[Gendergap] Emails to friends, lists to encourage participation

[Laura Hale]

On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Pete Forsyth
<pete.public.email at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> But in general, it ties in with what Sue brought up: people brand new to
> Wikipedia often need a *lot* of support and advice before they start to get
> their legs. So directing them to educational resources, and establishing a
> "cafe" type space to ask questions and build a sense of community, would
> certainly be helpful in keeping with what we've learned from our outreach
> efforts.
>

Related to this, I'm helping organize and conduct a series of "wiki
academies" aimed at the Australian, possibly New Zealand, sport community.
The details can be found at
http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/UCNISS/Sport_Wiki_Academy . The content for
the academy will really depend on who is there.  How we approach university
professors will be different than how we approach athletes.

Wikimedia Australia and UCNISS are working on helping fund these academies.
(Details are being sorted out and only the first academy date and location
are set.)  We're hoping to really address the women's sport community as the
articles in that area can be a little underwhelming when compared to the
men's side.  There are also some major women's sporting events going on this
year, which Australia and New Zealand are both participating in.  They
include the netball world championships and the women's soccer World Cup.
This can help create additional interest, give fans and organizations a
reason to participate.

While the focus is on how sport organizations and athletes can use wikis in
general, there will be a fair bit of discussion about how to use Wikipedia
correctly to help work towards meeting institutional objectives, like
increasing visibility as Wikipedia ranks so highly on Google searches.  If
there is interest, we'll see if we can't work it out between UCNISS and
Wikimedia Australia to set up some form of Wikipedian in Residence program
so that sport studies students can get academic credit, but that is a bit
further down the road.



We'd love some help with this if you're local.  If you might want to try
something similar or have any advice on running these academies, please let
me know either on list or off.




-- 
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
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