[Foundation-l] Fwd: [Wikimedia Announcements] Public Policy Initiative

Wed May 5 20:20:11 UTC 2010

Hoi,
Given that this was published two hours ago and, not published on
Foundation-l, I forward it. It is rather intriguing. I am interested to
learn what the community thinks of this and, if this is another en.wp only
project.
Thanks,
      GerardM

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frank Schulenburg <fschulenburg at wikimedia.org>
Date: 5 May 2010 19:50
Subject: [Wikimedia Announcements] Public Policy Initiative
To: WikimediaAnnounce-l at lists.wikimedia.org

Hi all,

I am pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation received a generous
grant from the Stanton Foundation for a 17-month pilot program that will
help inform how to best engage new contributors in the improvement of
subject-specific articles on Wikipedia. The Stanton Foundation also supports
the Wikipedia Usability Initiative and other Wikimedia activities; we are
very grateful for this ongoing support and interest. A public announcement
of this grant will follow later this week.

Subject-matter experts have always been valued Wikipedia contributors, and a
key goal of this initiative is to facilitate their collaboration with and
among the Wikipedia editing community. We will experiment with different
methods of using Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool in universities,
and ways to provide incentives and support participation by students,
teachers, and volunteers. The overarching goal of this project, called the
Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative, is to effectively increase the quality
of public policy articles on Wikipedia, and to support Wikimedia Chapters
with a model for working with universities to enhance other topic areas.

We have chosen the particular subject area of public policy because this
topic area is interdisciplinary, and requires collaboration among many
fields (including history, economics, law, and various social and hard
sciences). We also believe this subject area is underdeveloped on Wikipedia
and therefore offers a big opportunity for improvement. Furthermore we
recognize that public policy articles may pose special problems -- they may
center on issues and debates that are more controversial and less settled
than other articles in the sciences or in the humanities. We feel that if we
can succeed with public policy articles, other topic areas can be improved
based on this model.

This is a completely new and exciting model for outreach with subject matter
experts on Wikipedia. It's also a first for the Wikimedia Foundation, and
something we hope will lead us towards new best practices and a solid
foundation to better collaborate with our volunteers and with academic and
institutional partners.

During the 17-month time frame of the project timeline, the Initiative will
be led by a project team at the Wikimedia Foundation working with two keys
groups of volunteer Wikipedia editors: "Campus Ambassadors" doing
in-classroom training and face-to-face evangelizing, and "Online
Ambassadors" providing online support, coaching and mentoring. The Wikipedia
volunteers will support university classes, students and professors as they
engage in quality improvement of public policy articles on Wikipedia.

The execution of the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will take a phased
approach. This will include the recruitment of an advisory Steering
Committee of public policy experts, establishment of quality measures,
baseline assessment of the current quality of public policy articles, and
development of educational and training materials specific to this project.
We will then pilot quality improvement activities with 3-5 schools during
the fall and winter of 2010, learn from the experiences of the pilot
schools, and scale up to run work with an additional 7-12 schools during the
spring of 2011. The project will culminate in a conference at which best
practices will be shared and prizes awarded.

We believe that the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative will both improve
public policy content during the duration of the project, and also produce
information and infrastructure that could inform the design and development
of a long term sustainable model.

The Foundation will more publicly announce this new initiative later this
week with a press release, but we wanted to give everyone advance notice and
share these job openings.

The Public Policy Initiative will be led by Rod Dunican, our Education
Programs Manager. Pete Forsyth and I will remain closely engaged as the
project unfolds, and we will build a project team specifically around the
initiative. We invite you to have a look at the current job openings:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

For more information, click the links below to review:

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_project_details

http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Public_Policy_Initiative_FAQ

If you have further questions about the Initiative or the current job
openings, please contact rdunican[at]wikimedia[dot]org

Thanks for your interest,

Frank Schulenburg, Public Outreach

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