Education/News/October 2017/WikiConvention Francophone 2017

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Author: VMasrour (WMF) (talk) 05:52, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Summary: Highlight of the contents of WikiConvention Francophone that related to education.

WikiConvention Francophone was the second such event, focused on the French Wikipedia. It was held in Strasbourg, France, on October 19-21.

While the conference didn’t have a focus on education, two sessions were held on the topic: “How to convince educators to use Wikipedia as an educational tools”: the classic mythbusters “Wikipedia is not reliable”, “anybody can write anything”, and so on were recognized by participants from France as well as northern Africa, indicating that there is still significant work to do to remove those barriers. “Trending topics in education programs” was also received with interest.

WikiConvention Francophone was highly interesting in its discussions of Wiktionary, which has a highly engaged group of participants. Wikiversity also was part of the program, with volunteers that are actively promoting its use.

Vikidia, an independent project that uses the Mediawiki engine and Wikipedia structure to create and share contents focused on the needs of the 8-12 years-old group was also presented. While there are a few language versions of it currently working, French and Spanish are the current most advanced ones.

Interestingly, the most visible education program currently running in France Wikiconcours lycéen was not presented.

The Lingua Libre project was also presented, of high interest to linguist and “smaller languages” groups. While it still isn’t squarely on the Mediawiki platform, it will fairly soon.

Perhaps one of the most significant part of the program for education was the special event with Katherine Maher and Bruno Struder, Député, président de la Commission des affaires culturelles et de l'éducation. During his intervention, the representative offered to the French Wikimedians to make a presentation to the commission he presides, which is currently working on a report with recommendations regarding the overhaul of education in France.

If you would like to see some pictures, please visit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiConvention_francophone_2017

Wikimedia France has announced that it will release recordings of some of the talks at a later date.

Tags: education, France