Hi all,
I am pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation received a generous grant from the Stanton Foundation for a 17-month pilot program that will help inform how to best engage new contributors in the improvement of subject-specific articles on Wikipedia. The Stanton Foundation also supports the Wikipedia Usability Initiative and other Wikimedia activities; we are very grateful for this ongoing support and interest. A public announcement of this grant will follow later this week.
Subject-matter experts have always been valued Wikipedia contributors, and a key goal of this initiative is to facilitate their collaboration with and among the Wikipedia editing community. 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 volunteers. The overarching goal of this project, called the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative, is to effectively increase the quality of public policy articles on Wikipedia, and to support Wikimedia Chapters with a model for working with universities to enhance other topic areas.
We have chosen the particular subject area of public policy because this topic area is interdisciplinary, and requires collaboration among many fields (including history, economics, law, and various social and hard sciences). We also believe this subject area is underdeveloped on Wikipedia and therefore offers a big opportunity for improvement. Furthermore we recognize that public policy articles may pose special problems -- they may center on issues and debates that are more controversial and less settled than other articles in the sciences or in the humanities. We feel that if we can succeed with public policy articles, other topic areas can be improved based on this model.
This is a completely new and exciting model for outreach with subject matter experts on Wikipedia. It's also a first for the Wikimedia Foundation, and something we hope will lead us towards new best practices and a solid foundation to better collaborate with our volunteers and with academic and institutional partners.
During the 17-month time frame of the project timeline, the Initiative will be led by a project team at the Wikimedia Foundation working with two keys groups of volunteer Wikipedia editors: "Campus Ambassadors" doing in-classroom training and face-to-face evangelizing, and "Online Ambassadors" providing online support, coaching and mentoring. The Wikipedia volunteers will support university classes, students and professors as they engage in quality improvement of public policy articles on Wikipedia.
The execution of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will take a phased approach. This will include the recruitment of an advisory Steering Committee of public policy experts, establishment of quality measures, baseline assessment of the current quality of public policy articles, and development of educational and training materials specific to this project. We will then pilot quality improvement activities with 3-5 schools during the fall and winter of 2010, learn from the experiences of the pilot schools, and scale up to run work with an additional 7-12 schools during the spring of 2011. The project will culminate in a conference at which best practices will be shared and prizes awarded.
We believe that the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will both improve public policy content during the duration of the project, and also produce information and infrastructure that could inform the design and development of a long term sustainable model.
The Foundation will more publicly announce this new initiative later this week with a press release, but we wanted to give everyone advance notice and share these job openings.
The Public Policy Initiative will be led by Rod Dunican, our Education Programs Manager. Pete Forsyth and I will remain closely engaged as the project unfolds, and we will build a project team specifically around the initiative. We invite you to have a look at the current job openings:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings
For more information, click the links below to review:
http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_project_detailshttp://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_FAQ
If you have further questions about the Initiative or the current job openings, please contact rdunican[at]wikimedia[dot]org
Thanks for your interest,
Frank Schulenburg, Public Outreach
Wikimania is an annual global event devoted to Wikimedia projects
around the globe (including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikinews,
Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikimedia Commons, and MediaWiki). The
conference is a community gathering, giving the editors, users
and developers of Wikimedia projects an opportunity to meet each
other, exchange ideas, report on research and projects, and
collaborate on the future of the projects. The conference is open
to the public, and is a chance for educators, researchers,
programmers and free culture activists who are interested in the
Wikimedia projects to learn more and share ideas about the
Wikimedia projects.
This year's conference will be held JULY 9-11, 2010 in Gdansk,
Poland at Polish Baltic Philharmonic. For more information, please
visit the official Wikimania 2010 site:
http://wikimania2010.wikimedia.org/
Wikimania 2010 will be a mix of submitted talks, open space
meetings, birds of a feather groups, and lightning talks.
Submissions will be discussed and selected in an informal process
on the wiki. If your submission is not added to the schedule, you
will still have many opportunities to bring topics forward
on-site.
IMPORTANT DATES
* Deadline for submitting workshop, tutorial, panel and
presentation proposals: May 20
* Notification of acceptance: May 25 (workshops), May 31
(panels, tutorials, presentations)
* All proposals and presentations will be welcome in the
Open Space track of the conference, whether or not they
are accepted in this initial process.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Submissions will be reviewed informally by a team of volunteers.
TRACKS
This year Wikimania will offer three tracks for submissions for
members of wiki communities and interested observers to share
their own experiences and thoughts and to present new ideas:
People and Community
The People and Community track provides a unique forum for
discussing topics related to people using/building wikis.
Relevant topics include, but are not restricted to, the
following:
* Wiki Community: Conflict resolution and community dynamics;
reputation and identity;
* Wiki Outreach: Promotion of wikis and Wikimedia projects among
the general public;
* North meets south, east meets west: How can people of a
different cultural background create an encyclopedia according
to common rules? Same subject in the eye of different cultures.
* Special: Wikipedia in Central/Eastern Europe: this theme will
provide a forum to present and discuss the latest progress of
Wikis in the central/eastern European community.
Knowledge and Collaboration
The Knowledge and Collaboration track aims to promote research
and find exciting ideas related to knowledge...
* Wiki Content: New ways to improve content quality, credibility;
legal issues and copyrights (is free knowledge free?); use of
the content in education, journalism, research;
* Semantic Wikis: The use of semantic web technologies, linked
data; semantic annotation and metadata (in particular manual
vs. automated approaches).
Infrastructure Track
The Infrastructure track at Wikimania will provide a forum where
both researchers and practitioners can share new approaches,
applications, and explore how to make Wiki access ever more
ubiquitous:
* MediaWiki development: issues related to MediaWiki development
and extensions;
* Moving beyond MediaWiki: what other Wiki-like platforms exist;
what tools and features do we need for collaboration on
different types of knowledge?
* Mobile Wikis: The Web is moving off the desktop and into mobile
phones, how we use wikis on mobile devices?; wiki-based
Augmented Reality (AR) applications, location based services
* User Interface Design: Usability and user experience;
accessibility, adaptive interfaces and personalization; novel
UI designs.
WIKISYM 2010
Please note that Wikimania 2010 is co-located with WikiSym, The
International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. More
information about WikiSym can be found on the conference website:
http://www.wikisym.org/
SUBMIT A PROPOSAL
To submit a proposal for a presentation, workshop, panel or
tutorial, please visit:
http://bit.ly/Submit2010
Thank you for helping make Wikimania 2010 a successful event. :-)
See you in Gdansk, July 9-11!
--
Marcin Cieslak
Wikimania 2010 Gdansk
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