Education/News/October 2018/Wikifridays: editing Wikipedia in the university

Wikifridays: editing Wikipedia in the university

Author: Florencia Guastavino (WMAR) (talk) 17:49, 22 October 2018 (UTC)

Summary: An experience about using Wikipedia with university students and teachers in Argentina.

From Wikimedia Argentina Education Program, we think that it is very important that students and university teachers participate in the edition of content in Wikipedia. To promote this work, since 2015 we carried out the project "Wikipedia in the University".

This proposal has two instances of work: a first virtual workshop with teachers leading the proposal in the institution; and a second meeting, that can be virtual or face-to-face, where students begin to edit. During this year, we work with more than 10 Universities and with Maimónides University we took the project one step further, organizing "Wikifridays".

Together with teachers and students of the Multimedia Career we divided the work in four weeks, during the month of September. In the first week, we work on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in general, and introduce them to the basic notions about editing in the encyclopedia. In the second meeting, we carried out a workshop on Free Culture and Creative Commons licenses and we started the editing workshop that continued during the third full day. For the group of 4th year, in addition, we designed a fourth workshop where we work on Wikidata. All the work was carried out by 38 students and 5 teachers.

This work throughout the whole month, allowed us not only to edit quality content but to deepen the work on free culture and the various wikimedia projects together with the students. The exchange was very interesting and allows us to continue thinking about possible ways of working with Universities. Some of these debates are then captured in research papers that we write together with university professors. We share one of these works, for those interested in the subject.

During October, we are working with teachers and students of the subject History of architecture in FADU-UBA (Buenos Aires University). It is the third consecutive year in which we work with this subject, in the improvement of content and also in the illustration of the articles from images taken by the students. We hope to let you know about the results of this work soon!

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