[Foundation-l] (fwd) Wikimedia Foundation will engage academic experts and students to improve public policy information on Wikipedia

[Everton Zanella Alvarenga]

2010/5/11 Amory Meltzer <amorymeltzer at gmail.com>:

> So if I could distill this announcement, it would be "$1.2M to liaison
> with profs to essentially grade public policy articles so that our
> unpaid volunteers can correct errors, add sources, and fix the
> proverbial 'awk' in the margins" - is that correct?

"Wikipedia is written by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from
around the world, and that won't change with this project. The
Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will recruit Wikipedia volunteers
to work with public policy professors and students to identify topic
areas for improvement, and work to make them better. Some of that work
will take the form of classroom assignments, and pilot activities will
begin during the 2010 fall academic semester"

Hummm, I don't know how this money will be used, but this can be a
really good project. As stated above, Wikipedia will continue to be
written by volunteers, then I don't think there wil be any liaison
with professor. But also also want know details how it'lll be done.

I really hope it can extends to other languages and I'll be happy to
follow details of this project and talk to the organizers. I remember
when Kul visited Brazil, I talked to him the importanc...e, in my
opinion, of approaching specialists for estimulating them to write on
Wikipedia and participate on other Wikimedia projects.

Sometimes I really feel ignorance is a cause for not having more
specialists participating of Wikimedia projects. I remember how much
waste of time was *some* of my undergraduate studies with professors
just copying books at blackboard, defining some important concepts for
a physics course (even at high school level!), but all this
information is lost, in the sense it could be archieve and accessible
on a Wikipedia page, for example.

Also, I have some Brazilian scientist friends who seems to contribute
more to English Wikipedia than to the Portuguese version, in a sense
much more needed because of the lack of open educatinal resources in
Portuguese (I'm using a common jargon, I prefer the work free as
opposet to open). I think it's really difficult to a English speaker
to understand the difference of educational content in English and
Portuguese (for sure also in other less spoken languages).

Best wishes,

Tom