Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Etherpad for Quick Notes

Tuesday, March 19, 15:00 UTC

Agenda

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

Update on Wikimedia movement participation at Mobile Learning Week 2019 at UNESCO
Mapping Exercise
Update from Liang on Taiwan's meeting
Kannada Wikipedia Education Conference update
Rajeeb's updates - WikiGap initiative
Quick advance update about pilot initiative from WMF education team: W&E Greenhouse

Participants

Melissa (WMF)
Sailesh (WMF)
Rajeeb
Liang (WMTW)
MD Abu Siyam (Bangladesh)
Pavanaja Bellapady

Minutes of the meeting

Melissa: I am from Peru, I work as a program officer for the Wikimedia Foundation

Liang: My name is Liang, I am from Taiwan. I am working as a language liason for the strategy movement process. Would like to know about the Movement strategy process. I am a board member of Wikimedia Taiwan.

Rajeeb: Rajeeb from India, I am a member of Wikimedia India. I am working for Outreach projec

Sailesh:

Melissa: I wanted to share briefly about the participation of Education team at the MLW. It is an annual conference by UNESCO, It is one of the largest conference for Education + ICT. Topic of the year: How different organisations are using AI to advance Education goals. We had a table for the Wikimedia Movement (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_Learning_Week_2019), thanks to John Cummings and Nichole Saad who advocated for a better presence of WM during the event, we had a representation of WMF, Wikimedia Sweden, Wikimedia France, Wiki Loves Women, Kiwix, Wikipedia & Education UG. We had so many people approached us at the table and reached out to us on how Wikimedia projects works. We introduced ourselves as a representatives of whole of the Wikimedia projects. We had opportunities to share a few presentations, Shani gave a presentation on Wikidata, Nichole and I presented how Wikipedia uses AI. We were able to meet people from Ministry of Education in Bangladesh and many more officials. We are going to start conversations with those. It was really great, everybody who participated from the movement found that it was a very productive week. Last day of the conference we had UNESCO's Wiki4Women event, more than 200 people contributed in that.

Sailesh: How many people asked you about the relations between Wikileaks and Wikipedia?

Melissa: (the story when met a guy in the session, he asked where Melissa comes from and if she is near Julian Assange)

Sailesh: Would you introduce yourself, the new comer Pananaja Bellapady.

Pavanaja: I am Pavanaja, from Bangaluru, with Karavali Wikimedians Usergroup. Kannada WIkipedian since 2004.

Sailesh: Thank you, sir. Now I will briefly explain the Mapping Exercise. Between july to september, me and another colleague, work on the project of a spreadsheet/database to see what are the different kind of activities that the Wikimeidans are doing in the movement. At the end we have defined 108 events. We will open the database for the community to review this March. In the process, we have experienced the difficulty of no standard for these activities. Many different version and format and platform for the report. It was difficult for us to let us figure out what has happend spread the world in the past 7 years. Some of the data also missing int that. Some of the courses, what are the challenges the activities are faced... We have opened a google spreadsheet, we will open to comment only, if you find some of the data is wrong, which we believe it is definitely so... please point out, We will aso provide a survey that may take 15 minutes to complete. No private information needed. We just look forward for the next few months as an active source of this community, how can we involve the community leaders, and how can we localized to the community programs. Any comments are appreciated.

Pavanaja: Any timeline to open release this database?

Sailesh: We will post it on the education newsletter March edition.

Pavanaja: How to submit to the education newsletter?

Sailesh: will share link on your personal email

Liang: is there information about the languages in those 108 entries?

Sailesh: 90-100, identify by WM projects/affiliate... I just wondering we don't have any language option.

Liang: That is interesting to see if the language diversity.

Melissa: We have identified the region and country, but it would

Liang: Because, It is related what I will share in this Office hours, In Taiwan we have 16 Indigenous ethnic groups. Their mother tongue are not evenclose to Mandarin, they're Austronesian languages. Now only a few people speak that languages. The Abroorginal study center want to revitalise these langauges. They are hiring people to become full time language speaker. They pay as their full time job for young Indigenous people to use how to write speak the language, and using Incubator Wikimedia. The teacher was sharing this will make indigenous people have honor with having an indigenous language version of Wikipedia. Now the whole project is trying to make the indigineous language Wikipedia as a hub for the native speakers becomeI have been a Wikimedia for almost a decade, I always relied on Chinese Wikipedia, I never realize the usage of Wikimedia projects can help preseve the diversity of the local culture. There are really Wikipedia with smaller languages. How Wikimedia projects and educators can collaborate to preserve languages.

Melissa: UNESCO declared for the year of indineous languages and they have a website where you can register your organizations or individual involvement (https://en.iyil2019.org/get-involved/). It provides you the information and present the resources, there are also conference and other resources.

Liang: There will be three scholars from the study center in Taiwan at the Wikimedia & Education Conference. If Sailesh can share with me the questions that you and Nichole have prepared.

Pavanaja: On February 9th and 10th we had event at Bangalore, the focus was on Kannada Wikipedia Education activities. Kannada WEP is happening at Christ University, Alvas and some other institutions. Alvas college has student association, student who participate in the event get marks. One faculty and one student presented their paper on the Education activities, Second day was the training for the faculty from other colleges who wanted to start WEP at their colleges.

Melissa: When you say the education Wikiipedia Program, what do you exactly mean, do the students use WIkipedia as their assignment?

Pavanaja: Christ Univ students write only one article, but in other colleges students write 3 or more articles. There are other things they do, such as uploading photos. All things are designed and carried out by the local user group. We also help sharing how to analyze the articles.

Sailesh: The GLAM program is in which colleages?

Pavanaja: Fantastic church. And we did another project to adding articles about medicinal plants and generating QR codes for those articles. 155 plants...

Sailesh: Medical Translation, you can ask Liang.

Liang: Well, we are really not the best in the translation effort, maybe the Odia community is someone worth to consult.

Sailesh: May you introduce what you are doing, Rajeeb?

Rajeeb: Yes, when I start using Wikipedia, I never knew that I could contribute. So when I start to do WikiGap project, the Sweden embassy is funding it, very luckily I found WikiClub as in Isreal/Armenia and so on. It is like a regular meet up, this case inspires me to look up a place locally, that makes me to do the event in my city. I want to make a more india flavor, so name it after Wiki Bachalog

Pavanaja: to work with universities you need to find people who are interested, keep looking until you find one.

Rajeeb: I'd like to learn more about the case studies, the way you approach the work with universities.

Melissa: It is awesome to hear about the connection being made over here. It is to give an advance update, which we are going to announce in the Education conference, We are working on a project called Wikimedia Greenhouse, it is a pilot project on its first edition. The idea for community that doesn't have many resources to build education activity but has an impactful idea, knowledge of their community and contacts, the pilot will provide capacity buidling and resources to one team. We are going to open application in April and as this will be our pilot we are going to select only one team. One of the team member from the Education team will do a site visit to help in incubating the project, plus the team will participate in an online course with curriculum developed specifically to improve learning and skills around Wikimedia & Education projects.The course will cover topics on the value of the Wikimedia projects in the global education goals, how to get external partners involved in the Education projects, program management skills, evaluation and communication of projects, the online course will also provide a forum space for participants to interact and learn from each others' experiences. The education team will work with the team closely, but the online course will be open for everyone who wants to take part in it and it will start in the first week of July. Everything will be updated by the first week of April. This will be a great co-learningopportunity for everyone to join and take advantage of.

Pavanaja: It is very interesting and I am keen to join us... One of the institution we can also think

Liang: When Melissa said site visit, what is the scale of it? As you said it is a pilot project, you will work with only one group right. As the chapter is doing the education activities, Is that the scope?

Melissa: First, we are not putting any limitation on the scope of the proposals but of course we will look for doable programs. One member of the education team will do a site visit at the beginning of the Greenhouse implementation stage and it's gonna be an opportunity for mentoring, meeting the teamdeveloping their project, learning from their context, making stronger connections with local partners, so it won't be a visit that lasts one day.

Liang: That helped, thanks

Melissa: Als just to note that there will be two site visits, one at the beginning and one during the end, to help wrap up and provide support in the ending stages like collecting information, for example.

Liang: Good name by the way, who come out of the Greenhouse. Sounds like the education team will send a gardener, haha. How was the name chosen?

Melissa: Yes, it was actually a group effort with Nichole, Maria Cruz, and me. We brainstormed a lot and finally came out with this name.

Sailesh: Great, I feel if there is no further questions, then we can call it a day. Very productive meeting, thank you all for sharing.