Hi all,

First off, I want to introduce myself: I'm LiAnna Davis, the communications associate for the Wikimedia Foundation's new Public Policy Initiative. The Initiative is a new project where we will work with professors at public policy schools in the United States to incorporate improving Wikipedia articles into the curriculum for their courses.

We will experiment with different methods of using Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool in universities and ways to provide incentives and support participation by students, teachers, and Wikipedians. The goal of the project is both to improve public policy content during the duration of the project and also to produce information and infrastructure that could inform the design and development of a long­-term sustainable model.

We're finalizing our list of professors who will be participating in the Initiative for the fall, so stay tuned for more information about that -- but at the moment, we're in the middle of an article assessment drive, and we encourage everyone to join us. Our on-Wikipedia home is the WikiProject United States Public Policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...), and we've started a challenge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...) to tag and assess as many articles relevant to our project as you can.

We're using a more detailed assessment model (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...) to meet the quantitative analysis needs of our project. Over the last few weeks, we've had great collaboration with several editors who have already joined our project on the first few drafts of our metric. Please join us help work out the bugs as we put it into action.

We're also looking for Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors, experienced Wikipedians who can help students in the courses navigate editing Wikipedia. Campus Ambassadors (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...) are people who can physically be at the schools; Online Ambassadors (more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_United_States_Public_Poli...) can participate from anywhere.

I encourage any editors interested in U.S. public policy or using Wikipedia in the classroom to join our WikiProject and help out.

LiAnna