At the beginning of the school year, we wrote about Wikimedia's Public Policy Initiative, a pilot program that introduced students to editing Wikipedia pages as part of their public policy college coursework. As its the end of the school year now, the Wikimedia Foundation has just published some of the results from its first year of the initiative.

Over 800 students participated in editing Wikipedia over the course of the school year. In the fall term, this was one of the requirements for 14 college classes, and in the spring term, 33 courses were part of the initiative. If you've ever worked your way through grading stacks of college assignments, you can imagine the size of this contribution: the equivalent of 5800 pages - 11 reams of paper - full of new content added to Wikipedia. he chart at right shows the number of bytes our students added to articles. Over the course of the academic year, students have added 8.8 million bytes to the English version of Wikipedia.

But the Public Policy Initiative wasn't simply about adding more content, it was about quality content, and the Wikimedia Foundation boasts that the public policy articles improved by 140%, based on a scoring system that experts use to assess materials. More number crunching on that to come, promises the Wikimedia Foundation.

The effort to get students involved with contribution to Wikipedia isn't the only thing that the Wikimedia Foundation is doing to help promote itself in education. It has a Wikipedia Ambassadors program on , for example, that works both online and on campuses to help train and support students in editing Wikipedia. Wikimedia is also reaching out to faculty to help encourage them to make use of Wikipedia assignments.

Convincing the Faculty

The new relationships that are being forged between academia and Wikipedia aren't just happening in the classroom. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education looked at the recent call to action by the Association for Psychological Science, encouraging its members to take a more active role in contributing to Wikipedia's articles on psychology - to "make sure Wikipedia--the world's No. 1 online encyclopedia--represents psychology fully and accurately."

Although it might be hard to convince all university professors to contribute to Wikipedia (until it counts towards tenure, perhaps), there does seem to be a shift in the attitudes towards Wikipedia. For its part, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to expand both its ambassador program and aims to have editing projects be requirements in over 130 college classes next year.

In the interview clips, included below, Moller hints at the site's upcoming suite of editing tools and sharing options. He compares video to text and image content, subtextually posing the question: If other kinds of non-video content are so easy to grab, remix, and reuse, why not video, too?

Although videos have been part of the Wikimedia stable for a couple years through the open-source Ogg Theora format, the offering has been limited. Now, however, a Firefox 3.5 plugin called Firefogg will allow for server-side transcoding to the Ogg format. In addition to allowing for downloading and editing, the Ogg format also consumes significantly fewer resources during video playback.

Of course, any open-source technology that makes information free (both free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-free-to-move-about-the-Internet) is not without controversy. The Ogg codec's role in HTML 5 is of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of web-based video.

Of particular interest to those concerned with the evolution of content ownership, however, is the Foundation's proposal, as stated by Moller, to allow users to "take a video, to crop it, to edit it, to take different assets and mix them into a single video - not just video... a text slide or... a slide show. You can mix videos, tag them with audio, obviously. So we want to build a completely open standards-based environment that people can use to remix video."

As we reported last month, when news of the new player was breaking, hundreds of thousands of public domain videos from sources such as the Internet Archive and Metavid will be available in the new format.

The editing tools to be made available later this year are led and funded by open source video company Kaltura. Moller also revealed to Beet.tv that Wikimedia is looking for a CDN partner to ensure streaming video performance.

According to the Wikipedia blog, the 2009 swine flu pandemic page "got about 16,000 page hits on April 23, and this number increased to a dizzying 2.86 million page hits only a week later." The article began as a mere stub and has since expanded to a 21 page article with multiple iterations and discussions.

The NIH is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' primary agency for conducting and supporting medical research. Contributions from the group will likely help dispel myth from fact and increase awareness for early detection and preventative health.

In the past, a number of media stories from the American Medical News, Reuters Health and Seattle's KOMO TV News have criticized Wikipedia for its lack of credibility. There have also been a number of breakaway efforts to recreate the Wikipedia experience amongst subject experts including Toxipedia, Medpedia and Citizendium. Nevertheless, with Wikipedia's monthly unique traffic of 300 million visitors, it simply makes more sense for medical experts to travel to an information epicenter rather than asking millions to modify their behavior.

While no responsible medical professional would ever suggest Wikipedia as the sole information source for self-diagnosis and treatment, the NIH's recognition of Wikipedia's value might spur on other agencies to consider the site in health outreach strategies.

The grant will fund a study of barriers to entry for users and contributors new to Wikimedia Commons. The project team will also identify best practices from similar media-sharing sites. The team will design and implement a simpler workflow for uploading, licensing, and describing media.

"We want to make uploading files to Commons as easy as possible so that people everywhere can join us in helping Commons grow. The bigger Commons is, the more people it will serve."

According to the Ford Foundation website, the funds are granted to select organizations that support emerging leaders, research and dialog, and life-changing or life-improving innovations. Typically, fewer than 3 percent of grant applicants are selected for funding, and purely scientific projects are not typically considered for these grants.

Ford Foundation representative Jenny Toomey said in the Wikimedia statement, "The global community that is building Wikimedia Commons is setting the standard for the way that video and images are uploaded and shared through the Web.

"The whole process is simplified, promotes collaboration, and is driven by consensus among the community. Ultimately, this approach and others like it can help ensure that the Internet remains a rich and open space for learning, expression, and participation."

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization which operates Wikipedia, the free, online encyclopedia. Wikipedia contains more than 12 million articles in 265 languages contributed by a community of more than 100,000 volunteers.

One of the requirements for any video added to the site is that it be based on open-source formats. With the heavy exposure that the Wikipedia web site receives - often the number one search ranking for any subject and the seventh most popular web site in the world - the organization hopes to put pressure on other content holders to release more of their videos into the public domain.

Neither adding a video to the site nor clipping a section of video will require users to have any sort of video-editing software on their computer - all the tools will be provided online. In the future, Wikipedia plans to add more features to the system so as to allow users to edit, add to, and reorganize the clips embedded in the articles, just as users are able to edit text on the site today.

To help with the video effort, Wikipedia has partnered with Kaltura, an open source video solution provider, who is helping to develop the necessary tools for importing the video content. The partnership was originally announced back in January of 2008.