Thanks for the update, Vinesh.
Agreed that Wikimedia UK needs to make educational projects one of the
central planks of what we do. That's in hand- I'm at the Wikipedia in HE
summit right now. Most importantly, we can't impose a change of practice
from outside academia. Wikipedia needs a network of friends, or at least
open-minded practitioners, in as many different institutions and roles as
possible, so your work reaching out to academics and getting Wikipedia onto
the agenda of teaching meetings is a great step forward.
On the Wikiality point, I'm not sure which pithy criticism you're getting
at. The paragraph you link to mentions a number of traditional criticisms of
Wikipedia. I'm confident that all of them can be answered by articulating
WP's existing policies and processes. Tell us what objections you're
encountering, and I can help you tackle them head-on either in individual
email, WMUK's publicity channels, or specialist publicity channels for
academics and librarians. Cheers,
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Patel, Vinesh <vinesh.patel06(a)imperial.ac.uk
wrote:
Dear all,
After just having completed my exams and an academic year lasting 366 days,
I am back to being active at Imperial College Wikisoc as their president for
the coming year! However, I will also be studying for the final year of my
course beginning in two weeks and so need to finish most of my personal
activity by around Jan/Feb 2012, and will be incredibly busy. Therefore it
is imperative that we in the society work hard for new recruits, but also
that the board and the chapter generally invest appropriate amounts of the
various resources we have in the near future. Otherwise the society will
falter, because to be honest I have carried it thus far without much support
from busy colleagues currently part of the society.
We have great leads in the society and need to grow them slowly enough to
mature well. But in order to attract people and make our projects a success,
we need to be imaginative to ENSURE our success. Wikipedia should start
creating a brand in the UK that it provides higher education resources and
opportunities of the very highest quality (while recognising our place), and
we need to figure out how that can be made with both top down and bottom up
insights - so I urge all UK Wikipedians to join in with relevant thoughts.
and then we will have to make some decisions about how we go about this.
We will be focussing on our Campus Ambassadors program (two of us having
been trained), for which we have two interested professors already, but also
doing work on creating a network of editors and furthering the discussion of
the relationship between Wikipedia and higher education.
Concerning this debate, Stephen Colbert of all people came up with one of
the most pithy objections that I have read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_culture#Wikiality. I think more
of this kind of talk needs to be done. What may be needed is a meeting of
interested parties - librarians, universities etc. to really nail this issue
(or suggest what kind of research needs to be done), in a bigger meeting
than simply the London Wikipedia Academy that we previously organised
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/London_Wikipedia_Academy.
That's much information not perfectly organised, but I hope it gets out
where the society is at - the purpose being that we and new student
societies need to plan our structure and place in universities.
Vinesh Patel
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