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

[Sydney Poore]

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 12:31 AM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga <
everton137 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

It is great to have organizational support from the Foundation for this type
of collaboration.

There are international public policy projects and organizations that do
collaborative work and would definitely be ripe areas for focus as a source
of volunteer editors, a resource for content, and a topic for articles.

The public policy area is one that can be taken across different language
wikis by volunteers if there is there is an interest from the communities.

Sydney Poore
(FloNight)