Education/Newsletter/June 2016/Maastricht University 40 years

Maastricht University 40 years

Snippet: Expanding the knowledge on Wikipedia and collaborating with Wikimedia is the next step

Since 2014, Wikipedia has been taught at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. In 2014, at the same time, a series of three Wikipedia workshops were organised and, separate from this, a specialised course was started as part of the bachelor of students. The course included also an image donation of illustrations from historic travel reports. In 2015, Jimmy Wales received an honorary doctorate for Wikipedia, and three Wikipedia courses were organised, together with 3 open-door, walk-in Wikipedia sessions. And in 2016, another new course has started.

This year, the university celebrates its 40th anniversary, and they want to organise lustrum festivities. All of the Wikipedia activities that were organised in the past years have created awareness and have come to the attention of the management of the university. With the 40 years celebration, they have planned multiple activities together with Wikipedia, including a writing week on Wikipedia. Additionally, they have organised a special knowledge session about what staff of the university can learn about collaborating with Wikipedia/Wikimedia, what the benefits are, why their colleagues already have participated and how they have experienced it, and how editing Wikipedia works and can be used in higher education. As these now are organised together, the importance and value in education is further shown, and it will be interesting to see where this will lead us.