time, share their experiences and how would they benefit from
it?
I believe those are a few and important challenges to make the program
expand inside academia.
Best,
Tom
*Besides most public universities in Brazil have education as one of their
pillars, research comes first. I've seen a lot of professors who produce
amazing educational resources, but they are treated in the same way as those
professors who simply copy and paste American or European books on the
blockboard, instead of using some of their time to do what is written in the
contract with the institution he or she works.
[1]
http://pantonprinciples.org/
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:51 PM, Bart <bart.humphries(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In other words, for academics to take it seriously
(ask for time off,
volunteer time to write a paper, spend money to travel out there, stay
at a hotel, eat, etc.), it has to be run like a "real" academic
conference. I could go present a topic and speak for an hour at my
local Rotary club (and I have), but it's not really going to mean much
professionally and I wouldn't be putting it on either my resume or
curriculum vitae. Presenting a topic in a somewhat competitive forum
where the speakers are vetted and the presentation topics have
generally been run through some basic fact checking to make sure
they're not complete bunkum would be something of a "feather in my
cap", something that I would definitely put down on at least my
curriculum vitae.
So, the question should be, is Wikimania a "real" academic conference,
or a fan convention (or both)? I'd argue that, in its current state,
Wikimania is basically a fan convention, designed as a big
meet-and-greet for Wikipedia editors, with some presentations given
that likely haven't been put up against any sort of test other than
"It's not Time Cube, right?" That's cool, I enjoy fun conventions,
but it's going to be difficult to attract "serious" academics to come
as presenters.
Bart User:Banaticus
--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
Wikimedia Brasil
Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Education mailing list
Education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education