Wikipedia:WikiProject Academical Village/Online Ambassador Selection Process

The Online Ambassador Selection Process, is a process that helps select Wikipedians to become Online Ambassadors. These Online Ambassadors, are the day to day virtual mentors of students in the Academical Village, and generally consider themselves a guide to a student editors first 100 (or so) edits. Hence, Online Ambassadors are available to answer basic questions about Wikipedia formatting, policies, and culture, and guide students through every step of the contribution process. On a very high level Online Ambassadors can consider themselves trying to achieve two specific goals:

• Helping convert their students become regular editors after their class is over.
• Helping to make sure student's articles and edits, are adding high quality content to Wikipedia that has no copyright violations.

Basic Duties of an Online Ambassador

Much like hosts in the Teahouse, in order to be a successful Online Ambassador, one must be willing to guide new student editors through their first edits on Wikipedia. To do this we have found the following tasks to be done by the best Online Ambassadors.

• Day to Day Tasks
  • Helping students find their way around Wikipedia
  • Aiding students in understanding how to prevent plagiarism
  • Protecting when students when they get bitten
  • Random Technical help

• Long Term Tasks
  • Ingraining the student with good habits so they help others in the future
  • Making the student want to be a Wikipedian, after the end of their class

• Does not Mean (Although you are more than welcome to)
  • Performing major re-writes of articles for the students
  • Finding Additional References for student's articles

• Training (In particular important for Ambassadors in Training)
  • Stay up to date on Training Materials
  • When you don't know the answer to a student's question, figure it out.

Selection Criteria

In order to apply to become an Online Ambassador, the Steering Committee of the Academical Village has determined the following minimum requirements:

1. The applicant must have had a user account on Wikipedia for at least one year.
2. The applicant must have at least 250 edits on the mainspace.
3. The applicant must have at least 100 edits in the past four months.
4. The applicant must not be under any administrator or office bans.
   1. Any requirement can be waived under special circumstances by the Selection Committee, especially if the editor has completed at least one semester in the Academical Village Project as either a Student, Campus Ambassador or Regional Ambassador.
5. The applicant must answer the following questions:
   1. Why do you want to be an Online Ambassador
   2. How have you been involved in helping new users on Wikipedia
   3. Summarize your current involvement with Wikipedia
   4. Have you had major conflicts with other editors? Blocks or bans? Involvement in arbitration?
   5. How would you make sure your students were not violating Copyright laws?
   6. If one of your students had an issue with Copyright Violation how would resolve it?
   7. In your own words describe what Copyright Violation is.
   8. What else should we know about you that is relevant to becoming a Wikipedia Ambassador?

Approval Process

Under normal circumstances the application process should take under a week, and will generally go as follows:

1. Applicant submits application to the Online Ambassador Selection Committee.
2. Selection Committee verifies applicant information.

• Selection Committee votes on-wiki, any applicant with:
  • less than 50% support will be rejected, but will have the opportunity to re-apply in 3 months.
  • 50% to 66% support will be offered an Online Ambassador in Training position, where a current Online Ambassador shall mentor the applicant. After one supporting one class the Ambassador in Training shall automatically become an Online Ambassador with no restrictions, unless the mentor and Steering Committee determine otherwise.
  • more than 67% support, rounded down, will be approved as an Online Ambassador with no restrictions.

Application Form

To apply on-wiki, create a subpage for your application using the input box below, answer the questionnaire, and transclude your application in the "Current applications" section of this page. Replace USERNAME with your own username.

Relevant Links

• Update/Port: Wikipedia:Ambassadors/About
• Current Online Ambassadors
  • Followup on Category:Wikipedia_Online_Ambassadors if active or not
• Past Applications*
  • Move Wikipedia:Online_Ambassadors/Apply/Archives and subpages?