Education/Newsletter/May 2013/Articles of Interest in other publications

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Article on Wikipedia for foreign language teaching in The Linguist

The Linguist is a magazine published by the University of Birmingham, England for language learners. In April, it published an article on using Wikipedia for foreign/second language development, which featured the work of Thelmadatter at ITESM Campus Ciudad de México. Link to the article


Egypt program produces great results
Participants in the Jordan program

The results from the second term of the Egypt program are in, and students are dramatically improving the Arabic Wikipedia for the better. Students at Ain Shams University and Cairo University added nearly 6 million bytes of content to the Arabic Wikipedia last term, and the are now making up 10 percent of the total active editors on the Arabic Wikipedia. The program has now expanded to Jordan, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia as well. Learn more about the program.

U.S. Ambassador featured on WMF blog
Chanitra Bishop

Chanitra Bishop, a librarian at Indiana University Bloomington, started volunteering for the Wikipedia Education Program in its pilot phase in fall 2010, and she's been active in the program ever since, serving as a Campus Ambassador and Regional Ambassador. As a librarian, Chanitra interacts with students in teaching them both how to use and how to edit Wikipedia. Learn more about Chanitra's views on Wikipedia by reading this profile of her.

Program leaders gather to share learnings
Education Program Leaders Workshop group photo

More than 40 people gathered in Milan, Italy, last month for an Education Program Leaders Workshop. Participants shared progress and plans for education efforts happening in more than 25 countries worldwide. The enthusiasm for Wikipedia Education Program efforts is large, and participants were happy to discuss the breadth of activities happening worldwide. Learn more.

Canadian professor assigns translation

Julie McDonough Dolmaya, a professor at York University in Canada, asked her students last term to translate articles from the French Wikipedia into the English Wikipedia as part of their coursework. She's written a blog post reflecting on the pedagogical aspects of such an assignment for her blog. Read the post.

Teachers in Namibia learn to edit Wikipedia

Peter Gallert, a faculty member at the Polytechnic of Namibia, authored a post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog highlighting the outcomes of a workshop he led for teachers at schools throughout Namibia, teaching them how to edit Wikipedia. Peter hopes that these teachers will start editing Wikipedia with their students in villages across Namibia. The workshop participants, despite hot temperatures and slow internet connections, moved the article on Witvlei from a stub to a start class article. Read more about Peter's efforts in Namibia.

Swedish university kicks off program

Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences launched a unique collaboration in January in which a "Wikipedian in Academy" works with the university to encourage 100 researchers at the university to make significant contributions to Wikipedia. The intention is to have an annual Wikipedia day when researchers participate in workshops and training and/or write about their field of research in Swedish and foreign language Wikipedia. Learn more about the project.