[Foundation-l] Encouraging participation

[Milos Rancic]

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 1:16 AM, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:
> To attract academics this is and must be viewed as a serious endeavor.
>  Yes some aspects such as reverting vandalism could have a fun twist
> applied to them but the creation of content must remain simple and
> serious.  Wikipedia already has a problem with its image regarding
> credibility.  Things that would affect Wikipedia's image must be
> carefully considered.  I personally do not need further distraction
> while I edit.  Medpedia http://www.medpedia.com/ has more of a
> facebook appearance to it and for that among other reasons I will not
> contribute their.  We need to keep our goal of writing an encyclopedia
> first and foremost.

We were and are working with various professors of Belgrade
University. In brief: benefits are thin.

* One of the Serbian Wikimedians is a professor who is working at one
of the top institutes in US. He has almost cult status at one of the
faculties in Belgrade: If he says that something should be done, that
is out of question. So, he made an initiative to introduce professors
and students in work on Wikipedia. I've made two lectures and we had
one set of student's works. And we had just one set of students'
works.
* At another faculty we have a teaching assistant among Wikimedians.
After two projects, we've concluded cooperation because students
didn't quite understand work on Wikipedia and started with
confrontation.
* At one more faculty (actually, just a different department of the
previous one), I made similar cooperation. It passed as the first one.
Just one set of students' works.

I am still trying to make a long term cooperation with some professor
or so. But, it is not going easy. The most of the participants in that
process are not motivated properly for participation in Wikipedia. It
is not fun to them. Any idea how to improve their motivation?