Wikipedia:Education Program/Structure proposals/Jensen Outreach

Please list your name and/or Wikipedia username.

Richard Jensen ("user:Rjensen")

What idea(s) do you have for what the new structure for the U.S. and Canada Wikipedia Education Programs could look like?

Outreach to Academe

1. Problem and solution Wikipedia is known to every professor and student, but its reputation is mixed--many are suspicious--and it needs an aggressive outreach to overcome those problems, broaden its base, and upgrade its reputation and usability. The number of editors on Wikipedia is declining--and the move to mobile devices makes editing much harder. The project will add new editors with a generally more advanced knowledge base working for credit for professors in the subject matter. That will give Wikipedia a more sophisticated tone to articles in most use by academe.

Wikimedia has an outreach program in place that reaches about 50 classes--out of the million-plus eligible university courses in the 4000 institutions of higher education in North America. The present system may be too retail oriented and not structured to maximize participation. The Regional Ambassadors are assigned compact geographical areas of the sort that sports leagues use to minimize travel time and expense; they are not well positioned to sign up professors in any large numbers. Using the Internet primarily, compactness is not of much importance to us. Instead we are focused on content, and ambassadors are not capable of dealing with university-level content in a range of academic disciplines from astronomy to zoology, from accounting to women's studies. It is hard to help students or faculty on articles you cannot understand. In my opinion the best way to work with academe is to work with the very well established academic structures now in place. Courses and faculty are organized by disciplines. I am most familiar with history, although I have done some work as well with political science and sociology. History is a good target because it is large and has a very strong international component, not only in Canada but in practically all countries with universities. I sent out a short email last month to about 4000 historians using the H-NET lists. So far 32 professors signed up (mostly in history) and we have set up a discussion list to consider how to get training and how to integrate Wikipedia-writing into undergraduate classes. Sending out additional mailings is likely to produce another hundred or more volunteers. That is retail recruiting and reaches historians I can talk to.

2. Scholarly Societies Even better would be wholesale recruiting through direct personal contact with history professors at the major national conferences of scholarly societies. The project will work directly with the head office of the scholarly associations. The American Historical Association brings together about 3000+ professors for three days in early January--they cover all fields of history. The Organization of American Historians (professors who teach U.S. history) brings together about 2000 professors in April. The project should have a booth, staffed with three of our people, which can not only enlist teachers who might incorporate wikie-writing, but--perhaps more important--reach out to the much larger number of professors who have serious questions and want to know a great deal more about Wikipedia from a live Reliable Source. Canada also has history meetings (I gave a paper on Wikipedia to the Ontario history teachers' conference.) The model is flexible and can extend to smaller national and regional annual conventions (with 300 to 1500 people attending). The "Association for Psychological Science is already on board and ran demonstrations at its 2011 convention. The presidents of the American Sociological Association and the American Historical Association have announced support for a Wikipedia initiative. The project director will explore with the program committees of the societies whether they would welcome a regular panel session on the uses of Wikipedia. Articles describing the project will be written for the newsletters of the societies.

3. Training We can use the booths to familiarize academics with the basics and the fine points of Wikipedia. We will set up a feedback mechanism so professors can comment privately on content issues; our people can then edit the articles in question or discuss the issue on their behalf on the talk pages. The conference venue can be used for training. A 4-hour hands-on session can cover the basics of how to teach how to edit an article. The model of special short workshops has often been used at academic conventions. The Online Ambassadors are a very impressive group, and they will be play a major role in classes. The OA will also invited to be paid staffers at the conventions, for disciplines they are comfortable with.

4. Organization The current system of OA and CA will be kept. The conference project will steer interested people into those roles and will enlarge the pool of talent available at the local level. A priority in selecting CA should be familiarity with the discipline (as in taking a course or two). Thousands of graduate students attend these conventions, and we enlist CA's there. An incentive is that we can pay the CA's we recruit. $500 a course is not much, but coming in the form of a cash fellowship from a national high-tech organization (us!) will be a great resume-builder. We will budget an instructor for on-line training of CA's and professors.

Regional Ambassadors will not be needed in this model. It would be a good idea to have all the ambassadors meet together for a few days each year to exchange ideas on best practices. That, however, is expensive in terms of travel budgets and will be a decision to be made in a year or two depending on whether foundations will fund it.

5. Target audiences We can begin with psychology, sociology and history. Those are large fields each with 20,000 to 30,000 professors in North America, or 70,000 in all. We will aim after by year 3 of the project for a 1% return rate, or 700 professors, each doing 1 course a year with 30 students giving 20,000 students a year. We will need to develop an organizational chart and an evaluation rubric. As our model proves its worth we can move to other social sciences such as political science, the humanities, etc. While our program will focus on certain disciplines it will not exclude other professors who volunteer to join up and take advantage of the online training and OA system.

6. Structure The project will be a 501(c)(3) organization so its fund-raising is tax deductible. It will have a board of directors representing the key constituencies (Wikipedia activists, Wikimedia Foundation, scholarly societies). It will meet online at no cost. Each participating scholarly society will nominate its own board of (unpaid) advisors who will meet online. The project will be hosted by an academic institution that (for a fee) will provide Internet and accounting services.

An excellent funding possibility is the National Endowment for the Humanities. Years ago it gave me a series of grants totaling over $1,000,000 to set up different programs for retooling historians. We reached about a thousand history professors and graduate students (including the presidents in 2012 of the American Historical Association and the Southern Historical Association). They also funded my setting up of H-NET. NEH now has an "Office of Digital Humanities" that suits Wikipedia well. Other foundations include NSF and the many private foundations interested in disseminating technology (Sloan, Packard, etc).

7. Budget The budget key to using conferences is that the target audience has paid its own travel. Our expenses will be travel for sending a team of 3 to 5 staffers to a three-day conferences will include airfare, hotel rooms, per diem, and registration fees for each staffer. Add in the cost of the booth in the exhibit hall, a private room for training, an open reception, and handouts such as thumb drives with tutorials and exercises. We will have a one-time expense of $5000 in buying laptops and projectors for the booth and training room. Staffers should have graduate training in the discipline and have significant Wikipedia editing experience. If we can get funding we can pay the staffers for doing professional work on behalf of Wikipedia. Each convention appearance will cost $8,000 to $15,000 depending on travel and size of staff; the average cost is $12,000. We can handle 10 conventions a year (2 to 4 conventions per discipline) at a cost of $175,000 a year. Management costs (salary, fringe, travel, consultants) for a project manager to plan and run the operation and raise funds will cost $55,000 a year. Total budget then is $180,000 a year for a comprehensive program. The budget is scalable -- in the startup year a more modest presence at 8 conferences will cost $100,000 a year. Later on, a highly visible presence with six staffers at 12 conferences will cost $250,000.

8. Outcomes The project has multiple goals that are mutually reinforcing. It will train hundreds of university teachers (and thus thousands of their students) in how to write a good Wikipedia article on academic topics. It will upgrade the quality of Wikipedia content for thousands of articles. The hardest part about joining the Wikipedia community is writing, being criticized, and rewriting. The project will hold the neophytes' hands in this critical stage. We can expect many will continue to be active Wikipedians. The project will have a broader reach: through the convention appearances it will familiarize many additional thousands of university faculty and graduate students (who attend conventions) not only with our writing process but also Wikipedia's basic philosophy and mission. We will get a great deal of professional feedback on our articles. It will overcome some of the hostility and doubt that is endemic in academe. Ultimately the project will help establish Wikipedia's presence in the worldwide Republic of Letters.

How would you ensure this new structure involves all key stakeholders, including academics and the Wikipedia community?

The governing board will include active Wikipedia editors (chiefly OA), Wikimedia representatives, academics, and representatives of the scholarly societies

What are potential pitfalls of this approach?

The potential pitfalls are money--in terms of foundations this is a small project but times are very tight today and the money depends on how foundations see the viability, vitality and value of Wikipedia. The other downside is that active Wikipedians will resent money paid to workers who train article writers. For some that may seem like paying for articles.

Any other comments about your proposal?