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Education/News/June 2020/Participants of Wiki/Ponder online workshop in Kosovo edit Wikipedia

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Participants of Wiki/Ponder online workshop in Kosovo edit Wikipedia


Author: Miranda038




Summary: Members of Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group in Kosovo were invited by UNICEF Innovations Lab in Kosovo to collaborate for an online workshop Ponder hosted by them. Part of the workshop, precisely the final session of the workshop, participants (mainly high school students) were asked to create new articles on sq Wikipedia. Since the first workshop resulted in success, we helped host two more of the same form thematic workshops throughout May and June.


Starting in late March in Kosovo (as elsewhere) organizations, schools, and such were trying their best to adapt their activities online. This was also the case with UNICEF Innovations Lab in Kosovo, a unit of UNICEF Kosovo operating in cooperation with NGO PEN, who yearly organize Ponder Critical Media Literacy Workshop with the aim to improve critical thinking skills, focusing on Critical Media Literacy. And what better way to achieve this online than by asking participants to edit Wikipedia articles? That's where us Wikimedians of Albanian Language stepped in.

The first workshop took place from April 4th-April 19th. Those interested to become part of the workshop had to sign up via a google form and the participants which fit the requirements were added to a closed Facebook group by our colleagues of the Ponder workshop. This group during the two-week period served to share useful videos and tutorials relevant to critical thinking, tutorials on why and how we should edit Wikipedia, and answering questions on technical issues beginners usually encounter. The participants were divided into 18 groups (of 3 members) and the topics of the articles were selected by us - all related to medicine. As a result, we had new 18 articles on sq Wikipedia such as Public Health in Kosovo, Vaccination in Kosovo, Seasonal Flu in Kosovo, Smallpox in Kosovo, etc. of which 3 were chosen as winners.

Seeing the results of this workshop, UNICEF Innovations Lab/Ponder reached us again to collaborate for two more, this time with participants from two small towns in Kosovo (Lipjan and Gjilan). Unlike the previous workshop, we decided to experiment and suggested to the organizers we use the Content Translation Tool for the next two. Besides this change, we followed the same procedures (using a closed Facebook group to communicate with the members)

The theme for the workshop in Lipjan held from 8-22 May was Mental Health and we were happy to see 16 new articles translated! Again, three groups who did a slightly better job were chosen as winners. Right as we finished with Lipjan, the workshop with Gjilan started from May 22nd lasting until June 3rd. The theme this time was Sexual Health and 16 articles in total were created.

We also held two online Q&A sessions where participants could address technical problems they're addressing and created an article in our blog to help them with electronic dictionaries and automatic translation tools, seeing that some of the participants were shy to ask publicly in the Facebook group.

This whole experience was refreshing for us and seeing the success of the Content Translation Tool inspired us to reach out to Universities of foreign languages in Albania and Kosovo to see the possibilities of collaborations between our user group and their institutions.



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