Education/Newsletter/December 2016/Greek schools collaborate to write local history about Corfu

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Greek schools collaborate to write on local history[edit]

By Marios Magioladitis (Wikimedia Community User Group Greece) and Sotirios Fotiou (teacher of informatics)

CorfuPedia logo

Snippet: Greek schools collaborate to write on local history about Corfu

What is happening when students have questions about the history of their place? How can Wikipedia help them create and learn? What can they do in order to spread their knowledge to the world? These are some questions that Corfupedia is going to answer in the following months.

CorfuPedia will be a student project with the main purpose of introducing students to Wikipedia via creating new articles about the history of the place they live in.

The project will take place in Corfu, Greece. A small island in the north western part of Greece. Corfu, has been mentioned from ancient times and many great personalities of the past, from Ulysses to Onassis and from Cervantes to Durrell spent many days of their lives on the island. English, French and Italians, during their occupation of the island, left great monuments that are still part of the living history of Corfu. The students of the cooperating schools proposed the project to their teachers, since they have seen (after their introduction to Wikipedia) that there are not many articles referring to the local history of Corfu in Wikipedia.

They decided to create Corfupedia. A Wikipedia student project. Genuine new articles, high resolution photographs, hyperlinks (blue and red links) as well as graphs and tables are going to be gathered, organized, evaluated and published by the students. The students will learn the values of cooperation, creation, and participation by applying their knowledge and research to a real project that will contribute to the main goals of Wikipedia and spread the Corfiot history around the world.

The students come from 2 Junior High Schools (Secondary education schools, with students aged 12-14), one evening High school (students aged 15-65! ) and one vocational evening High school (students aged from 16 to 38) and a team from the local, Ionian University (4 MA students with Phd candidates). The total number of students is 60.

The project will take place during the 2016-2017 school period from December to May. The aim is to cover the main articles of the local history of Corfu between 1815 to 1864, the period when the island was under British occupation.

We hope that the project is going to be successful and we will come back to you with more information during its creation and at the completion of the project in May.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Greece here.