Mexico City student club work with Indianapolis Wikimedians

Student club participate in Translate-a-Thon with Children's Museum[edit]

College students in the Wikipedia Club in Mexico City participated in the Children's Museum of Indianapolis Edit-a-thon ^{[See This Month in GLAM coverage]} by translating articles in realtime; a "translate-a-thon" (traduciratón). The focus was to give students their first taste of contributing to Wikipedia, emphasizing the social and international nature of the "Wiki-world." The goal was to start with articles about the Museum's collection already in existence such as Bucky (Tyrannosaurus rex), learning the intricacies of proper translation attribution. It began with a brief introduction to the tasks and communication with Lori Phillips (HstryQT) and Angie McNew, essential to motivation. Organizers set up Skype for the participants in Mexico to communicate with those in Indianapolis, but this was not used as students, working in groups, had few difficulties in determining ways to render the information in Spanish. One exception to this was the railroad jargon in Reuben Wells (locomotive) but this was resolved by searching the terms in the English Wikipedia and clicking onto the Spanish versions, if they existed. By the end of the day, six articles about the museum's most iconic objects were translated into Spanish. Thanks to the students' help, the QRpedia codes in exhibits are now more accessible to Spanish speaking visitors.

Photographs of the event can be seen on Commons.

Next "Mexico report" →