Wikipedia:WikiProject United States Public Policy/Courses/Spring 2011/Federal Indian Law and Policy (Kristin Ruppel)/Progress Report (2011-02-17)

Fellow Ambassadors,


 * On February 17, 2011, Bonnie McCallum and I hosted members of the Renne Library staff for 1 hour presentation/discussion session on Wikipedia and the Ambassador program at MSU as part of their professional development program. The presentation is attached.


 * There were 10 attendees:
 * 3 IS/IT employees
 * 2 reference librarians (1 adjunct, 1 tenure track)
 * 1 digital librarian (tenure track)
 * 1 circulation supervisor
 * 3 cataloging employees (1 grad student/public administration, 2 grad students/librarianship)
 * Only 1 of 10 attendees had any experience with editing on wikipedia. The presentation went for about 20 minutes with a few questions and was followed by a lively round of questions and discussion.


 * All the pages links in the presentation were viewed as examples of what can (and is being done with WP)
 * The Book creation function was especially interesting to the group.


 * We reiterated, more than once, that if anyone was interested in becoming an ambassador, editor, and/or knew of professors who might want to use wikipedia in their course rubrics, we are here to help them get started. Bonnie also distributed “stuff” from wikimedia (brochure, stress balls, lanyards, etal.)


 * One grad student (public administration) is going to tell her professor about the scholar/ambassador program and if he is interested, the grad student will forward his name to me to share with Annie at wikimedia.


 * Take-away: Although many people are familiar with wikipedia and regularly use it to look something up, there are general misunderstandings of what it is, --everything from “can’t trust it” to copyright law infringements to how it works to why someone would even want to participate in its content development.


 * Follow-ups:: 4 in-person follow-up comments from attendees: all four really liked the talk and when asked what they liked about it, all responded with a similar response of “I had no idea all that was going on.” All thought there should be another workshop on how to get started. One suggested we expand the audience to include anybody --especially students. She suggested we do 1-hour workshops for library walk-ins and not just about “what’s going on,” but how to get started and also explain about the “basic rules” (5 pillars).


 * 3 people who could not attend expressed in-person their regrets and said they will “attend the next one.” (I didn’t tell them we’d only scheduled one presentation. Guess we’ll monitor this.)

Future attendees:


 * 2 reference librarians
 * 1 circulation staff (masters in agronomy)


 * In the afternoon Bonnie and I held office hours and attended to two students, helping them create user pages, sandboxes and make progress in selecting their editing topic for the semester.

Bonnie Mccallum, MSU-Bozeman Libraries, Wikipedia Campus Ambassador, User:McMormor Mike Cline, Bozeman, Montana, Wikipedia Campus Ambassador, User:Mike Cline

Mike Cline (talk) 18:52, 18 February 2011 (UTC)