Call for Academic Presentations

WikiConference North America 2016 • San Diego, California

Call for Academic Presentations

WikiConference North America 2016

7-10 October 2016, San Diego, CA, USA

Deadline for Submissions: 31 August 2016

Note of Acceptance: 15 September 2016

Date of Presentations: 8-10 October 2016

Contact e-mail: submissions@wikiconference.org

WikiConference North America (formerly WikiConference USA) is the third annual conference on the North American continent devoted to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The weekend will feature both academic and casual presentations on Wikimedia-related outreach activities, workshops to improve the skills of grassroots organizers, and discussions on the past, present, and future of the Wikimedia projects. The conference features offerings about community outreach, online activity, partnerships with institutions of knowledge, and technology. Keynote speakers are scheduled to include Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, and Merrilee Proffitt, Senior Program Officer of OCLC Research. The last day of the conference will feature programming coinciding with Indigenous Peoples' Day.

We seek academic presentations addressing topics related to Wikipedia or open access and culture. Presentations may be from any academic discipline. Submissions can address, but need not be confined to, the following topics:

Pedagogy How is the practice of teaching and learning affected by Wikipedia? What are the best practices of teaching and learning with Wikipedia? How have students' lives been impacted by classroom practices involving Wikipedia?

Epistemology What counts as knowledge? Who decides? What is the relationship between knowledge produced by experts and knowledge produced on Wikipedia? How does access to knowledge affect its value?

Production of Knowledge on Wikipedia How does the operation of Wikipedia impact human understanding? How do Wikipedia's systems of governance impact the creation of knowledge?

Bias How does bias affect knowledge production? How does information produced on Wikipedia reflect or perpetuate existing biases in knowledge?

Mission How does the mission of Wikipedia to make freely accessible the sum of all human knowledge affect the missions of institutions of higher education? How does the success of Wikipedia in providing public access to knowledge affect the role and mission of academic disciplines?

Reliability How reliable is knowledge produced on Wikipedia, and how would we know?

Format: Accepted presenters should plan for 20 minutes. Individual presentations may be grouped with similar presentations into panels. Presentation facilities will include ability to host your laptop computer with a projector, power, internet access, and Mac or PC connectivity.

All submissions will be reviewed by a panel of three people appointed by the academic track committee according to the following guide: · Time: Is the presentation timed to be less than 20 minutes? · Format: Does the presentation include visual references, e.g., slide deck, power point, film, handouts? · Language: Is the presentation in English or Spanish? · Engagement: Does the presentation show promise to engage an audience interested in Wikipedia and/or higher education? · Audience: Does the presentation address both a public and academic audience? · Coherence: Does the presentation identify and support a main idea throughout? · Literature: Does the presentation reference literature of its field and/or the growing literature of teaching with Wikipedia? · Impact: Does the presentation offer a significant insight, as defined by its author(s)?

Submission: To submit a presentation to the academic track of WikiConference North America, please post an abstract of no more than 250 words following our online submission process at https://wikiconference.org/wiki/Submissions. Be sure to explicitly request an academic peer review. Please include an e-mail address and indicate if you are willing to serve as a moderator of other panels.

Abstracts provided by submitters will be posted on the WikiConference website and released under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Submitting an abstract on the website or via email constitutes an agreement to release the abstract text under that license. If you have any difficulty with or questions about the submissions process, or wish to submit via email for whatever reason, please contact submissions@wikiconference.org.\

Presenters and attendees should review the Safe Space Policy of WikiConference North America 2016 at https://wikiconference.org/wiki/Safe_Space_Policy.

After the conference, presenters are invited to submit their work to the inaugural issue of Wiki Studies, a new interdisciplinary, open access, peer-reviewed journal investigating the intersection of Wikipedia and higher education.

Academic Track Chair: Dr. Robert Cummings cummings@olemiss.edu