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without oversight from an off-wiki group. I like that the WEF does not give pretense to organizing community volunteer ambassadors to manage classes, because previously when things went wrong in classes, some people assumed that the
Wikimedia community was supposed to clean the mess. This is at odds with the WEF which encourages professors to have their classes contribute content, because any time students come their contributions are often troublesome. In the new model, the WEF staff personally contact every United States and Canadian professor coming to Knowledge (XXG) and they take more responsibility for clean up, leaving no responsibility to any ambassador. If anyone in the community wants to help, then great, but with paid staff off-wiki being at hand to talk to professors on phone and by email, now the WEF is more obligated to have good outcomes any time they bring a professor into Wikimedia and encourage their class to contribute. The standardized training and consistent communication by phone and the rest is not something which the Wikimedia community has historically been able to manage well.
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having people act as ambassadors without any training and any support, which does not seem likely to provide more effective work. Opening criticism of student edits to the general community without screening will quite possibly have the same effect it did at AfCs , where eventually screening of those approving AfCs was introduced--though it seems possible that the requirements for this should have been set considerably higher. It is not clear to me if the proposed drafts will be on
Knowledge (XXG), and in what space they will be. If on enWP, where to put them and how to work on them needs to be discussed on-wiki and decided by consensus-- the community controls its own WP. And if they are on enWP, the community can then if necessary form a consensus to exert its role when confronted with bad editing, and require qualification for editing in that space using its own procedures. No matter where they are put, at least the accepted material will need to be put on enWP and undergo its usual criteria for improvement or deletion, just as at present.
556:. There is funding available for ambassadors, particularly in the form of travel and training support, and I would like to see more individuals request aid from any chapter if they want to participate in the education program or any other outreach program. Again, I hesitate to encourage people to seek this kind of funding from groups like the WEF, because that is not a community-managed group, and I fear empowering anything other than community groups within Wikimedia projects. For people who want grants and funding, the most common process is to discuss it with a chapter, and if the chapter likes the proposal, they endorse the proposal. They request WMF funding, pay the community member, and send the community members receipts and project report back to the WMF as part of their annual reporting. I would be fearful to hear that community members are taken out of oversight of the funding process.
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and that the student editors are taught enough about
Knowledge (XXG) policies to understand how to contribute effectively. Do we want to discourage 1,000-student classes? Yes. Do we want to discourage instructors who want students to write analytical essays on Knowledge (XXG)? Yes. And we can do that best by being responsible for onboarding those classes, when we can call a professor and say, "As a Wiki Education Foundation staff member with experience supporting 600 classes, your assignment will harm Knowledge (XXG). But here's an alternative you could consider that would still achieve your learning objectives and actually help Knowledge (XXG)." In no way do we want to end the program; instead, we want to make sure the classes that are editing are filling Knowledge (XXG)'s content gaps with high-quality content. And we think the best way to do that is through this process change. --
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my numerous e-mails. They sent their students to
Knowledge (XXG) with no regard for our guidelines or programs and I became the first Wikipedian they interacted with. Now I feel disempowered to conduct this sort of outreach and I fear many easily preventable problems will mount. Since the WMF fancies itself a grant-making organization I would suggest funding the ambassador program through organizations like the WEF and keeping coverage in both areas dense with institutes of higher learning and the schools where professors have historically been proponents of the program. I can only assume the WEF plans to effectively end the Education Program in the US and Canada by restricting course participation to the short list of professors they approve and banning the rest, batch reverting the edits of entire classes. Time will tell if this is the correct strategy.
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wiki. Campus ambassadors put a face and a voice to the nebulous
Knowledge (XXG) movement. For many coming to Knowledge (XXG) for the first time this real person in front of them was far more approachable and understandable. I felt utility in bringing the passion I have for the semantic wiki concept to college students so they would eagerly jump into it, too. Our campus ambassadors could instruct in a way our tutorials could not. When the program worked well, students and professors interacted with Knowledge (XXG) properly and some good academic content was added. Students not only got a grade for their class but they also contributed to living knowledge. They learned about both the reliability of Knowledge (XXG) and the community of editors, well beyond the academic facts learned in their class.
198:. Campus Ambassadors (with the epcampus flag) are meant to be a real-world Knowledge (XXG) representative on campus, interacting with the professors and students before these new editors are sent to Knowledge (XXG). While campus ambassadors presumably remain part of Knowledge (XXG)'s global Education program, students in the US and Canada may no longer be seeing these volunteers in their classrooms. I was one of those campus ambassadors and I did not take the news well. It hit me hard because being an ambassador was primarily what I joined Knowledge (XXG) for. I found out about the campus ambassador position in 2013 and decided to start racking up edits on Knowledge (XXG) in order to submit an application. I have always thought that although we cannot seem to stop
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want to lose by looking like you don't care about them. At the same time, I agree that it's high time that a more professional and accountable force takes over - too often I've seen Campus
Ambassadors who had next to no edits on Knowledge (XXG), who hardly knew anything more than the students they were supposed to help, and who became inactive and unreachable as soon as the class ended, creating a false impression that there were volunteers to support a given (regional) area. The system needs a reform, but I'll stress once again - don't break what's not broken, i.e. try not to loose the few really active and dedicated Campus Ambassadors. Recruit them, hire them, make them part of the process. --
402:, so we know students are getting an overview of how to edit and important policies. We will be in contact with instructors so we can alert them quickly if there are problems. We will be the ones the community holds accountable for fixing problems, so volunteers don't feel blamed when things go wrong. Structural problems are ours to fix, and one way we can do that is to take responsibility for ensuring volunteers, then, are free to do the specific content-related task they like most: copyediting, wikifying, checking sources, giving feedback, etc. (although staff will be also helping out with the tasks as well). You can see these task-based categories here:
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to manage volunteers, then personally I would have been fearful of the powergrab, and I think many others in the
Wikimedia community are hesitant to support the granting of on-wiki authority by anything other than the Wikimedia community. The low-level support that the WEF used to give was, in my opinion, the limit of what the Wikimedia community would tolerate from an off-wiki authority. I expect that if the Wikimedia community had developed its own education program ambassador training, then the WEF would have supported that program and the WMF would have funded anyone who wanted to develop it. I still think the WMF would fund such a program at
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the userright entirely and it can become anything. I would love to talk with anyone about opportunities to regulate "ambassadors" for all kinds of outreach, including to universities, nonprofit organizations, government offices, and coffeehouse meetups, because I still worry about people representing the
Wikimedia community when they do public relations, and would like for anyone who is doing outreach and public relations to have all the support that they want. There are some interesting software and social tools here with a history of use and it would be great to see the community use some of these.
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interested in volunteering as ambassadors but had no nearby classes using
Knowledge (XXG) to interact with and no plan to initiate collaboration. Unless a Wikimedia chapter subsidized these activities no money was being allocated to support ambassador activity. Coverage was therefore uneven and in some cases ineffective. When classes of more than 40+ students taught by ill-informed professors arrived on-wiki without the preparation campus ambassadors could provide, editors bore the brunt of turmoil as articles were inundated with poorly-sourced material or copyright violations. The WEF
218:, effective with the upcoming Spring semester. The announcement indicated that WEF sought to consolidate control of the program, making their own paltry staff accountable for interactions with the classes. But if the ambassadors we did have were insufficient to the task then reason dictates having zero ambassadors would not work any better. Unless the WEF planned to hire our intrepid volunteers I'm not sure what the way forward would be. What is the community's remaining education program in the US and Canada after all of its functions had been subsumed into the WEF?
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well, where an active Campus
Ambassador engages the instructor and student editors, and Knowledge (XXG) gets more good content in areas where we have content gaps. As my colleague wrote in the email she sent to Chris alerting him to the shift we're making to the support structure for Wiki Ed-supported classes,"If we could copy and paste you into every university, there would be no need for the changes."
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in the past; the major change here is that we want Wiki Ed staff to oversee the non-content elements to the class, so we can ensure the course is following our best practices, and we are held accountable for any problems. We believe this will result in a better experience for everyone: instructors, volunteers, student editors, and the general Knowledge (XXG) editing community.
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538:. Considering the cost of trying to wrangle general volunteers, and considering that after years of education program only a few people volunteered for this role, I do not recognize how the WEF could have spent resources to increase the impact of ambassadors or scale up their recruitment to justify the cost.
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I do not want to obligate the WEF to take more responsibility for ambassador oversight than they have had in the past. They used to claim some oversight, but the ambassador program never was well established. Now instead of them promising almost negligible support for ambassadors, they have abandoned
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I think that the WEF never managed ambassadors because managing Wikipedians is difficult, and in hindsight, I think it is a bad idea for any organization to propose to manage a distributed network of online volunteers to do in-person outreach on behalf of the larger community. If WEF would have tried
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Chris has been a great volunteer, and one who has done tremendous work with students and staff. I agree with Chris that in-person support makes Knowledge (XXG) editing more approachable and understandable. And I agree that in an ideal world, classes would function like the ones Chris has supported so
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Knowledge (XXG) is great for the literate self-selectors that can teach themselves by going through our numerous instructional pages. Just as our edit-a-thons accomplish outreach amongst those that will not be self-taught so too does our campus ambassador program reach those not already interested in
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The suggestion that Wiki Ed will be restricting course participation, banning students or instructors, or mass-reverting their edits, is simply not true. Our goal isn't to ban student editors; on the contrary, our goal is to make sure what students are asked to do will actually help Knowledge (XXG),
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of them, and most were really interested in Knowledge (XXG)'s content. That meant courses fell through the cracks, weren't following our best practices, and led to problematic student edits on Knowledge (XXG) — and the Ambassador unfairly became the recipient of blame for what went wrong. At the end
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Of course, the Education Program is less about teaching students and more about controlling the scholastic flood which arrives on our shores one way or the other. Knowledge (XXG) has been a magnet for some classes without Knowledge (XXG)'s prodding and unless we put a person on campus these students
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There is after all perhaps an advantage in having the WEF separate--although they are not under the control of enWP or even the WMF, they are also no longer in any sense the owners of material on enWP or the supervisors of its editing. Their role will be threefold: providing advice and training and
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I read the above with much interest (as an active Wikipedian, instructor, and ambassador). I guess WEF did not announce its plans very well - I suggest you work more on communication. The few active and valuable ambassadors (more or less the few that will read this article) are a treasure you don't
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seems to be leading to enacting what was initially planned, to enable the Education Program Extension (and thus the userright) to be used for a variety of purposes. And, as we communicated to Chris and the other still-active Ambassadors, we encourage them to continue supporting classes as they have
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regularly documents these "stealth classes;" groups of new editors all sloppily editing in the same subject areas replying that their edits must stay due to a class assignment. I recall having to drop-in unannounced on one professor who failed to either reply to several talk page messages or return
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I still would like to see "ambassadors" managed and there is discussion about the userright on the education noticeboard. I just do not want the authority and prestige of the userright to come from the WEF, and I think it empowers the Wikimedia community to give this userright authority in another
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The old model was a one-size-fits-all "Ambassador" role, where the volunteer was supposed to have a variety of skills, from onboarding instructors to teaching students how to edit, to giving feedback on student work, to wikifying and adding images to articles, to serving as the liaison between the
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And any WP chapter can play whatever role its people wish, as in the past. I hope they will coordinate with the WEF, but they can work independently of them if needed, as some of them have been doing. Perhaps the most useful thing the current effective ambassadors could do is to organize active
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could function as their own campus ambassadors, random professors that had heard about Knowledge (XXG) might assign their students to edit articles unaware Knowledge (XXG) had a formal program with which to participate and had no ambassador knocking on their office door. Some Wikipedians might be
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If the material is on enWP, the WEP staff will at present have the same right to add tags that any editor will have, and of course any other editor may do so also, or remove them, in the usual manner. If they do this well, and I think they will, then we are the gainers. If they do not, the same
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Chris (and Blue, and some others) were really effective ambassadors, but I think the general view is that they were in the minority. In my personal view, the solution for inadequately trained and supervised ambassadors the WEF has adopted (apparently without outside consultation) seems to be
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The Wikimedia community has hardly had an education program. In my opinion, now that the WEF has abandoned the ambassador program, now there are more tools available for the community to manage itself. I would like for "ambassador" designation to be something that the community regulates itself
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Thank you for the op-ed and the reply. I am a Wikimedian in Taiwan. My observation on the open source community's effort to the campus has similar situation as above. The rate of good Wikimedian transfer into a good liason is not 100 percent. The discussion makes us can reflect on our strategy
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The problem is the ideal world isn't reality; we supported 98 classes last term, and only a handful had active Ambassadors like Chris. Community members rightly objected when course pages weren't filled out and when students edited medical topics without understanding
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dissemination; providing some degree of organization for those courses that wish to use their system; and, apparently, indicating problems with articles--which I understand will in particular include checking for copyvio--an area where certainly help is needed.
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The new model makes Wiki Ed staff accountable for the non-content pieces. We will be onboarding instructors, so we can be sure that all assignments meet our current understanding of best practices. We will be responsible for sending students through our
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My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation: Chris Troutman has been a campus ambassador for six classes in the Los Angeles area over the past four consecutive semesters. He is currently a Knowledge (XXG) Visiting Scholar at University of California,
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I regret that there is no process for managing volunteer ambassadors. It is true that WEF made almost no effort to manage them. I would like them managed. I do not agree that WEF should manage them, and rather wish that a community process
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of the day, that's not okay: Wiki Ed's goal is to improve content on Knowledge (XXG), and we need to make sure our structure and processes work toward making sure all courses are having a positive impact on Knowledge (XXG).
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That doesn't mean, though, that the Ambassador Program is going away. For several years, Ambassador applications have been processed by community members on the
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from editing, we can always try to recruit his antithesis.
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in the US and Canada, recently ended their support of the
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365:If your comment has not appeared here, you can try
240:. Editors wishing to submit their own op-ed should
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631:Explore Knowledge (XXG) history by browsing
72:My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation
182:, the separate non-profit that administers
689:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2014-12
18:Knowledge (XXG):Knowledge (XXG) Signpost
404:Knowledge (XXG):Education program/Tasks
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485:Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus
216:announced the change on December 18th
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184:Knowledge (XXG)'s Education Program
171:University of California, Riverside
536:meta:Wikimedia movement affiliates
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413:; they will continue to be. The
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415:discussion about the userright
361:add the page to your watchlist
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610:chapters at their locations.
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232:The views expressed in these
224:education program noticeboard
554:meta:Wikimedia New York City
622:19:33, 9 January 2015 (UTC)
585:17:48, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
495:17:01, 5 January 2015 (UTC)
471:15:28, 3 January 2015 (UTC)
452:22:15, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
432:22:12, 2 January 2015 (UTC)
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188:campus ambassador program
180:Wiki Education Foundation
196:Public Policy Initiative
192:was started in July 2010
358:. To follow comments,
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