Education/News/January 2019/More than a hundred students gathered in Ecuador to edit Wikipedia
More than a hundred students gathered in Ecuador to edit Wikipedia
[edit]Author: Edjoerv
Summary: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador has been the main partner in Wikimedistas de Ecuador's educational projects. In two years, this collaboration had consisted in three edition events and many articles improved by the students. This editatona gathered 135 students to the project, who edited constantly in around 8 hours articles of women writers from Ecuador and their work.
In November 25, around 9 o'clock, the first group of students walked into Aula 012, ready to share their knowledge about women writers from Ecuador. User:Maritzafigueroa9 is a teacher at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador, and she runs the Community Bridges program there too. She always remembers a couple words that pushed her to encourage her students to edit Wikipedia: "Be brave". And this time, after three years working on her own with her classroom on editing topics about her class (Cross-cultural Communications), she was brave enough to call more than a 100 students to edit together the spanish Wikipedia. In different times, each one of them had the chance to press the "edit" button and add content and references to Wikipedia articles.
User:Edjoerv, User:Mikaelashamrock and User:Tanuyeiro are long-term wikimedians that helped develop the ecuadorian community of Wikimedia users, and both of them have been engaged on teaching others how to edit Wikipedia for around 4 years. User:Vahidmasrour is the educational expert at Wikimedistas de Ecuador and the one in charge of talking to teachers about the benefits that bring using Wikipedia in their classroom. In 2015, Vahid had a talk at Campus Party Ecuador, which Maritza attended and convinced herself of starting this journey. The five of them reunited in Quito three years later and talked during two days about the importance of editing, and how they should add reliable sources to the information in the articles.
On Monday, november 24, Tania was helping students from PUCE make their first contributions to Wikipedia. When she finished with her first round of 25 students, she was very impressed. "Everyone was eager to contribute with our own history", she mentioned, "students understood that we are a network of knowledge". That was the first goal Wikimedistas de Ecuador wanted to achieve when approaching new people involved in the educational area.
Tags: Ecuador, education, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador