Education/Newsletter/March 2015/A new edition of Wikipedia Education Program kicks off in Uruguay

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By Fernando da Rosa (Wikimedia UY) - Samir Elsharbaty (WMF)

Snippet: Wikipedia Education Program in Uruguay starts a new edition expanding to new bigger classes

In November 2014, Wikimedians, professors and students in Uruguay gathered to celebrate concluding the first edition of Wikipedia Education Program there. The first edition of the program headed by Prof. Fernando da Rosa held events attended by 1676 people of which nearly one thousand students created accounts to start editing on Wikipedia. The 899 articles that have been created and nearly 30,000 edits that have been made, were the most prominent numbers in this edition.

In the following couple of months, the program leads spent longer time preparing for a new edition aiming at retaining their past success and expanding to new classes with larger numbers of students. The new edition’s plan aims mainly at raising the awareness of students toward Wikipedia. In this phase, three new courses are planned to start at "Facultad de Información y Comunicación, Universidad de la República, Uruguay" with expected number of 300 students divided into two shifts, each of 150. By the end of these courses all students will have a clear idea about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement and how to join it.

In detail, two of these three courses will be mainly theoretical, titled "Introduction to ICT" and "Multimedia I" with more than 100 students in each. In these two courses, students are asked to understand Wikipedia and edit if they want, which is not mandatory to pass their courses. The third course, "Multimedia II" is expected to have around 60 students who will understand the basics of Wikipedia and how to edit. In this course, students will need to edit Wikipedia as part of their syllabus in order to succeed.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Uruguay here.