[Foundation-l] Building an academic network for Wikimedia

Tue Apr 1 07:26:27 UTC 2008

One quick suggestion of a thing you could to to make it less efford in
the long run, and make more people able to do it besides you, is to
make very thorough documentation.

Try to write it down in a lesson program, so that you don't have to
invent the wheel over and over again. Just make a X lesson program,
starting with an introduction to Wikipedia etc, which helps them
getting the basics on Wikipedia. Then you could write an explanation
how they should do their project, where they can get help if things
don't work, what to watch with respect to copyright etc, so that you
do not have to explain everything yourself.

Maybe that could motivate other Wikimedians to help you out, and also
take care of giving an introduction to one group, and guiding them a
little. Because after all, that is the strength of Wikimedia. A lot of
people do a little bit of work. You should not have to write a whole
encyclopedia (or run such a whole series of projects) all by yourself.

This way it is also more easily translatable to other languages, so
that they can use it as well.

Best regards,

Lodewijk

2008/3/31, Milos Rancic <millosh op gmail.com>:
> After the third "experiment" on sr.wp, I have to say that cooperation
>  between particular professors, their students and one of Wikimedia
>  projects is working very well.
>
>  The first project started with professors Cvetana Krstev and Dusko
>  Vitas from Mathematical and Philological faculties in Belgrade. As I
>  am not involved in that project (and I don't know for details), I will
>  skip it. I only know that a number of students' works in computational
>  linguistics were published on Serbian Wikipedia.
>
>  The second was initiated by professor Slobdan Macura (a Wikipedian,
>  too), who asked me to make a presentation of Wikipedia to students of
>  the third and the fourth year of physical chemistry. This cooperation
>  gave to us a number of very good articles about chemistry of proteins
>  [1]. While half of them are translated from the English Wikipedia, the
>  rest are original encyclopedic works made by students. For example, an
>  article about Anfinsen's dogma is much better in Serbian [2] than in
>  English [3].
>
>  When I started to finish my studies in linguistics (last September), I
>  found that some of my professors are interested in adapting their own
>  rules to contribution to Wikipedia. The best cooperation I made with
>  my professor in sociolinguistics, Jelena Filipovic. Her students have
>  to make three types of works: three short forms, usually what a
>  student thinks about something, one longer form on what student thinks
>  about one of specific texts and a seminar work, which should be the
>  longest form.
>
>  (By accident, at the same time Linguistlist called linguists to
>  contribute articles in sociolinguistics.)
>
>  Professor's and mine first target was to change three short forms to
>  three articles. Almost a half of the students (something less than 20
>  of something more than 40) opted in to that change. And not only that:
>  a couple of them opted to change their seminar work to one longer
>  article.
>
>  A week ago the first short forms were finished. Two students sent to
>  me articles. Yesterday I started to analyze them in depth. And I have
>  to say that articles are real success! I processed the first three
>  articles and here is the report:
>
>  - Dialect atlas (or "Linguistic map" -- two names for the same term).
>  Article in Serbian [4] is much longer than article in English [5].
>  - Linguistic interview. Article in Serbian exists [6], while article
>  in English doesn't exist.
>  - Language variable (a fairly important linguistic term) now exists in
>  Serbian [7], but doesn't exist in English.
>
>  The main consequence of such work is that we are able to move our sum
>  of knowledge at the next level. While a number of smaller Wikipedias
>  have problems with very basic articles, which may be covered by high
>  school students, thanks to such cooperation we are able to put into
>  Wikipedia more specific knowledge.
>
>  * * *
>
>  However, the situation is not sustainable. While I am able and I am
>  willing to work with some number of professors, I am not able cover
>  even my faculty alone. While initiating cooperation is a time
>  consuming task, it is a temporary task. I am willing to spend a couple
>  of weeks or a couple of months in making a cooperation alive, but when
>  an initiation of cooperation is finished, I may start do work on other
>  one.
>
>  However, if I have to take care separately about all groups all the
>  time, I would be able to work with five or ten groups, but not much
>  more.
>
>  Instead of that kind of organization, I think that it would be much
>  better to make some kind of a global "academic network for Wikimedia".
>  For the first time it should be one network for sharing resources: to
>  explain how to find priorities for writing articles, to make some
>  comprehensive manuals for professors and students, to show to
>  professors and students how to find an online help as well as how to
>  find real-life help.
>
>  Also, such network may be very useful for professors and students:
>  While at the first time such network would be able to connect a
>  linguist from Serbia with a biologist from Germany (which is not so
>  useful), as time is passing, this network would be able to make
>  connections between people who are working on the same topics.
>  Actually, if people from Linguistlist (those who already made calls
>  for contributing to Wikipedia) are interested in joining to such
>  network, we will already make the first connections between linguists.
>
>  * * *
>
>  I am not sure was here a similar talk. However, I know that Wikimedian
>  community has a number of university professors and other experts. And
>  those professors and experts should be the front persons of such
>  network. Of course, I am willing to help, but we need to make a group
>  of relevant people who would attract other professors and experts to
>  join the group (and groups in the future).
>
>  * * *
>
>  There is one anecdote about Stalin. Some of the persons in charge for
>  foreign relations came to him:
>  - An emissary from Vatican came. What should we do?
>  - How many tanks do they have?
>  - None.
>  - Take them away!
>
>  So, whenever someone came with an idea to add some number of articles
>  to Serbian Wikipedia, I was making jokes which were beginning with
>  "How many tanks do thay have?" -- in the sense of a number of
>  articles, of course.
>
>  While it is obvious that 10 good articles are much better than 100
>  bad, it is, also, obvious that we have to find a way how to make a
>  "mass production" of good articles. When I say "mass production", I
>  think about a systematic effort for improving quality of our project.
>
>  And if there are three articles covered systematically by students on
>  Serbian Wikipedia which are better than corresponding three articles
>  on English Wikipedia (actually, two of them don't exist), then it is
>  obvious that all Wikipedias need such systematic effort.
>
>  I presented above my idea for making such systematic effort. It came
>  to my mind yesterday, which means that it is far from a rounded idea.
>  I didn't even thought about other possibilities. So, a question for
>  discussion here is: Do you have some better idea? Does such thing
>  exist? Do you think that this idea is good enough for implementation?
>  If so, are there people (especially professors and experts) who are
>  willing to participate?
>
>  * * *
>
>  [1] - The list of articles and students who made them is here:
>  http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BB:%D0%A4%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D1%85%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0/%D0%A4%D0%A4%D0%A5
>  [2] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D1%85%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B0
>  [3] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anfinsen%27s_dogma
>  [4] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijalektolo%C5%A1ki_atlas
>  [5] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_atlas
>  [6] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intervju_(lingvistika)
>  [7] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jezi%C4%8Dka_varijacija
>
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