UC Berkeley grad to expand Wikipedia's scholarly offerings - SFGate

"Kevin Gorman is the proverbial walking encyclopedia - the kind of guy who can explain the significance of the Winter War of 1939, but also name nearly every species in the fungus kingdom. Gorman, 22, UC Berkeley Class of '13, spent his youth guzzling up the pages of Encyclopedia Britannica before eventually becoming a full-blown Wikipedia fanatic.  Now Gorman is UC Berkeley's official Wikipedian-in-Residence, a liaison of sorts between the hallowed halls of academia and that essential ingredient in so many last-minute term papers. In short, his charge is to improve the quality and quantity of information on the collaborative online encyclopedia. It is the first post of its kind at a university.  Gorman helps the university use its vast academic resources to inform Wikipedia content. In turn, the university gets a crack at influencing and educating a sizable audience. 'Students in general are the fuel of Wikipedia,' said Frank Schulenburg, director of San Francisco's Wiki Education Foundation, a nonprofit spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation that encourages the use of Wikipedia in the classroom.  'There are so many underdeveloped content areas on Wikipedia,' he said. 'So we thought why don't we work with students to improve the quality.'  Berkeley, Gorman points out, probably has more students than Wikipedia has active editors. In other words, if Wikipedia is to continue to expand and grow, university students are a good way to do that.  But navigating the Wiki world is not so simple. Creating or editing posts requires the use of Wikipedia's bizarre markup language. And the zealous community of Wikipedia editors can sometimes pose a challenge. Student posts have also come up against issues such as plagiarism.  So Gorman functions as a guide to the terrain. He works with professors to design assignments that incorporate creation of Wikipedia content into the curriculum. But he also walks students through the more technical side of writing for the encyclopedia, offers style pointers and advice on what sort of content to include, monitors quality and intervenes if, for instance, a student post gets flak from the Wiki community ..."