Some of my comments:

It’s not only possible, but vitally important to the future of Wikipedia that engaged, experienced, and mission-driven Wikipedians develop consulting skills. It’s not an easy path, and it’s not for everyone; I’ve worked hard to get this far. But the demand for expert advice in how to engage with the biggest, most widely read body of work in human history is not going to subside. … I try to work with clients who have an interest in improving a general topic area, building goodwill as a good “digital citizen,” and/or learning something about online community engagement through an exploration of Wikipedia. I believe staying active in these areas, both in my paid work and as a volunteer contributor, is essential.

A strict prohibition on article editing for editors in a conflict of interest would go against healthy, everyday Wikipedia practice, and would have devastating consequences. Conflicts of interest are common, and only some of them involve money. They can be managed through ethical behavior and sound judgment. Striking the right balance can be a challenge, but new and experienced Wikipedians challenge themselves to value neutrality above their own opinions every day, often with excellent results.

Wikipedia is founded on inclusion, not exclusion. While any serious Wikipedian should be concerned about the influence of special interests (monied or otherwise), excluding broad categories of contributors, whether from the entire project or from editing article content, is the wrong way to go. That kind of exclusion would go against everyday, healthy Wikipedia interaction, in which reasonable contributors engaging in respectful ways are treated well. It would also take us in a new direction, in which there are giant asterisks next to our core policies of Be Bold and Assume Good Faith.

It’s great to have the chance to broadly communicate with the Wikipedia community about my consulting model. There has been some good discussion on the interview page, on Twitter, etc. Please feel free to share your thoughts below as well!

Since the beginning of 2008, the highest number of page views for Wikipedia's "open educational resources" article was on April 5, 2012.

On April 5, the popular news site Tech Crunch ran a story about a lawsuit involving Boundless Learning, a Boston-based maker of open educational resources (OER).

I’ll let you go straight to the source for that important story; but here, I’d like to use it as an example, to show how improving Wikipedia content can pay off at unpredictable times.

Importantly, Tech Crunch linked to Wikipedia’s article on OER.(It’s likely that other sites’ coverage of the issue did as well.) And as the chart above illustrates, 755 people visited Wikipedia to learn about OER that day. Not enormous as a raw number, but it’s more page views than the article has received on almost any other day in its history. (Bonus points for anyone who can identify what drove the traffic on April 8, 2008!)

This is a common phenomenon. In a far more dramatic example, a moderately famous entertainer’s article spiked from a few hundred page views per day to 85,000 page views when a sex tape was leaked to tabloid media.

If you care about the public (and/or specific stakeholder groups or decision-makers) having access to high quality, factual information on a topic, improving Wikipedia’s coverage of that topic can pay huge dividends.

Maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

When aspiring Wikipedians work and learn together, good things happen. Photo from San Francisco Wiki Women's Edit-a-thon, March 2012, by Matthew Roth. Licensed CC BY-SA.

When I first started editing wikis, I didn’t start with the most ambitious encyclopedia project in human history; I started with a non-profit where volunteers and staff convened to work together in person. Learning this unfamiliar tool along with others—some experienced, some green like me—made it fun, challenging, and relevant to my other work. Before long, editing and improving Wikipedia and a host of other wikis had become part of my day-to-day activities.

In the Open Education Collaborative Documentation Project—announced yesterday at the Hewlett Foundation’s annual Open Educational Resources (OER) meeting—we will facilitate the educators and leaders in the OER world in creating similar experiences.

Through workshops and gatherings, both in-person and online, we will guide both experienced and aspiring Wikipedians in improving content related to their work in education. Where are the gaps in Wikipedia’s coverage? Where is content outdated, inaccurate, or simply difficult to read? Where there are inconsistencies in Wikipedia coverage, do they reflect confusion or disagreements within the OER world that need to be worked through independently?

If you are at the Hewlett meeting, let’s talk this week! Dr. Bob Cummings and I will be available for questions during the poster & exhibition sessions this afternoon and tomorrow; and we will run a mini workshop during the Hack Day on Friday.

If you’re not here, please get in touch!

Dr. James Fasules discusses the American College of Cardiology's participation in Choosing Wisely as part of a panel including Dr. Glen Stream, Dr. Steven Weinberger, and Dr. Christine Cassel (President of the ABIM Foundation). Photo by Pete Forsyth, CC-BY 3.0.

A Wikipedian in Residence, in a six month engagement at the offices of Consumer Reports magazine, will guide collaboration between experts on consumer issues, experts in medical science, and experts in Wikipedia publishing.

Using a model and practices established by Wikipedians at world-class museums and archives, the Wikipedian in Residence’s central role will be to create opportunities for mutual learning. As they produce content according to Wikipedia’s policies and editorial standards, Wikipedians will have opportunities to consult with the network of experts convened in the Choosing Wisely initiative. They will also have be invited to guide and advise those same experts in becoming Wikipedians themselves.

Choosing Wisely participants stressed the importance of informed communication between doctors and patients. Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Jorgejesus4, licensed CC BY-SA.

Yesterday Consumer Reports, a non-profit magazine committed to evidence-based reporting and independence from corporate influence, announced 11 organizations that will work together to publish evidenced-based information about medical procedures as part of the Choosing Wisely initiative. Aided by the Wikipedian in Residence, Wikipedia volunteers will have the opportunity to participate in the initiative.

The American College of Cardiology was one of nine medical societies to release carefully researched and cited lists of recommendations yesterday. Wikipedia does not publish lists like this, but the research conducted to produce them could be used to improve Wikipedia articles.

Choosing Wisely, launched by the ABIM Foundation, brings together 17 non-profit medical societies to promote wise choices by clinicians in order to improve health care outcomes, provide patient-centered care that avoids unnecessary and even harmful interventions, and reduce the rapidly-expanding costs of the health care system. This partnership represents a rare opportunity for Wikipedians: to engage with 27 mission-driven, non-profit organizations as they take aim at one of the great ethical challenges of our time.

In the last decade, Wikipedians have produced 23,000 articles (in English alone) relating to health and medicine; these articles reach a tremendous audience. The article on influenza, for instance, which was awarded the site’s highest internal quality ranking in 2006, was accessed 155,000 times in January 2012.

The ethical issues faced in science are inextricably linked with the ethics of publication and journalism. In the last decade, many of the authors and editors of Wikipedia have established themselves as experts in the way information travels and evolves in the online world. Wiki Strategies is proud to partner with Consumer Reports, and with the medical societies and consumer organizations involved, in bridging our various communities. We are eager to discover what can be done to more clearly expose accurate and useful medical information to the public through our various publications, and to bring more medical and consumer experts into the Wikipedia family.

Wiki Strategies designed this Wikipedian in Residence program as a consultant to Consumer Reports. A grant from the Wikimedia Foundation will fund a portion of the Wikipedian in Residence’s stipend, and will support continuing work exploring opportunities to build bridges between Consumer Reports and Wikipedia.

In this blog post, I’ll tell the story of a short article I wrote a few years ago, and why I think it’s important.

A proposal for a 60 acre off-reservation casino in the Columbia River Gorge (the first designated U.S. National Scenic Area) came up in the late 1990s, and quietly dominated regional politics for over a decade. It impacted the 2002 Oregon gubernatorial election, and drove the heaviest campaign contributions (from Indian tribes on both sides of the issue) of the 2006 election. Elections across the river in Washington were affected as well; even a former Idaho governor weighed in.

The site of the 60 acre casino would have been near the left end of this photo. Portland is down the river to the right. Photo by Scottywong, CC-BY-SA.

But as a citizen, even if you followed the news closely, you’d hardly hear about this vitally important issue. Sure, big campaign contributions would get a mention, and the local press would document major decisions by local and federal entities. But if you wanted a bird’s eye view of how the deliberations were progressing, so you could put the current news item in context? Forget it.

In fact, from reading what occasional news stories did appear, you might come away with the impression that even the reporters covering the issue — whose names would change from one story to the next, and from one year to the next — didn’t have the clearest high-level understanding of the evolving issue, either.

Since I was interested in this major issue affecting my state, I researched old news stories (which, in many cases, required a library card — a simple Google search often won’t get you far with paywalled local news sources). But as a Wikipedian, I didn’t want to keep the knowledge I accumulated to myself — I wanted to smooth the way for others who might be interested, too. So I summarized and cited my findings in a Wikipedia article.

The article isn’t anything fancy, by Wikipedia standards — fellow editor Aboutmovies assessed it as “start class,” the site’s second-lowest quality rating, rightly noting that it doesn’t do much to explain the motivations of the various interested parties. But even so, the article filled a vital gap: I’m confident it was the only publication, online or offline, that collected the facts of the decade-plus saga in one place. (The Friends of the Gorge published a similar page, from a less neutral point of view, over two years later.)

A couple of typical things happened, which I would contend speak to the general value of Wikipedia:

• The new article debuted near the top of Google search results. (Curious why this happens? See this illuminating discussion thread.)
• Various Wikipedians emerged over the years to add little updates as the story continued to unfold.

But in April 2010, two years after I started the article, there was a much more satisfying endorsement of the article: Jeff Mapes, a longtime and highly respected reporter at the Oregonian, prominently linked to the article in a blog post about the proposal, with the implicit suggestion that it provided a solid overview of the subject.

The yellow "W's", highly concentrated on the left, represent Wikipedia; as subjects researched new topics, they relied heavily on Wikipedia in the early stages, moving toward more specific sources as their understanding grew.

And at last fall’s WikiSym conference, social media researcher Ed Chi of Google made a point that finally tied it all together for me in his keynote address. He described a study that found that Wikipedia is commonly used for “scaffolding” – a term in educational psychology that refers to building a conceptual framework in the early stages of developing an understanding of a topic.

This is one of the things that intelligent, interested readers need in a world full of disconnected nuggets of information: resources that help them gain an initial understanding of a topic, and establish context. This is what Wikipedia is good at. This is an activity that is well suited to a broadly distributed project with many participants: when many people drop in a relevant link or point, it’s not hard to put together a basic timeline that supports a shared understanding of the facts. An article like this might only attract a couple hundred views a month, but if some of those viewers are reporters or bloggers putting the pieces together before writing an article, many more benefit indirectly.

So there you have it: a well respected reporter and a well respected media researcher seeing the same value in Wikipedia that Wikipedians see. It’s like our our shared notebook for making sense of, and keeping track of, the rapidly evolving world around us.

Consumer Reports, a magazine and organization devoted to serving consumers with useful and unbiased information, offers a three month position (with a $4,000/month stipend) based in Yonkers, New York. This Wikipedian in Residence will be focused on consumer health issues, and will design programs that bring Consumer Reports staff and Wikipedians together to present useful information in both publications. A background in the sciences is desirable for this position.

The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which provides services including the WorldCat database that underlies the inter-library loan system, offers a position (with compensation based on experience) in its San Mateo, California offices. This Wikipedian in Residence will have the opportunity to help OCLC to adapt its own practices to incorporate Wikipedia, and also guide libraries in Wikipedia engagement.

Wiki Strategies is pleased to have the opportunity to work with both organizations, in defining a strong foundation for an effective engagement with Wikipedia. We look forward to seeing the results of these unique and exciting positions, which represent a significant expansion in the kinds of organizations bringing on a Wikipedian in Residence.

My favorite measure of success: laughter. Original photo by Benoit Rochon, CC-BY-SA.

The challenge was irresistible.

Last October (2011), I was honored with an invitation to work with the dynamic community of Wikipedia volunteers and consultants working with cultural institutions (Wikipedians in Residence, and their supporting cast) as they convened for a focused work session at GLAMcamp DC. In my own work to help institutions connect with Wikipedia, I had been in close contact with this community, but had not had the opportunity to work with them directly. It was a timely and welcome opportunity to strengthen important working relationships and learn from accomplished Wikipedians.

• The goal: to meet the rising demand among GLAMs (for the uninitiated: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) for substantive engagement with Wikipedia.
• The challenge: Having excelled at individual prospecting and engagement, established Wikipedians in Residence would need a new approach. Cloning themselves, sadly, was not an option.

In this post, I cover our planning process; future posts will cover the event in detail, and offer some broader reflections.

The GLAMcamp model, where small numbers of highly-engaged Wikipedians assemble regionally to work together, is under a year old; from all reports, the first events in New York City, London, and Amsterdam were highly successful. These events helped the growing ranks of Wikipedians in Residence, following and extending an outreach model pioneered by Liam Wyatt in 2010, to build a sense of community and perform worthy tasks.

But GLAMcamp DC’s organizers, veteran Wikipedians in Residence Lori Byrd Phillips and Sarah Stierch, had bigger goals: to focus intently on U.S.-based institutions; to stoke a shared commitment to meeting the rising demand; and to concentrate on developing resources (both technical and educational) for GLAMs, as an alternative and as a complement to the Wikipedian in Residence model.

When Lori and Sarah invited me to facilitate the event, I was at once invigorated and intimidated. Imposing specific goals and structure on a community that is used to working ad hoc is not always welcome or effective; but if done properly, I believed it could be effective, even transformative. In this post, I discuss the advance planning we did; check back for stories about the event itself, and for further reflections.

As we looked ahead to the event, here are the main things we had in mind:

Getting the right people in the room

From the outset, we had a tricky issue to grapple with. Wikipedia has a strong culture of inclusion. In practice, in previous events, this has meant an open sign-up process. The saying that “whoever comes is the right people,” a truism in the Open Space model used for many wiki events, is tried and true, and reflects important Wikimedia values; all previous GLAMcamps had been built on this principle.

The DC organizing team agreed that the spirit of inclusion is important, and has brought good things to Wikipedia: diverse ideas, a sense of belonging, a sense of freedom. But we also had important goals which were difficult to reconcile with the Open Space model. We wanted a manageable number of people, small enough to quickly gel as a team; we wanted a group that was committed to a narrow set of goals, and to avoiding distractions (even the worthwhile ones). We also wanted to reimburse expenses through a Wikimedia Foundation grant, and knew we would need to show a good return on its investment; although all Wikipedians enjoy open-ended discussions, funding travel and accommodations to have them isn’t necessarily the best use of donor funds. It was important to us and to the funder that we commit to a set of outcomes, and that we plan in a way that gave us confidence we would achieve them.

We decided on a maximum of 25 participants, and required privately-submitted applications. We put a section for “interested participants” to (optionally) add themselves on the wiki.

Through a combination of planning and good fortune, we ended up with an extraordinary group. We did not have to turn away a single serious applicant: the numbers matched up well, and every application reflected unique and remarkable talents and interests. As we finalized the list of participants, we were completely convinced they were indeed the right people, up to the task in every respect—and, moreover, likely to stretch our initial ideas of what was possible in creative and useful ways.

Setting clear expectations ahead of time

Just getting good applications wasn’t going to be enough to establish clear and useful expectations all around. The last thing we wanted was to get together a great group, only to discover that their beautifully diverse ideas about the best path forward got in the way of group cohesion, or of getting down to work. So in addition to attracting the right candidates, we designed the application process to communicate our vision, and to invite participants to start thinking about what we would accomplish together.

We crafted our application questions around the event’s goals, and highlighted that connection in the way they were phrased. When we had followup communications, both to the group and one-to-one, we made an effort to emphasize and remind people of our goals. When people had special requests (if they fell within our budget), we granted them, explaining that we wanted to be sure they were at their best for the event.

Establishing buy-in

Even with all that advance communication, when everybody arrived in DC, we would still have to bring everything together. Everybody had the same general understanding of the problems we were trying to address, but would we go about solving them? We had some ideas of our own, but we had gone to a lot of trouble to assemble a group of smart, talented, and passionate people. We were hungry for their input on the best path forward.

For this component, I turned to Eugene Eric Kim of Groupaya, who helped me think through and plan the event facilitation. Eugene reminded me: not only did we want everyone’s input, we needed everyone to be invested in the process, to believe the goals and the tasks were the right ones. If we truly wanted to get there, they had to be the group’s goals and tasks, not ours. We had to hand over the reins, and as early as possible.

Scary!

Eugene suggested three models for an introductory session, not unrelated to Open Space, but more appropriate to our goals:

• World Café: Small groups converse, in several rounds, mixing up groups between rounds, and taking notes to report back.
• Fish Bowl Dialogue: A few people start a conversation in the middle of the room. The rest listen. An empty seat invites anyone to join the discussion at any time; but when one person joins, another must leave.
• Merging introductions: This is the method I chose. People pair up for a few minutes, then the pairs combine, and then the groups of four combine. During the process, participants move from introducing themselves to exploring concrete ideas. Then, each group of eight reports back to the whole group.

Staying present as leaders

A final, and crucial, design goal was that the team of organizers should be able to stay present, focused, and perceptive throughout the event. We had addressed some of this through our planning, as described above: by taking care of as many logistics as possible ahead of time, and by communicating as clearly as possible about our goals and methods. But during the event, we would need to know who was responsible for what, and be aware of each other’s strengths and limitations. As you will see in the next post in this series, we hit a couple bumps in the road, and learned some valuable lessons.

Up next

Stay tuned! In my next post, I’ll dive into the actual facilitation of the event, and the lessons we drew from it.

All that, just to get to this. The opening circle. The introductions. The terrible puns. Original photo by Benoit Rochon, CC-BY-SA.