User:Pgallert/You can help!

What do we do?
Polytechnic of Namibia runs a Wikipedia university project since 2010. First-year students are required to develop a little content in their individual sandboxes on Wikipedia. We then mark this exercise, and then comes the interesting part: For every student submission we need to decide whether what the student produced is worthy of making it to main space.

This worked well in 2010 when we had 200 students enrolled. It did not work so well in 2011 with 400 students---I'm still not finished with all the submissions. It might crumble in 2012; we are enrolling 900 students this year. Without volunteers it will definitely fall apart by 2014 or 2015 when we will be teaching this module to almost 4,000 students. We are educating tutors in the mean time but most of them are not yet comfortable to make the decision whether a student contribution is good or bad. That's why we could use a little help from the community.

You can find the current project on School and university projects/Polytechnic of Namibia. There is also a navigation box containing older entries.

Who can help?
Many students write about Namibia or neighboring countries. I privately edit in this area and can take care of these submissions. But some students write about topics in their own field of study, and that makes it difficult for me to decide if Wikipedia needs this content. For instance, if a nature conservationist creates an article about a plant species such as this (This particular issue is solved and the submission made it to DYK), I cannot really say if it is new to Wikipedia or exists under a different name. I also don't know what sort of references in this field are reliable.

So we most urgently need volunteers that can evaluate our students' content contributions in the following areas of expertise:
 * audit, financial accounting, business management
 * land surveying, land use planning
 * nature conservation
 * human resources management
 * local sports, music, and celebrities

We could also use some clerking: Keep the page structure intact while students are signing up, welcome the new members, check for blatant copyvios.

What needs to be done?
If you want to help please leave your signature below. I would then notify you if the exercise has been marked (likely at the end of September), and then you could start to browse some students' contributions. I suggest the following procedure:
 * 1) Go to School and university projects/Polytechnic of Namibia and check which groups are studying your field of expertise. I will indicate this for each group should anyone volunteer.
 * 2) Click the link to a student's submission. If the student did not manage to create that link, check their contributions to see what they edited.
 * 3) If the student wrote about something outside your area of expertise, you can leave the evaluation to me, or to someone else.
 * 4) Evaluate the submission for inclusion in main space. Particularly check for plagiarism, reliability of sources, duplication of existing content, neutral wording.
 * 5) If it is a valuable article creation, trim and move to main space.
 * 6) If it is a valuable article expansion, update the existing article. You might want to consider a history merger.
 * 7) If it is not usable, check if it can remain in user space. Tag for CSD if not.
 * 8) Give feedback about what you did on the project page.


 * I would like to volunteer:
 * [add signature and indicate your area of expertise]

If you do not want to work on current submissions: this project page from last year still has a backlog.

You can help creating a special offline Wikipedia for Namibia
I frequently participate in initiatives that are aimed at upgrading IT infrastructure and content at Namibian schools. I take the offline Wikipedia with me to schools, and I also began promoting usage of offline Wikipedia to local government.

The problem is that most schools have MS Encarta, and the 47,000 articles that were selected for Version 0.8 are not much better than that. They furthermore do not contain much about Namibia and are such of limited value.

At Wikimania 2012 I was told that it would be technically possible to produce an offline Wikipedia that consists of Wikipedia:Version 0.8 plus existing content on Namibia (maybe all articles better than stub). I am looking for someone to produce this file, or to teach me how to do that.

You can help translating into OshiNdonga, Otjiherero, and Khoekhoe
If you are a native speaker of one of these languages you can help us translating the interface (give me a shout on my talk page), or you can simply write articles in the incubator: The more people actually start producing content, the earlier these languages will become stand-alone Wikipedias. If you are resident in Namibia you can also come to our Translat@thon to receive training and do the translations in a group of like-minded people. Next Translat@thon: TBA
 * OshiNdonga
 * Otjiherero
 * Khoekhoe (Damara/Nama)