Hi Kevin,
Congratulations! Whatever your responsibilities, I hope you will continue your study and measurement of and experiments with approaches to counter systemic biases including gender bias and well-funded politically motivated theories which do not comport with the peer reviewed secondary literature. The English Wikipedia reflects such biases in great abundance, and they represent the greatest quality challenge as editing activity continues the slow transition from article creation to updating and maintenance.
Would you please reach out to Leonie Haimson of http://www.classsizematters.org/about-us/ ? She started editing the class size and student-teacher ratio articles on enwiki in the past year. They had previously been stuffed with astroturfed Stanford work from the charter school movement which was not well supported in the peer reviewed secondary literature, and which gave MOOC proponents false hope that technology advances could raise the optimum class size ratio, which is determined by education level relative to the rest of global society.
Please let me know your thoughts, and please enjoy your work!
Best regards, James Salsman
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 8:57 AM, Kevin Gorman kgorman@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all -
I have talked about this in bits and places elsewhere, but as I finally have a finalized signed contract in hand, I figured I'd make an actual announcement about it. Officially effective today, I am the Wikipedian-in-Residence for the American Culture Program at the University of California, Berkeley. American Cultures at Berkeley is a program centered on the study of race, ethnicity, and culture in the United States - a lot of what I will be doing will be centered around very closely supervising USEP classes in under-represented areas, but I'll also working on other related issues, such as trying to arrange media donations, trying to document best practices, etc - as well as tackling other projects that have yet to be thought of!
Wikipedians-in-Residence have previously focused almost entirely on GLAM institutions, and as far as I know, I'm the first WiR at a University. I'm hoping that this will end up being a productive collaboration that sets up the groundwork for future WiR positions at other Universities. I know UCB will be trying to set up some press later in the month, and I intend to meticulously document my residency, make my materials available for reuse, etc.
Since my duties aren't set in stone yet, I'd also strongly welcome suggestions for additional projects to take on - since I'm based out of the AC center, most work I do should be focused on areas that are currently under-represented on Wikipedia, but that can cover an awful lot of ground.
Best, Kevin Gorman
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