I talked with Jami Mathewson from the Wikimedia Foundation on 13 December about the campus ambassador program. We talked a bit since then, and then on 6 February we had a long talk and I agreed to be the regional contact for campus ambassadors, professors, or anyone else who wanted to join Wikipedia’s Campus Ambassador Program. What this means is that if anyone in the area wants to talk to a particular human familiar with the program then I volunteer to talk to them.
I think the region I am covering is Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, and British Columbia. Obviously this is a ridiculously huge region and if there were any great amount of work to do then it would be impossible. Also it seems that I am the only identified person in this region who would elect to be a regional contact, or who knows about the program. I do a lot of phone chats with Wikipedians anyway so I am expecting to continue to do what I have been doing with no extra time commitment. I would like to encourage more people to be Wikipedians but I have not yet found or created a reliable system to engage people like I am engaged.
I hosted the monthly Wikipedia meeting last night at Allegro. I had just met Dennis the past month but he is committed to Wikipedia and has been for years. He came again last night and expressed that he would come every month. He, like me, is interested in organizational management and that is mostly what we discussed last night. Neither of us has ever made a Wikipedia “good article” (which is an official designation after peer review) and we talked about doing that soon. He is interested in the history of motorcycle engineering, including technological, business, social, and marketing aspects of the process. This is interesting to me because it has so many connections to histories of economies.
This week I saw Rahul, the professor from Cornish doing Wikipedia with me, and am working with Joe Tennis and his student Katherine Thornton who are organizing a research project on article categorization with a class of grad students in the i-school. None of these people have a clear idea of what they want to do but relationships take time and as long as they want to have occasional chats with me I want to have them with them.