Jump to content

Education/Newsletter/March 2015/Cairo University students wrap up their sixth term on Wikipedia

From Outreach Wiki

By Walaa Abdelmonem (Wikipedia Education Program Egypt) - Samir Elsharbaty (WMF)

Snippet: Another successful term of Wikipedia courses has just ended in the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University with great success.

This term the program started in Cairo University with promoting posts on Wikipedia and social media websites to help new participants understand the general idea of the program as well as holding meetings with professors from the departments of English language and Spanish language. Walaa Abdelmonem, the program leader in Cairo University, has held some workshops for the English translation students but they did not show great interest and stopped soon. On the other hand, Prof. Abeer Abdel-Hafiz has exerted great efforts with her students in addition to introducing Walaa to new classes of senior students for whom she has organized general seminars about Wikipedia and the education program. At the same time Walaa was assigning her Spanish department students of the first and second year to edit Wikipedia.

Abeer and Walaa started the workshops with students who has been excited to the idea of contributing to Wikipedia. Abeer was recommending to her students translating articles about Spanish female celebrities from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia or working on articles about history. Most of students worked on articles about female writers, novelists, athletes, etc. Their classes are achieving great success in the direction which the program is taking around the world, i.e. increasing gender diversity. Walaa has held 2 online webinars to follow up with her students in addition to the workshops held at the campus. Regarding numbers, 64 students joined this course, of which 56 are female and 8 are male students. They worked on 55 articles adding more than 1.8 million bytes to the article namespace on the Arabic Wikipedia.

See the course page of this group on the Arabic Wikipedia here.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.