Imperial wikisoc: where we're at - Wikimediauk-l

7 Jul 2011

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