Guys
As a Board member I personally believe we should be attempting to promote
our Schools Project here and that should sit at the heart of any release.
Feel free to wrap any or all your very valid points below inside and around
the idea/goal of the project, should you agree with me.
To refresh: the Board has been looking for opportunities to 'work with
teachers' or 'trainers' or 'academics' to help them see the advantages
of
Wikipedia in terms of use with students. This could be in terms of
collaborative research projects that can put these skills into practice. In
could be in terms of helping teachers or trainers build additional skills in
the groups they train. The bigger objective is to lead to new volunteers for
Wikpedia and new content.
This is the real 'prize' here. I am working on something along these lines
in Bristol with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre ready to work closely with
schools and colleges in the area and probably up for handing over lots of
content (when copyright free licences can be sorted out correctly). I am
also working on trying to get into some local schools to get the Schools
project outlined above rolling - I have one school very interested and hope
to have a date for a session in the not too distant future.
So my point is... don't bury this message in this more peripheral point -
link it back to what I describe below. There is more substance to a press
statement if we are not only making a statement about something but ALSO
trying to actively do something about it as well. We must not simply sound
off on issues 'as and when' they pop up as we would not have people
listening to us when it really counts and we need the press to publish it.
Happy to help 'team up' with anyone and everyone in drafting anything - just
mail me
Best to al
Steve
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Douglas Gardner" <microchip08(a)btinternet.com>
Sent: Thursday, January 07, 2010 12:09 PM
To: <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com>om>; <wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] "Schoolchildren told to
avoidWikipedia" -Telegraph> Perhaps a quick note about Special:Cite?
...said... ==> ...stated..?
-----Original Message-----
Michael Peel wrote:
Having said that, I've just looked at the
original document:
http://www.ofqual.gov.uk/files/2009-12-24-plagiarism-students.pdf
It actually does a pretty good job at giving advice on how to use
Wikipedia. It's just the Telegraph that chose the choice quote and
ignored the advice. ;-)
It even mentions the School's Wikipedia.
OK, I'm trying now to draft a press release by shoehorning it into the
"six sentence" format. This seems to work well enough as a way of seeing
what the "story" is.
Draft:
School students spend an increasing proportion of their free time
online, and will not be deterred from spending study time on the Web
also. Now Ofqual, the UK's official examination regulation body, has
endorsed a guide "Using Sources" that is designed to help students using
the Web avoid the hazards, such as plagiarism and unreliable
information, by making proper use of sites such as Wikipedia, which
produces
schools-wikipedia.org and DVD selections especially for this
educational sector.
Wikimedia UK, the national organization representing the Wikipedia
reference site and other online resources, has responded by producing a
concise online document aimed at secondary school teachers. Mike Peel,
chair of WMUK, said "For all the adverse media comment and robust
debate, it is really important that students using Wikipedia understand
the correct way to work with this resource, and teachers can help them
to a more informed and critical way of using a site that they will all
know about and read anyway."
The new guide is based on understanding how to look over a Wikipedia
page, examine warning notices and references, and follow up clues in the
history and discussion of a particular article. It is free content,
released under the GFDL license used for Wikipedia.
/draft
This isn't perfect, clearly. But is this on-message? Would this be what
WMUK wanted to say at this time? (NB that Ofqual did not write the guide
itself, but endorses what
plagiarismadvice.org wrote.)
Charles
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
http://uk.wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
http://uk.wikimedia.org