Education/Newsletter/September 2016/Armenian students inspire their parents to join Wikipedia

Armenian students inspire their parents to join Wikipedia

Snippet: Wikimedia Armenia organized its 4th wiki seminar for teachers.

Wikimedia Armenia organized its traditional wiki seminar for teachers on June 14-19 in Dilijan - one of the most beautiful cities in Armenia. It's already 4th wiki seminar in a row. This year we had the highest number of applications - 146, of which Wikimedia Armenia chose only 51 to participate. The aim of such seminars are the increase of reach of wiki projects, the growth of the wiki movement among teachers from different regions of Armenia, as well as to involve new editors and volunteers in the WMAM projects, especially in Wikipedia Education Program. During the seminar, the teachers learned about wiki movement, its ideology, wikiprojects, how to edit different wikiprojects, the main rules and tools. After learning basic rules, the teachers began to improve and create articles with great enthusiasm. Day by day, they deepened their wiki knowledge and editing became easier and fun for them in a way that no one wanted to leave wiki during the breaks.

Among participants there were also parents whose children already actively edit Wikipedia in the frames of Wikipedia Education program. Seeing their children so active in editing they wanted to learn editing tools themselves. Hamest Melikyan confessed:

I was worrying that my son spent hours in front of the laptop. But now, seeing the important work he is doing by creating and sharing free knowledge, I'm more understanding. I'm so proud of him!

Hamest's son - 7Vendetta7 is a high school student, one of the active editors of Armenian Wikipedia. Editing for only 1 year and 3 months, he has already 3,401 edits in different wikiprojects and 755 articles on Armenian Wikipedia 1 of which (Dennis Bergkamp) was chosen first as a good article and then as a featured article. 7Vendetta7 is also one of the editors of Armenian Wikipedia Education Program, who has been selected by Wikimedia Armenia to participate in WikiCamp Portugal on August 17-27 organized for Western Armenian students.

The last 2 days of the seminar coincided with Wiki Loves Science project edit-a-thon during which teachers got acquainted with many experienced editors of Armenian Wikipedia who motivated them to continue their wiki way.

At the end of the seminar, 7 teachers, who were actively editing since previous seminars, received Gratitude Certificates for enriching wikiprojects with high quality content.

Almost 2 months have passed since the teachers of the seminar has returned home. Many of them continue editing and enriching Armenian Wikipedia with high quality educational articles of their field.