Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Monday, January 15, 14:30 PM UTC

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Agenda

Which topic would you like to share/discuss/ask about? Add your suggestions here:

International Year of Indigenous Languages (https://en.iyil2019.org/get-involved/)
Education Conference Donostia 2019 (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia%2BEducation_Conference_2019?fbclid=IwAR3ISsT6unGrJsQqmhvWCEX4hSN_Zx2Ka7ILjT7O6o5MLvAzHN2XZrM6blg)
Robin sharing his work

Participants:

Sailesh Patnaik (WMF)
Luisina (WMAR)
Florencia (WMAR)
Melissa Guadalupe (WMF)
Justice Okai-Allotey (WM GH)
Robin Owain (WMUK)
Rajeev Dutta
Krishna Chaitanya Velaga

Minutes of the meeting:

Robin: Head teacher for 14 years, Primary and Secondary, Started editing Wikipedia 10 years ago, inspired the Welsh Government. to support editing Wikipedia and Wikidata Added Wikipedia in Education Curriculum, at baccalaureate level.
Florencia: From Wikimedia Argentina Education team
Luisina : Education Manager of Wikimedia Argentina, Working since 2016, Editing Wikipedia for Human Rights
Melissa: I'm from Peru, I am working with Wikimedia Fundation since November, I'm based in Peru and I have a background in education and development. Very excited to learn more about the projects happening in the movement.
Justice: I volunteer for Wikimedia Ghana UG, I volunteered for the first Wikipedia Education UG pilot, we're looking for second version for it. The first pilot was started in 2017.We've learned from the challenges and we're excited to continue withmore education projects.
Sailesh: Started working for the Wikimedia Foundation as an intern, I've volunteered for the Wikimedia movement for 7 years. We have 3 items in the agenda, if you have more add it there or we can continue the conversation. Do we have anymore points in the agenda?
Rajeeb: I am new to Wikimedia movement, I have been using Wikipedia from last one decade.
Melissa: UNESCO has declared 2019 as the year of Indigenous languages around the world, I have share , this something we have mind to focus
Florencia: Last year we had a virtual course called Wikibridges, Mooocs, we developed courses for Teachers and students, we did the activity in Paraguay where student edited in both Spanish and (please add the indigenous language here), 50 articles were created.
Justice: At WM Ghana user group we want to start a language project that's more inclusive. We're trying to do our program to use different languages to edit and encourage and grow readership in local languages as well because even if they exist people don't read Wikipedia in local languages, we want to make it grow. , Currently we have 4-5 Ghanian languages on Wiki
Robin: We had organised Celtic conference for Indigenous languages, Welsh is 1500-1600 years old, We got 2800 schools those teaches Welsh , Recording and documenting work which can be used in Wikipedia as well. It's important tomaintain and celebrate this diversity, otherwise the world becomes grey.
Sailesh: in 2012 I worked with a school which is one of the largest schools for indigenous communities in my state, we started the students working on a Wikisource project, I feel like wikisource is easier to work with students than Wikipedia. I'mcurrently working with the Santali community which is one of the indigenous communities in India, they have their own scripts and literature. in march 2018 we had the first workshop with them in the university, they suported with infrasctrure. one ofthe most dificult things with indian languages is the lack of technology to write online. that community is spread throughout four countries, I'm working with that community to have a better wikipedia for themselves.
Robin: the difficulty of getting text in indian languages is a short term problem cus technology is coming fast (speech to text). Welsh Government
Melissa: We have a Wikimedian in Residence in UNESCO, I was having a chat with him last week, one of the interesting thing we discussed was understanding the challenges of not having the technology available to write online in indigenous languages, for example. This IYIL is a good opportunity to leverage our influence and highlight the need for this technlogy to be created, to make indigenous languages communities more visible.
Rajeev: I'm interested to know working for outreach work what we can do together, I've been in the industry of technology for two decades. Outreach and education event should be more important so people know they can do more than just reading wikipedia, we've been doing these projects for 3 years now. I'm trying to work more on the Education and focusing on how Education movement can be promoted through workshops. I've used Wikipedia as a teacher. I am looking forward to learn more.
Rajeev and Sailesh: discuss Sailesh's visit to his region and potential activities that can be done together
Sailesh: are there any teams who will do some activities based on the IYIL and would you need any support from the education team?
Robin : Certainly we would do something. One suggestion for Argentina, if you wanted to do something in Patagonia I'd be very happy to help organize something
Luisina: Yes, in Argentina we have Mapuche language communities located between Argentina and Chile, we want to first research better the education curriculum cus it's a little different than the other curriculum, we wnt to be prepared andrespectful to that community because of the political situation in that community as well.
Robin: Welsh isn't indigenous language in (the place) but we can work on it.
Luisina: Yes, would be interesting to work with the Welsh community in Patagonia, we know about the existence of that community
Sailesh - Will share slack channel with Robin
Luisina: Education conference coming in April in Donostia, open to the community and educators as well. Do you have any questions about the conference? It's important to share these experiences and these meetings where we can have face toface time. Theres gonna be different panels and speakers, one from UNESCO about IYIL. If you have any questions or want to know anything specific about this cus we're still in time to present any proposals.
Robin: There will be 5 people from Wales. We have people from the national library, Wici Mon (Aaron) and myself from WM UK / Welsh User Group.
Luisina: if you want you can share our email and I can share specific information about the conference
Melissa: I was speaking to Galder, to get confirmation from the speakers, they're all gonna be really awesome.
Robin: Briefly, we , I think he is doing fantastic, We have secondary Aaron looks after 10-12 schools visit them every week, teach them how to edit Wikipedia. We receive messages from schools asking who can go help there. Long term goal: compulsory learning the skills of esiting Wikipedia! I'm joking. Long term policies of the Welsh government is compulsory use of Wikipedia and Wikidata, working with the Government. I'm trying to work out on how to pass this information to otherschools and other countries as well.
Sailesh: where can we find information about these programs?
Robin: https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2018/06/aaron-morris-at-wicimon-promoting-the-welsh-language-with-wikiwales/
Sailesh: the floor is open for other comments. I want to mention that we're doing a lot of changes to the outreach portal, we recently got our new logo this is based on feedback from the community. We also made some changes to the news portal. I'd love to hear feedback or suggestions from this. Most probably by the end of next week we're going to mvoe the landing page you're seeing on the main space. We're working on updating and improving the resources. That's something I wanted to share, in this process we'll probably need help from volunteers and the movement to make better resources, the education team will be in touch for suggestions. Any feedback you want to share?
Justice: I like how things are easy to navigate, I think you're doing a good job.
Sailesh: Thank you! If you have any updates I'm sharing the newsroom link
Krishna: I am in the board of the education user group, sorry for arriving late to the meeting.
Final remarks: there's links on the chat for the Wikimedia+Education slack channel, WM Argentina Education team email, Wipedia + Education FB group to get connected.