I see this as one of the core activities of a local chapter. The German
chapter, for example, has been highly successful in doing just this -
working with academics to change the perception of what Wikipedia is,
and improving the quality of the articles.
Interestingly, they've apparently been particularly successful with the
humanities departments. Scientific articles are often better quality
than humanities articles, but humanities departments have responded
well to the attention. They're often more poorly funded than science
departments, and can be less likely to embark on the learning curve of
wiki markup, but are as passionate about contributing once the learning
curve and poor perceptions are dealt with.
Lourie Pieterse wrote:
From the beginning of this year I started
to look into the
possibility to include Wikipedia in the university curriculum in some
manner.
Currently all the first years has a course that handles about scientific communication. One of the many
aspects we are focussing on is the correct use of references. As David
said; the
fact that people doesn’t understand or know how to use references are a
great
problem. I started to chat with the coordinators of these courses, with
the
idea to incorporate Wikipedia. Unfortunately the head coordinator was
in a car
accident this holiday, so things are going slower than usual. My idea
was to
implement the concept at Stellenbosch and then spread it to the rest of
the South
African universities. Currently we and Potchefstroom (and probably some
other
universities) are already using the same sort of information for this
course. That’s
why I thought that if I could get Wikipedia implemented at
Stellenbosch, it
would easily spread to the rest of South Africa.
As Kerryn said in the one email; most of
the people in South
Africa has a completely wrong idea of Wikipedia, and the other
Wikimedia
projects. If we succeed in starting the South African Chapter; it would
be
great if this could be one of the initial projects handled by the
chapter. Not
only will we get the academia involved at contributing to articles, but
we may
even succeed in promoting the quality of Wikipedia articles. This way
we could
even encourage the rest of the South African population to contribution
to
Wikipedia and make use of its information. That way we could address
issues,
such as the tiny amount of Afrikaans and other African language
articles on
Wikipedia. People like to read articles that are in their home
language, so we might
improve the popularity of Wikipedia this way.