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Education/Newsletter/December 2015/Wiki expeditions, animation clips about alebrijes and more at the Tec de Monterrey in Mexico

From Outreach Wiki

By Leigh Thelmadatter (Wiki Learning-Tec de Monterrey)

Group photo of Reto Wikimedia participants at Tec de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus

Snippet: Student participation is more than just text!

For the Fall 2015 Wiki Learning-Tec de Monterrey held two wiki expeditions in Mexico City and began a collaboration with the Museo de Arte Popular. We also received our first grant!

Wiki expeditions

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The 32-campus Tec de Monterrey system has each semester an event called "Semana i" (i Week), when students forego normal classes for an entire week to work on challenging projects called "retos." For the Mexico City and Santa Fe campuses, one option for students was to work with Wikimedia, with the aptly named projects "Reto Wikimedia." Both campuses opted to do wiki-expeditions to different parts of Mexico City. The Mexico City campus had the larger group with almost 90 students registered, who covered the two southern boroughs of Xochimilco and Tlalpan. The Santa Fe group had 35 participants, and covered the San Ángel neighborhood found not far from this campus.

Both campus took photos of landmarks with the Mexico City campus also focusing on photos of everyday life in the south of the city. The Mexico City campus tallied 5264 photos, 8 videos and 36 articles, including articles related to the area into French, Swedish and Danish. The Santa Fe group tallied 605 photos, and ten articles in Spanish on landmarks in San Ángel.

In addition, the Mexico City campus had a special speaker the borough chronicler of Xochmilco, Sebastián Flores Farfán. A short montage video of the event is in the works.

Some student photos:

Some video clips of the event:

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Animation about alebrijes

Wikiservicio, students working with Wikimedia for their community service requirement, added a new component. To attract more students and encourage more students to do all of their community service hours with Wikimedia, a collaboration was set up with the Museo de Arte Popular (MAP)... the first of many we hope! Six students from the digital art and animation major (see last newsletter) have continued working with Wikimedia, but focusing their efforts in creating short animation clips in relation to the mission of promoting and preserving Mexican folk art. One clip has been completed and can be see to the right of this text. So far, the video has subtitles in English, German, French and Punjabi. A second clip is nearing completion at the time of this writing.

Classes and Wikimetrics

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Fifteen students completed work with Wikiservicio doing translations, writing new articles and doing photography projects. As of this date, 7 have indicated interest in working with Wikiservicio on campus and another six with MAP.

Five university level classes and one high school class on the Mexico City (South) campus have had projects, all in writing and translation, with some video work.

Wikimetrics for the semester are:

According to Wikimetrics tool....

  • 9,589,918 bytes to Spanish Wikipedia
  • 3,098 edits to the mainspace of Spanish Wikipedia
  • 367 pages created in the mainspace of Spanish Wikipedia

Manual count

  • 302 student and teacher participants
  • 281 Spanish Wikipedia articles created or expanded
  • 6,057 photographs
  • 10 videos
  • 9 articles in English Wikipedia
  • 2 articles in French Wikipedia
  • 1 article in Swedish Wikipedia
  • 1 article in Danish Wikipedia

First grant Wiki Learning received its first grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The long-term goal of this grant is to establish a system for financing Wiki Learning. The grant, which totals a modest 12,500 Mexican pesos, will be used for swag, such as t shirts, stickers, buttons, etc, especially for Semana i activities and promotion of wiki activities to other campus. The money will also be used for incidental travel expenses, especially for projects needing to move expensive camera equipment.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Mexico here.