Education/News/August 2018/Mapping education in the Wikimedia movement

Mapping education in the Wikimedia Movement

Author: Alen Amini & Sailesh Patnaik

Summary:

The Wikimedia Education team has spent the past two months working on mapping the important education work the network has been doing across the globe. The community members and affiliates have adopted different documentation process at different platforms, such as Meta, Outreach Wiki, Local Wiki, to document their programs. To conduct the research, we have held interviews with individual program leaders, scanned newsletters, grant proposals, Facebook pages, and country pages, and looked at the various databases within the network. Needless to say, an impressive number of volunteer leaders have worked together and partnered with institutions in their local communities to help create and spread knowledge.

For the interns especially, it has been inspiring to read about the important work people across the community have been doing to promote knowledge access, knowledge sharing, and knowledge creation by people, everywhere. From training students and educators on editing Wikipedia articles, to the countless efforts launched to create content in local and indigenous languages, the Wikimedia community is doing tremendous work, and it has been a privilege to do our small part to try and begin mapping it comprehensively.

The past two months have taught us that this exercise is only a starting point as much of the data remains incomplete. As we wrap up, we believe that the centralised document of the Education Programs will help educators and community leaders to understand the strategies, ideas and workflow followed by different affiliates and education leaders, which can be localised into different contexts. We will rely heavily on the whole Wikimedia Education ecosystem to help complete the information we may have missed using their own knowledge of the work being done within their communities, and the sources they have accessible to them. Once we share the data widely, Wikimedians will be able to comment to help us edit, add information, and clean up our research to make it as complete as possible.

We are excited to present our findings on Tuesday, September 4th, and we encourage people everywhere to join us for the live stream of our short presentation here.

Tags: Education Team