[Wikimedia Education] Update on campus related activities

[Frank Schulenburg]

Hi All,

Here's a short update on our campus related activities:

(1) Global university program: Pune pilot started

In March, we finalized our strategy paper for the expansion of our university program activities [1]. Now, we started to kick off a Campus Ambassador Program in India. Hisham Mundol, who is leading the work in India, selected Pune as the pilot location for the India Campus Program.

Pune [2] is reported to have the largest number of colleges and universities of any city in the world: about 100 colleges and universities attended by more than 200,000 students. Also, there is a vibrant and active community of Wikipedians in Pune which will provide support to incoming editors.

Over the last few days we asked Wikipedia readers in India to apply for the role of Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors. We got hundreds of applications, of which 50 are from people in Pune.

We are now screening the applications. In the second half of May, we plan to stage the first Campus Ambassador Training in India.

(2) Students add more than 1.4 million characters to English Wikipedia in March

Recent numbers show the huge impact that Wikipedia classroom activities can have on our content: in March 2011, participants of the Public Policy Initiative [3] added more than 1.4 million characters to the article namespace on the English Wikipedia. That's more than 960 printed pages (at 1,500 characters per page).

Moreover, an first analysis conducted by Amy Roth (Research Analyst for the Public Policy Initiative) indicates that those contributions improve the article quality by 60%.

I will keep you updated on our further progress.

Frank


[1] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_University_Program
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Pune
[3] http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative