Education/News/May 2018/The first students of Russia with diplomas of Wikimedia and Petrozavodsk State University
The first students of Russia with diplomas of Wikimedia and Petrozavodsk State University
Author: Andrew Krizhanovsky
Summary: This is a report about works of PetrSU students in WikiProjects during 2017-2018 academic year.
For the first time in Russia, 14 students received diplomas signed by the state university and NP «Wikimedia RU». The certificates confirm that the students of Petrozavodsk State University are specialists in the wiki-projects of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Diplomas[edit]
Pros and cons of certificates for students of PetrSU was discussed during 2016-2017. The final decision on the preparation of certificates was made at the WikiConference 2017 in Moscow.
A certificate with a beautiful design was made by Natalya Vdovitsyna (User:Natty610). She is a professional designer with a lot of works in the portfolio. It should be noted that Natalia uploaded a number of her works to Wikimedia Commons with an open license.
See list of students with diplomas (in Russian).
Research in programming Wikidata[edit]
Students of PetrSU take part in the course "Research in programming Wikidata". Their work in Wikiversity is supervised by the teacher of PetrSU Andrew Krizhanovsky.
In this course, students study the Wikidata database, create queries to the database in SPARQL language, visualize results of queries. Then they write research articles in two languages: in English Wikiversity and Russian Wikiversity, linking these articles by interwiki links.
Students studied a number of Wikidata objects and wrote the following articles:
- Archive (the article was written by Mary Anisimova),
- Musical Compositions (Ilya Vershinin),
- Operating systems (Mary Kornysheva),
- Spacecraft and stations (Rego Grigorij),
- Schools (Arina Demidova),
- Institutes of Russian Academy of Science (Laitinen Nikita),
- Newspapers (Anastasia Bodryakova),
- Radio programs (Alexandra Dyatlova),
- Human settlements (Anna Eparskaya),
- Ships (the article was written by Max Klyuchnikov),
- University (the article was extended by Sergey Vedeshkin).
Let's describe in more detail the article Musical Compositions written by Ilya Vershinin. Ilya wrote a useful SPARQL script related to music and solving the urgent practical task, namely: to find music works whose authors died more than 70 years ago, and whose audio record is not on the Wikimedia Commons. Authors of musical works have died for a long time, so the license restrictions are removed, you can use these audio recordings with an open license. Built SPARQL query yields 160 records, which means that music lovers ‒ Wikipedia editors ‒ have something to look for in music archives for uploading to the encyclopedia.
Artolela ‒ Wikidata based games[edit]
Like other students Yulia Ipatova started working with the Wikidata object "Pictures" (Q3305213). Quite soon the work was stopped, because the idea came that a fun computer game can be made with pictures of Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons… We diligently and carefully invented the name of the project. As a result, we agreed on the pleasant-sounding abbreviation "Artolela", that is "Art of learning language". This name indicates that in the developed games players get acquainted with the artistic heritage of the world (art), players learn new words (learning language).
So, the teacher suggested the task and three students started working:
- Kirill Orloff and Kristina Shevtsova developed the Android application Artolela.
- Yulia Ipatova developed Website Artolela-web.
Languages were chosen arbitrarily, based on the personal preferences of students and the teacher. Android application supports three languages (Russian, English and Italian). In 2017 Wikidata has 757 paintings, which have a description simultaneously in Russian, English and Italian. The constructed SPARQL script extracted this information from the Wikidata.
Artolela-web allows you to learn Russian, English, or German, and the number of pictures that have descriptions in two languages depends on the specific pair: Russian and English ‒ 3035 paintings, English and German ‒ 5012, Russian and German ‒ 724 (as of 2017).
Students wrote articles about their work Artolela and Artolela-web (in Russian) in the project "Wikidata Programming" of Russian Wikiversity. Julia Ipatova translated her article and published it in English Wikiversity: Research in programming Wikidata/Artolela-web. The students created projects on the GitHub site: Artolela-web and Artolela.
Now the game on the website is more interesting than the Android application, because you need not only to translate the text, but also to guess which text is right for the picture. That is, there is no clue in the form of text in the second language, which makes the game more complicated and fun.
Authorea, LaTeX and English[edit]
During this research work students together with the teacher wrote their research essays in several formats (Latex, HTML, PDF, Wiki markup) and disseminated their articles on several sites (Wikiversity, Authorea, Nauchkor):
- an article (in Russian) with wiki-markup in the project "Wikidata Programming" of Russian Wikiversity;
- step by step translation of this article into English (LaTeX format) at site Authorea, the result text is HTML page (see list of articles written by PetrSU students at Authorea);
- this article in LaTeX compiled to PDF and submitted to the site Nauchkor (see list of articles written by PetrSU students at Nauchkor);
- a translation of this article in the course "Research in programming Wikidata" of English Wikiversity.
Petrozavodsk State University[edit]
From 2014 PetrSU students write about our university in Wikipedia.
The article "Petrozavodsk State University" (in Russian Wikipedia) for the second semester of the academic year 2017/2018 was supplemented with material that will be of interest to economists, lawyers, historians, philologists and sportsmen.
In the English Wikipedia student Egor Khorolsky in the article "Petrozavodsk State University" wrote the section PetrSU in 1985—1990. This was the translation of the section "PetrSU in the second half of the 80's" of the article about PetrSU from Russian Wikipedia.
In the previous year students Vadim Sidorkov and Stanislav Remnev created video about Petrozavodsk and our university, this video has audio track in Russian. In this academic year student Vladimir Lipinsky and teacher Andrei Krizhanovskiy translated subtitles from Russian into English. Then Andrew read the text, and Vladimir included a new audio track in the video.
See also[edit]
See the previous story Russia report: WikiProjects of students of Petrozavodsk State University (2017).