Wikipedia Ambassador Program growing, adjusting
- 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.
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.