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Ambassadors

Wikipedia Ambassador Program growing, adjusting

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By Sage Ross and Alex Stinson
User:Sross (Public Policy) is Sage Ross, the Online Facilitator for the Wikimedia Foundation's Public Policy Initiative. As a volunteer, he edits as User:Ragesoss.
User:Sadads is organizing Wikipedia Ambassador activities at James Madison University and is a member of the Ambassador Program's Steering Committee.

The Wikipedia Ambassador Program—which started in July as part of the Public Policy Initiative—is wrapping up its first term of working with students and professors. Currently we are preparing for a much larger wave of classes in January, with as many as 500 students assigned to improve Wikipedia articles.

The leaderboard, highlighting articles that have been heavily edited by students recently

We began the first term of the Ambassador program working with 13 classes. The contributions of these classes, documented at the leaderboard Frank Schulenburg has been developing, have taught us many things and given us a glimmer of the potential of a Wikipedia Ambassador program. Across these classes, students have generated 20 "Did you know?" entries, started many other new articles, and made improvements to existing articles that range from minor additions to major overhauls. Overall, 207 students in these classes contributed more than 2 million bytes of new content to articles—an average of more than 10,000 bytes each to articles.

Each of these classes worked with two different sets of Wikipedia Ambassadors. The first set was the Campus Ambassadors, who provided in-person support to the professors and students consulting on the design of the Wikipedia writing assignments, presenting Wikipedia and its policies to the students, running workshops to help with Wikipedia editing, and providing office hours and feedback on the article content which the students developed. The second group was the Online Ambassadors, who provided online support via IRC and feedback on talk pages throughout the semester. These Online Ambassadors helped the students figure out the markup, provided support on navigating the various Wikipedia policies, reviewed new content, and generally welcomed them to the community. You can read more about how the first term went, and what the plans are for the second half of the Public Policy Initiative, in the November progress report for the Stanton Foundation.

Lessons learned and changes made

For the next term, we're giving much more guidance to instructors about how to create assignments and communicate with Wikipedians. We'll be granting the title of Wikipedia Teaching Fellow to instructors who commit to major assignments according to our new memorandum of understanding and whose plans meet the course design requirements.

We learned a lot in the first term about how to make Wikipedia assignments work for both instructors and Wikipedia. The major changes include requiring introductory exercises, spacing editing milestones throughout the term, and having students start small and move out of sandboxes into main space early on (rather than posting full articles all at once). Mentorship by Online Ambassadors will also be much more central; students will be matched with mentors early on and use on-wiki discussion, with mentors and other editors, as the first option when problems arise.

The Wikipedia Ambassador Program is also making the transition from an experimental Wikimedia Foundation-led project to a scalable volunteer-run project. The first major change to volunteer leadership has been the Wikipedia Ambassador Steering Committee. The Steering Committee is composed of a combination of Campus Ambassadors, Online Ambassadors, and Foundation staff; its role is to develop proposals for the future of the program. The Committee has also taken a central role in the recruitment and selection of future Ambassadors, as well as—with other Ambassadors and Wikimedia staff—developing training materials and teaching resources. For subsequent terms, the Steering Committee will be coordinating the recruitment of instructors as well.

The training program for Campus Ambassadors for next term is being revised to prepare Ambassadors to take multiple roles at their universities. In addition to facilitating Wikipedia writing assignments in university classrooms, Campus Ambassadors will be creating student clubs and conducting other outreach activities, such as workshops for the faculty and making connections with cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. In early January, five training events will happen across the United States: in San Francisco; Washington, DC; New York City; Baton Rouge; and Indianapolis.

What to expect and how you can help

The enthusiasm and goodwill on the part of both instructors and Wikipedia supporters who aren't regular editors is very strong. The challenge is how to apply it, and how to get the community looking outward enough to work with outsiders effectively. Next semester, we expect to work with about 500 students under primarily public policy professors in the United States; expanding the program to additional disciplines and geographies in the future will be a major scaling hurdle. But there are many topic areas where Wikipedia coverage is relatively weak, despite heavy representation in college and university courses: literature, non-military history topics, anthropology, sociology, etc. We expect to start recruiting in all of these disciplines for future semesters. Also, we have begun discussion with some volunteers from other Wikipedia language versions to begin developing Campus Ambassador Programs in their countries.

To effectively mentor the 500 students for this next term, we will need at least 100 Wikipedians, and ideally 175, who can help the students as Online Ambassadors. Currently there are about 30. These Ambassadors will need to be friendly and flexible, helping students adapt to the culture and processes of Wikipedia—helping students avoid having articles deleted as they are getting started, navigating the "Did you know" process, getting article suggestions and reviews, article formatting, and general good encyclopedic writing. If you're a friendly, active Wikipedian who is comfortable giving detailed feedback on articles in progress and you agree with the Ambassador Principles, you can fill out a short questionnaire to apply to be an Online Ambassador.

The program can continue only if Wikipedians creatively and energetically help build and maintain the program. To keep up with the Wikipedia Ambassadors program on a week-to-week basis, you can subscribe to the weekly email newsletter. And if you have ideas or would like to get involved in other ways, talk to an Ambassador or leave a message on a relevant talk page.

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Is "number of bytes of content" really a good metric of the success of the project? It seems like it has been used just so that a big number can be quoted (its over 2 million!!) rather than to give useful information on the contributions that the project has made. $1.2M, the goodwill of 175 experienced editors, and an 8 member advisory board is a huge investment for a project that has seen only 20 DYK articles and (as of now) no improvements sufficient to to meet the standard of a good article over a 6 month period. Its probably too early in the projects history to pass judgement yet on whether it will ultimately be a success (and I sincerely hope that it will because public policy is undoubtedly an area where wikipedia has huge potential for improvement) but it seems to me that there must be a clear focus on measuring the effectiveness of the investment in a meaningful way. Ajbpearce (talk) 21:43, 28 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

That was the last response I expected to see down here. The project is just beginning, and the bytes statistic is a mere marker. The project would be worthwhile even if they had only established relationships and taught basic markup, built a foundation for future projects, and established good will among institutions--which they did, too. One way or another, the future of Wikipedia exists at our universities, and the effort to celebrate that year's first accomplishments could probably use a 'good job' before we start waterboarding the numbers. Ocaasi (talk) 23:36, 28 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Ajbpearce that number of bytes isn't a great metric of success, and the "over 2 million" is more wow factor than anything. We've been working more systematic measures of article quality improvement, the preliminary results from which should be ready soon. But I'd also say that a) 10,000 bytes per student is pretty significant, in terms of a starting point (it will be higher next time) for what we can expect per student going forward with this model and b) the quality of the articles isn't captured well by involvement in the DYK and GA processes, because we weren't organized well enough to take advantage of these processes systematically (and there's a fair learning curve for these processes, so they need to be integrated into course plans rather than done ad-hoc like this time). Read some of the articles that students in different classes have been working on to get a good feel for the quality; on the whole, it's pretty solid. But yeah, it's too early to say whether this project is a success. All we can say is that we have a model that, despite a lot of room for improvements, works pretty well and taps into a lot of enthusiasm on the part of professors. Whether it's a success will depend on whether it's fun and interesting and compelling enough to gain the support of enough experienced Wikipedians to make it keep going and scale up. To be honest, there were a lot of growing pains this first term, and it wasn't as rewarding for mentors as it ought to have been (or, I think, will be in the coming term). But at this point, I'm starting to be very optimistic about its prospects.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:05, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think the project's sustainability really only needs to be bootstrapped by old editors for a few years. After that, it's likely that several of the students who participate in this program will go on to become active and competent Wikipedia editors and hopefully ambassadors themselves. On the whole, I can't see a use of our resources which would be better than going directly to academically minded novices and teaching them the basics while they practice in a supervised environment (ok, a WYSIWYG editor would be better, but still). This whole program has the potential to breathe life back into the encyclopedia, to address key credibility issues, content gaps, to gain a foothold with experts who have been found friction editing (where their students might not). It is also, again, a literal recruiting pipeline for smart, young people with specific content interests and general knowledge. Whatever the investment, it seems worth giving it a solid few years. Ocaasi (talk) 00:17, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
From what we've seen so far, some portion of the students are likely to be a steady source of Campus Ambassadors going forward. I'm not sure a one-term assignment is enough immersion in the diversity of Wikipedia to prepare someone to be an Online Ambassador, though. We might do better, but for the university program in Indonesia, they found that very few students who participated stayed on after the competition as Wikipedians. But yeah, in general, it's definitely worth doing what it takes to figure out how to work better with academic experts and their students, IMO.--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 00:35, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
If it's not already, maybe that's something to work into the program--a continuation appeal so that editors at a school could sign on as helpers for the next course, or be invited for ambassador training, kept on an email list to update them about their projects, or given a goal to improve their article to the next level (B class, GA, etc.) after their course. Some campaign to keep interest and participation levels going once the ball is rolling... Ocaasi (talk) 04:46, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
This semester we have accepted several of the students that participated in the courses as Campus Ambassadors, mostly ones who really enjoyed the assignment. Also, one of my mentors continued editing and dealing with issues on Wikipedia. I think the best thing to do most of the time is to get them active as Campus Ambassadors or in forming a student club, which the original Campus Ambassador needs to have the initiative for, for example, I recruited one of my students this semester as a Campus Ambassador for next semester at JMU, Sadads (talk) 05:16, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

[moving left]. I was an Online Ambassador this term. The project was just a pilot project this term. I think much was learned by the organizers, especially about getting the professors to work more effectively with Wikipedia. I mentored five students and assisted a few others in lesser ways. Three of my student mentees did extensive work on one or more articles. One of them created three C-class articles from scratch. For example, see the article on the Fair Sentencing Act. Another considerably expanded Sierra Leone Civil War, which I judge to be close to B-class now. Two of my student mentees seem interested in continuing as WP editors outside of class work, and that is even though their professors did not schedule their assignments optimally or make the Wikipedia part of the classwork a high priority. One of them very generously assisted other students in his class. Give this project a chance. Of course the first few terms will require an investment to build and perfect the program, but I think it is possible that the project will eventually attract a large number of continuing Wikipedians, and that the research and writing skills of the students could eventually make a great net contribution to Wikipedia. Thanks to Sage Ross and the other organizers who are working so hard to make this project a winner for Wikipedia. -- Ssilvers (talk) 06:47, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ajbpearce is right. "Number of bytes of content" is not a good (and not the only) metric of the success of the project. We used the leaderboard mainly for experimenting with new ways of increasing the participant's commitment. Research like Farzan / Dabbish / Kraut / Postmes, Increasing Commitment to Online Communities by Designing for Social Presence, has recently shown that leaderboards significantly increase the chance of returning to a site. Leaderboards clearly lead to longer and more participation. That's an effect that we aim to explore.
The project will be a success (a) if the participants significantly improve the quality of a specific topic area on Wikipedia, (b) if we can show that the Ambassador Program is an effective way of supporting university teachers who use Wikipedia in their classes, and (c) if the project is sustainable and continues to generate content improvement over time.
Looking back at the fall term, we can clearly state that the program created lots of interest in the academic community. Press coverage has been much higher than we expected and the interest from university teachers to use Wikipedia in their classes exceeded our expectations by far.
We are (and this is an important learning point) not aiming at recruiting a large number of continuing Wikipedians. We assume that the program will be more successful over time if we maximize the usage of Wikipedia in higher education across many institutions. We think that institutionalizing "Using Wikipedia as a teaching tool" will be more sustainable and thus have a better outcome than trying to turn people into Wikipedians.
Personally speaking, I have to say that this project is one of the most exciting things I worked on so far. I am eager to see the results of the spring semester and I am deeply grateful for all the support from people like Ssilvers and others who are helping us to make the project a success. --Fschulenburg (Public Policy) (talk) 17:03, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Disagree. Wiki has a lot of work to do on it's own...building the encyclopedia. Becoming a "teaching tool" is adding extra tasks. There needs to be a return in either content or editors for it to make sense. If you don't get returning editors or significant important content, the program is a waste from the standpoint of volunteers (and possibley for the financial donor). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.246.144.154 (talk) 08:30, 13 November 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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