Education/News/March 2021/Educational program of GLAM Macedonia

Educational program of GLAM Macedonia

Summary: Although the COVID-19 pandemic limited our face-to-face interaction, GLAM Macedonia managed to continue its activities online, organizing numerous edit-a-thons, continuing long-term projects, and educating newcomers into the editing Wikipedian world.

Wiki Club Skopje, February 2020
Teachers conference in Debrca
Wiki Club Ohrid, Rare Diseases workshop
Wiki Club Veles

At the beginning of 2021, Wiki Clubs remain active online with no gatherings. At the beginning of January, we started a new project called Wiki Senior, with the goal to educate seniors to edit and create new articles. On the 15th of January, traditionally, GLAM Macedonia’s members created and edited new articles for Wikipedia’s birthday.

For the entire month of February, our Wiki Clubs all over the country were active in editing and creating new articles, Wiki Club Ohrid, from the city of Ohrid, continued with the project called “Rare diseases”, a project that started in 2019.

In cooperation with the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Skopje, we’ve successfully organized an editing contest called Meet Russia, where 20 participants from the Wiki Clubs created or improved 625 articles for the entire month of February.

In 2020, GLAM Macedonia's edit-a-thons are generally comprised of the Wiki Club members and themed on some certain topic. Originally the events should have been organized in physical presence during a several hours time span. But due to the pandemic, we have adapted as a online event with a 24 hour time span. The first one was held in September, commemorating the 75 years after the World War II and served as Macedonian installment of World War II… 75 Years After. The second one in October, was held at the Wiki Club Staro Nagoričane as part of the project Meet Srpska, that has a goal to promote the Republic of Srpska within the Wikipedia and the Wikimedian community. The last three were conducted at December 9, 11 and 12-13, mostly of the being joined at international initiatives. The one on 9th was part of global editing Women in Climate Change. The next one was organized and themed after the Mountain Day. The last one occurred during the weekend and it was titled "Ottoman Culture". When it comes to numbers, there were 46 participations and 83 newly established articles.

Teachers conferences serve for invocating, introducing, sharing and mentoring about Wikipedia. The main target group, the teachers, are gathered at their respective elementary schools where they teach and to introduce them with Wikipedia, how it started as a project, the goals of Wikipedia, its columns of objectivism within its articles, and as a project in general. The goal of the conferences is to implement implement Wikipedia in the classroom, enlarging the boundary of our Wikipedian community and this project of Wikipedia could have bigger productivity. This year we held three conferences of this kind. The overall outcome was over 100 people who attended these three conferences.

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