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@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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Dr Martin L Poulter ICT Manager, The Economics Network