Archive:Workgroup Weeks/Endorsement Letter Template
The following (below the line) is a template letter that could be sent to major academic departments and academic/professional organizations, introducing ourselves and asking for some sort of endorsement--i.e., asking them to ask their colleagues and members to participate on the week, or simply for a quote saying that the week sounds like a good idea.
Dear ________,
I am writing on behalf of the Citizendium project (http://www.citizendium.org/), a free, expert-guided collaborative online encyclopedia project. I have a very small request of you, but first let me give you a little background.
You could think of us as an attempt to create a better version of Wikipedia: unlike that project, we are devoted to genuine expert reliability and we require contributors to use their own names. We are young (a little over a year old) but we have already created over 6 million words in over 6,500 articles, and we're growing nicely. The project was founded by Dr. Larry Sanger, a philosopher who co-founded Wikipedia and who has since become something of a critic of his own brainchild.
We are now preparing to expand our XYZ offerings, by offering an "open house" for X-ologists. From [date] to [date], we will be holding XYZ Week, which we intend to publicize far and wide in the XYZ community. During that week, we will try to get as many X-ologists as possible to join the project. This will be an opportunity for X-ologists to come together to support a project that we believe is badly needed. This event will help raise the profile of Citizendium among X-ologists. It will also help introduce X-ologists into the brave new world of online wiki collaboration.
To make this event we have a small request to make from you. We are asking for a sentence or two from you encouraging people to join the project and show up for XYZ Week. You could offer it either in your own name or as a representative of [name of department, organization, etc.], that we may use in materials that we are using for XYZ Week. If X-ologists see your encouragement to support Citizendium by showing up for XYZ Week, they will be more likely to sign up themselves.
You can learn more about the project at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:About and an explanation of why the project is necessary is at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Why_Citizendium%3F
We feel a small expression of support from you, or from [name of department, organization, etc.], could help us build our XYZ offerings (currently viewable at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Category:XYZ_Workgroup) into a first-rate resource.
Best regards,
[signature]