In August I am going to a meet up organized by Wikipedia to get training to be a “campus ambassador. Wikipedia is starting to provide support for people to go out to the general public and encourage other people to use Wikipedia. This is markedly different from any other top website’s marketing strategy – here is the Alexa list of top sites. None of them did an in-person social marketing campaign, and besides the campus ambassador program, Wikipedia provides support for many types of groups to meet up, discuss Wikipedia, then go home and add content to Wikipedia as individuals. Some of their other real-life projects are Wikipedia Takes Your City, GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), Wikipedia Loves Art, the Wicnic (a picnic), and more here.
The purpose of this program is to use Wikipedia as a media for accepting the work of college students and giving making the assignments meaningful to the world community. The issue is this – college students need to do a certain amount of independent study, and traditionally professors have asked students to write papers as part of their assignments. Usually the work product of students is discarded as useless after the assignment is completed. However, most college students have the expertise to be able to contribute to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia needs that expertise to contribute to its own body of content.
So what is proposed is that some Wikipedia Ambassador go to classrooms and work with the professor to talk about using Wikipedia in the classroom. The professor gives an assignment wherein the students chose a topic which interests them and they write a report on that topic using good sources. They then contribute their report to Wikipedia by integrating it into an article. The students benefit because they get to write on a subject which interests them. The professor benefits because now they are able to use modern technology and publishing in the classroom. And the world community benefits because information which was formerly entangled with jargon and copyright claims is made free through being put on Wikipedia.
I see few drawbacks to this system assuming that there is always information to be put onto Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia also keeps track of user activity, it also becomes trivial for the professor to see what students have done. Modern grading problems like checking for plagiarism become moot, because Wikipedia bots and users check to see whether material is copied. And students are very likely to get feedback from other people besides their teachers because they are submitting their work to a highly-reviewed public forum.
The drawbacks which do exist include the following: Wikipedia has a learning curve to use its language markup; information-science issues crop up in every field; some people are fearful of taking on any partners, and this project is a partnership with Wikipedia; there is the possibility of interaction with bad Wikipedia users; students might need to be fed good sources from which to write their contributions; some people might not believe in the Wikipedia mission; some people might not believe in the Wikipedia operating model.
I am excited for this and I hope this develops my relationship with Wikipedia.