Education/News/June 2018/Basque secondary students have now better coverage for main topics thanks to the Education Program
Basque secondary students have now better coverage for main topics thanks to the Education Program[edit]
Author: Galder Gonzalez
Summary: Basque Wikimedians User Group Education Program has two different goals: on the one hand, we want to involve as much students as possible in article creation; on the other hand, we want to improve basic topics for secondary school students, based on their official curriculum. 1.710 articles has been identified in this project, and the growth in this first year is obvious, thanks to students and wikimedians.
Basque Education Program has two different goals, and we want to fulfill them at the same time. First, we started identifying what articles where important for secondary school students, what they needed to know based on the official education curriculum and we found a bunch of 1,700 articles (our first goal was 1,000) that were at the same time important and frequently viewed. This articles count for around the 7% of all Wikipedia articles views, and quality must be specially worked on there.
Once we identified those articles, we started to find systems to improve them. Our may system has been giving them to University professors so they could ask their students to complete them for their assignments. With more than 40 courses in all kind of topics, students have written down more than a million words in their assignments.
But we have other systems for improving them: librarians in Donostia have worked on Universal Literature topics, managing both the list of articles that should be improved and making high quality editions within our librarians program.
Wikimedians have improved articles as regular contributions, and we have also created monthly competitions with great results. The sole action of creating a comprehensive list of basic articles have been helpful to focus active wikimedians effort.
In this graph you can see how articles have been improved according to the topic:
As you can easily see, some topics haven’t improved (most notably sports and culture), but some others have been widely augmented, specially on STEM topics.
We have a long way ahead, but our first steps are hopeful.
Tags: OER, article quality, minorized languages, curriculum