Education/News/January 2020/Updates from Wikimedia Education database edit-a-thon

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Updates from Wikimedia Education database edit-a-thon


Author:

Sailesh Patnaik


Summary: We ran a campaign to collect missing education activities from Wikimedia Education database. That 10 days long edit-a-thon campaign helped us to collect 36 new activities from 13 different countries. This 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.

In the Wikimedia movement, communities conduct and document their activities relating to Wikimedia in education. Since there has been no centralized documentation practice, many documented activities have gone unnoticed. Descriptions of programs and projects live in many different places, from the education newsletter to grants reports or country pages on Outreach, there is no central place to learn about the variety of education-related activities that have happened in the Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia Wikimedia Education database aims to change that.

The Education Team at the Wikimedia Foundation, through the initial support of two interns, established a mapping exercise to centralize documentation of Wikimedia Education activities in a single place. They searched for activities in newsletter archives, grant reports, country pages, blog posts, and many other locations, and documented them all in a spreadsheet with structured data.

However, there are several challenges in the data collected during the mapping exercise. One of them is that the data available on the mapping doc aren’t cross-checked by the larger community, so some of them are unverified data. And also due to short span of the mapping, we are still missing data of activities from many countries.

In December, We hosted a 10 days long asynchronous edit-a-thon for Wikimedia Education database from 10th December 2019 till 20th December 2019. The goal of the edit-a-thon was to get feedback on the existing data in the Education database and also to add the missing activities with the help of community members and affiliates. During our campaign for crowdsourcing data from affiliates, we asked for community members to join us as regional collaborators, through this call we collaborated with Wikimedians from Nepal, India, Jordan, Ghana, Cameroon, Poland and other countries. By the end of the campaign, we have received 36 new data items of Wikimedia education activities from 13 different countries. Thanks to our volunteers and affiliate members from these countries to help us in this campaign.

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 are still relying heavily on the whole Wikimedia Education community 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.



Social Media channels or hashtags: @WikimediaEdu #EduWiki