Wikipedia Campus Ambassador/Training/Outreach

Reaching out to professors:

1. Talk to students, they know who is in and who isn't interested in New Media and Wikipedia, use your networks
2. Contact a media savy librarian. They WILL know who is interested in the library and be working with people who want to know how media literacy especially Wikipedia
3. Go to new-media-conferences or teaching-with-technology conferences, talk to people there, get them to sign an e-mail list, give them swag, set up a table

• For examples: "Center for Instructional Technology Conference" at James Madison University. School, regional, or national conferences.
  

4. Hold workshops, talk about anything, everything. Everyone wants to know how Wikipedia works: who writes the articles? How does quality control work? What founding principles do we use on Wikipedia? What potential does Wikipedia have in a traditional academic setting? What does the Wikimedia foundation do?
5. Actually contact the professors

• Show up at their office hours!
  • Works a lot better than emails
  • Tell them how you found them (for example: "I heard from your students that you are interested in more innovative methods of teaching...," "I hear you're looking for new ideas on how to teach XYZ..."
• If really can't be on campus: send individual emails

Presenting Wikipedia assignments to educators (talking points)

Wikipedia is a community

• Wikipedia is a community. Editing Wikipedia brings students into another scholarly community that has a different set of norms.
  • There are approximately 20,000 regular contributors on English Wikipedia, which is about the size of a college.
  • Changes happen very rapidly!
    • For example, see Recent Changes, or see "WikipediaVision" tool
  • Base your discussion of Wikipedia and academia on the 5 pillars, the easiest two to do this with is #4 which implies that Wikipedia is community oriented, academics always want ways of making learning about working with a team, or others who are academically minded. Treat Wikipedia from the community perspective and they will be intrigued, because all they ever see is the encyclopedia, so miss how many people do so much work on Wikipedia
  • In particular how the English Wikipedia has about 20,000 regular contributors, about the size of a college
  • Talk about who is in the Wikipedia Culture (focus on the number of students and graduate degree holders)

Wikipedia is an effective & unique teaching tool

• Wikipedia is about knowledge production - collaborative knowledge production. It's a platform for students to examine the knowledge production process from a lens they rarely get in academia.
• Students who edit Wikipedia reach a global, public audience. Wikipedia-editing assignments are no longer just "throwaway assignments": they last beyond the class and reach thousands (millions) of people.
• Students could get feedback from a much larger audience than just their instructor, and have to learn to write for the public.
• Common learning objectives:
  • Collaboration/consensus
    • Have to learn how to work within a community, cooperate with other writers
    • Consensus model means students actually have to make an argument for their preferences
  • Improve writing skills
    • Encyclopedic writing vs. persuasive writing
  • Improve research skills
    • Proper sourcing, references, verifiability
  • Media literacy
    • Understanding how an online community functions
    • Basic familiarity of markup codes
  • Community of practice
    • Discovering /interacting with people who care about similar topics

Examples of Wikipedia assignments

• Make sure you talk about how students have reacted to teaching activities (offer a variety from copyediting to article writing)

Wikipedia is not going away anytime soon

• Emphasize how Wikipedia is becoming the public face of knowledge, it only makes sense for librarians and faculty to help assuage the misconceptions of Wikipedia that their students have
  • In other words: students are on Wikipedia no matter what professors tell them, so professors might as well teach them how to use Wikipedia responsibly!

Reaching out to students:

• Create a club sponsored by an institution on campus (Library, Media Center, Writing Center, etc.)
  • This helps you get spaces without a large of number of students supporting the group
  • prevents you from having to do paperwork if you don't have a huge student support structure
  • Likely gives you some sort of connection within the media literacy faculty whom will help you recruit professors
  • Even if an organization cannot "sponsor" you, see if they will help co-sponsor an event or workshop to help get your organizations recognized
• Hold workshops/meetings, talk about becoming an Ambassador to your courses part way through the semester
• Find avenues to advertise/promote your club on campus
  • Community posterboards
  • Club fairs
  • Campus newspapers
  • Talk to leadership, teaching or honor organizations
    • Gear your pitch for your audience. Ex: engineering/programing students - tell them that they have the opportunity to write the coding for the bots that help in Wikipedia!
• Potential activities
  • Train interested students in basic Wikipedia activities, get them to edit
    • These students are potential Wikipedia Ambassadors, make what you are doing on campus transparent, make them think through problems with you even if you already have a solution, give them a chance to run workshops with you
  • Collaboratively edit an article
    • Maybe go through books from the library together and work on an article together
  • Photo hunt
  • Start new articles! (students like the idea of having "created" their "first" article)
    • Not as daunting as it may seem
    • List of articles that need to be created: Most wanted articles or Missing encyclopedic articles
    • Easy to just start them, then flag them as stubs
    • Then share with the other club members the pages that were created!