Education/Newsletter/March 2016/Education Program Historic Data Campaign
By Anna Koval (Wikimedia Foundation) and Msannakoval (Wikipedia Education Program)
Snippet: Epic campaign begins to collect historic data from all Wikimedia education programs worldwide.
In 2015, Wikipedia celebrated 15 years and the Wikipedia Education Program celebrated 5 years. As we conclude 2015 and welcome 2016, we are recalculating our collective impact.
Wikipedia is being used as a teaching tool in education around the world in more than 80 countries worldwide. We know that these education programs exist, but in some cases, we know little more than that.
We are collecting historical data from all education programs to update our narrative and to communicate our contributions to the Wikimedia Movement and the world. This campaign will include each and every country that has participated in the Wikipedia Education Program, including those that have not been counted before.
This page explains the campaign's context, purpose, targeted outcomes, and overall goal. This Phabricator task tracks the campaign committee's collaboration.
So far, more than 30 programs have shared their data, and already the results are impressive!
“In 10 years, almost 5,000 educators and almost 50,000 students in more than 500 cities and at almost 1,000 schools have added almost 150,000 articles to Wikimedia projects and have contributed more than half a billion bytes of content to the free knowledge movement.”
And that is with just 30 programs reporting. There are another 50+ programs to count.
If your education program has not shared its numbers yet, there is still time. Through March, we will continue collecting data.
Please share your education program's data here. Later this spring, we will analyze the data and announce the campaign results.
There are plans to develop tools that would automate the collection of some of this information. For example, an internationalized multi-language, multi-project dashboard along the lines of what the Wiki Education Foundation developed. The functionality of the Wiki Ed Dashboard is demonstrated and explained in this video To learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation's Program and Events Dashboard, please see this discussion on Meta wiki. It is important to note that these dashboards can only count current contributions. They cannot count backward and collect historical data. Therefore, this process must be done manually.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to share your education program's historical data. We look forward to working together with you to showcase and celebrate the collected results of our work. :)
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program's historic data campaign here.