Pete Forsyth, an early designer of the Wikipedia Education Program, is now teaching a free online course on Wikipedia and Open Educational Resources, along with Wikipedian and education researcher Sara Frank Bristow. The six-week course, “Writing Wikipedia Articles,” recently concluded its first run, and will be offered again starting 14 May (Americas)/15 May (Asia/Australia). You can enroll here.

The course was born of Communicate OER, a project that seeks to activate the Open Educational Resources community to improve and update Wikipedia articles relevant to its field. Accordingly, as students learn about the technical and social aspects of Wikipiedia, they are encouraged to improve such articles as open educational resources, open content, MOOC, and free license. Students successfully completing the course earn the WikiSOO Burba Badge, which is based on English Wikipedia’s “service awards” and Peer to Peer University’s badges. The course is offered through the Peer to Peer University’s recently launched School of Open.

“This course has allowed us to bring together several communities that are passionate about the same things, but not always closely connected,” Forsyth said. “The OER community brings the values and practices that brought Wikipedia into existence to formal and informal learning around the world. The School of Open provides the perfect environment for a course like ours, allowing us to work alongside colleagues from free culture organizations like Creative Commons and Mozilla.”

Students are welcome to enroll regardless of their background; while some familiarity with wikis or OER can be helpful, it is not required.

“The WikiSOO course is exactly the kind of work serious Wikipedians need to be doing not only to make their encyclopedia better, but to make their community a more sane place to collaborate,” said Christine, a student who earned the WikiSOO Burba Badge in the course’s first run. “This course provides a solid primer of the skills needed to navigate the syntax, discourse, and guidelines you will encounter if you want to make substantive contributions to Wikipedia’s audacious mission.”

Enrollment in the course’s second run is open through next week. (The first class will be held Tuesday/Wednesday.) See the course’s page on the School of Open for more information, or to join the 60 students who have already enrolled!

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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Professor Rafael Pezzi, a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, read about a new program to support university faculty members in Brazil who were interested in incorporating Wikipedia editing into students’ assignments. Rafael was intrigued by the idea, and thought it might be a good idea for his physics course for engineering students.

“Wikipedia makes it explicit how knowledge is built: a never-ending dynamic process with conflicting opinions in a lively discussion,” he says. “Although this process is fundamental, it is ignored in the standard textbook-based class where knowledge is just given, considered as an absolute truth.”

Rafael was impressed with the level of support he received in the program, both from colleagues and from the Wikipedia community. Fabio Azevedo and Israel Rocha served as Wikipedia Ambassadors for his class. They introduced Wikipedia and motivated the students to participate in the assignment. They were also very supportive on-line, clarifying technicalities of the Wikipedia interface and introducing the participants to the Wikipedia community.

For Fabio, an editor since 2007, becoming a Wikipedia Ambassador and supporting Rafael’s class was a natural choice.

“I was motivated by using a modern teaching technique at my university, improving free content in my language, and helping Wikipedia to grow,” Fabio says. “I gave a talk on Wikipedia editing for his students in the first or second week of class. After, I replied to some emails, helping students with editing question and uploading images.”

“I must say that the help of the Ambassadors was key to making it happen,” Rafael says. “Without them it would not have happened, as I am not an experienced editor and created my Wikipedia account for this project.”

Rafael’s students really took to editing, creating or significantly expanding several important articles about physics related topics on the Portuguese Wikipedia, including articles such as Thermometer, Supercritical fluid and Interference of waves. In fact, five of Rafael’s students enjoyed the assignment so much that they volunteered to be Ambassadors for the current term.

“Basically traditional writing assignments are read once or twice and then sits in a drawer or folder archive in the professor computer,” Rafael says. “It is of limited value and does not really motivate the student apart from getting a good grade. With Wikipedia, the students have the real publishing experience and the feeling that what they write can help others understand what they are studying. Some get really motivated by this challenge.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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With more than 280 million native speakers, Arabic is one of the world’s most spoken languages, but the Arabic Wikipedia has lagged behind other language Wikipedias in terms of the amount of articles. The Arabic Wikipedia has only 205,000 articles — a tiny fraction in comparison to the English Wikipedia, which has 4.2 million articles. But the Arabic Wikipedia has been steadily growing over the last year, thanks in part to the efforts of college students in Egypt participating in the Wikipedia Education Program.

The Wikipedia Education Program kicked off in Egypt with a Cairo pilot at two universities, Ain Shams University and Cairo University. The chart at right shows the amount of content added to the Arabic Wikipedia by students participating in the program. In the first term of the pilot, students added about 1.85 million bytes of content to the Arabic Wikipedia — an incredible achievement celebrated at a conference in Cairo in July 2012. In the second term of the pilot, which wrapped up in February 2013, students contributed even more, with over 5.97 million bytes of content added to the Arabic Wikipedia. In addition, students who we’ve introduced to editing through the Wikipedia Education Program have contributed an additional 515,000 bytes, meaning the program has brought a total of more than 8.34 million bytes to the Arabic Wikipedia.

Volunteer program leaders organized a second celebration conference at Cairo University on February 27, 2013. Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez, a professor of Spanish from Cairo University, opened the conference and spoke about the spirit of the program and its importance in the lives of students and teachers in terms of skills development and new experiences. Faris El-Gwely, the education program consultant who runs the program in Egypt, shared results from the second term, and the best students and Ambassadors from the program received certificates recognizing their hard work. Students and professors also shared information about their experiences in the program. See more photos from the conference.

The second celebration conference was a catalyst for the program to grow. Two more universities in northern Egypt have joined the program, Damanhour University and Kafr El-Sheikh University, as has Saint Khadija High School for Girls in Cairo. The drive from these programs comes from past students and Wikipedia Ambassadors who want to volunteer their time to further the spread of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt:

• Walaa Abd El-Moneim, leader of the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University
• Doaa Saif El-Din, leader of the Faculty of Al-Alsun (Languages), Ain Shams University
• Helana Raafat and Mina Saber, leaders of the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University
• Samir El-Sharabaty, commander of the Faculty of Education, Damanhour University

Egypt is not the only Arab World country to see growth in the Wikipedia Education Program. In the term that’s just beginning, universities in Algeria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia have joined the program. All told, more than 45 classes will be editing the Arabic Wikipedia as part of their coursework this term.

In Jordan, Dr. Nidal Yousef of Isra University is one of five university professors teaching Wikipedia classes this term through the program. The Jordanian Teachers Association is also leading a program where high school students in every governorate in Jordan will be editing Wikipedia as part of their schoolwork, assisted by volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors. Dr. Abd El-Haq Fareh of Algeria is also incorporating Wikipedia editing into his free software class this term. And Dr. Mohammed Alghbban and Dr. Sami Bin Slimah of King Saud University are leading a Wikipedia translation program in Saudi Arabia in their school’s languages department.

We look forward to seeing the Arabic Wikipedia continue to grow, thanks to these dedicated faculty leaders and students.

Faris El-Gwely, Education Program Consultant, Arab World
LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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More than 40 people from 25 countries gathered together in person in Milan, Italy, last week to discuss Wikimedia projects’ use in education. Representatives from Wikimedia chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation, and universities worldwide discussed ways to further develop the relationships between educational institutions and Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Participants in the Education Program Leaders Workshop in Milan.

The Education Program Leaders Workshop was held in conjunction with the Wikimedia chapters conference in Milan, an annual opportunity for representatives from around the world to meet in person to discuss the future of the movement. The enthusiasm worldwide for the program bodes well for the future of Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia and education.

Notes from the workshop highlight the incredible depth and breadth of activities happening worldwide in the education sphere. Some programs, like in Serbia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Brazil, and Egypt, have been in operation for several terms and have been achieving incredible results on their language Wikipedias. Others, including programs in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, have dedicated staff people working on furthering their goals. Programs in Mexico, Switzerland, and Saudi Arabia are small but effective thanks to the dedicated work of individual volunteer educators whose drive to use Wikipedia in their own classrooms has furthered their language Wikipedias. Still others are just getting started, and many are exploring opportunities to collaborate with governmental bodies who work on creating curriculum and education policy to include Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

“Education” is a broad field, and participants represented programs working with everyone from school-aged children to seniors. Workshop participants discussed the different activities relevant to education programs, and talked about the best way of setting goals for programs as a whole. The Wikimedia Foundation remains committed to supporting education programs worldwide through such support resources as brochures, a MediaWiki extension, and online trainings. Workshop participants agreed that developing a better system to share experiences across countries — perhaps a searchable database of learnings — would help programs learn from each others’ mistakes and determine the best path forward for their own programs. With more than 30 programs in operation worldwide, the future is bright for Wikimedia projects and education.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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In 2005, Professor Ruy de Queiroz of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) in Brazil was browsing articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia in logic and the theory of computation, his speciality. Ruy found them disappointingly lacking — but when he browsed the same articles on the English Wikipedia, he realized that they were quite good.

So Ruy set out to change the Portuguese Wikipedia’s coverage of these areas, by engaging his students at UFPE in the efforts. Since 2005, he’s asked students in his “Logic for Computer Science” and “Theoretical Informatics” courses to translate or write articles on the topics for extra credit.

“This has worked very well, and we have produced a reasonable amount of articles in Portuguese,” Ruy says. He’s being modest; that “reasonable amount” is more than 125 computer science and technology related articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia contributed through his coursework.

He then assigns his current students to read the Wikipedia articles his students from previous terms have contributed as a supplement to their normal reading.

“The articles were an updated source into the specific areas, with good pointers to the bibliography,” Ruy says.

Ruy says that Wikipedia cannot and should not replace a traditional reading assignment, but it’s a way of keeping students informed with more up-to-date material and accessible explanations of complex topics. He assigned Wikipedia assignments as reading in two courses he taught in the 2005-06 academic year at Stanford University in the United States as well, because they were the perfect supplement to the traditional textbook reading.

The feedback Ruy has received from students and professors has all been positive, and he looks forward to the continuing development of the Portuguese Wikipedia, so that it can be as good of a resource as the English Wikipedia is.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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The Wikipedia Education Program has a simple premise: Professors assign their students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their coursework. These contributions can take many forms: writing articles, translating articles from one language Wikipedia to another, and adding photos, videos, or illustrations to articles, among others.

These programs, which are run by Wikimedia chapters, volunteers, and Wikimedia Foundation, exist in more than 25 countries worldwide, and resources are available in many languages to support professors and students. For many students, the Wikipedia Education Program is their first chance to have a real-world impact through their school assignments.

The video above discusses the impact one such student in the United States program has had, but many more stories exist. Interested in learning more? Visit http://education.wikimedia.org.

Every graduate student gets assigned a lot of reading, but not every graduate student gets assigned to read something they’ve written. That happened to Jacqueline McCrory in fall 2012, thanks to the Wikipedia Education Program.

As a master’s student in Environmental Management at the University of San Francisco and an employee at environmental consulting firm Analytical Environmental Services (AES), Jacqueline knew a lot about habitat conservation plans (HCPs) — but there wasn’t anything on the topic on Wikipedia. So when she enrolled in Professor Aaron Frank’s Environmental Law class in spring 2012 and discovered that Professor Frank assigned writing a Wikipedia article on a course-related topic, Jacqueline gravitated toward creating one.

“I chose this topic because the existing article had very limited information and the concept is important for conservationists as well as environmental planners,” she explains. “The legal documents pertaining to HCPs can be extensive and somewhat convoluted to read through, so I wanted to create a source that would clearly provide the need-to-know information to interested readers.”

Jacqueline was excited by the prospect of writing something that would have a global audience, and further her study of the conservation of special status species. She had support from two veterans of Wikipedia assignments: Professor Frank has participated in the Wikipedia Education Program since its pilot in spring 2011, as has Campus Ambassador Derrick Coetzee. With their assistance, Jacqueline and a fellow classmate created the article on Habitat Conservation Plans.

Other professors at the University of San Francisco noticed that the article on such an important topic to their field of study had been created, although they didn’t realize it had been written by a student in their program. One such professor assigned the article as required reading for students in his fall 2012 Natural Resources Management course. Little did he know, the author of the article was taking his class that term.

“When I informed the instructor that I had actually written the article, he acknowledged the depth and quality of the article and invited me to prepare a guest lecture on the subject material for my own class,” she says.

Jacqueline didn’t just receive kudos for her Wikipedia article at her university: her supervisors at AES recognized her expertise in the subject, and gave her related assignments. She’s grateful for the opportunity that Professor Frank’s class gave her, as she says she would never have edited Wikipedia without that nudge. And she recognizes how beneficial Wikipedia assignments are to students.

“Most papers that we write for undergraduate and graduate level courses end up being read by the professor grading the assignment and remain in electronic folders to be deleted as trash at some point in the future; however, when published as Wikipedia articles, these academic papers can be viewed and used as resources and references for countless other people and may continue to serve a purpose,” Jacqueline says.

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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Walaa Abdel Manaem

Walaa Abdel Manaem had browsed Wikipedia whenever she needed to find information about something, but she’d never contributed until March 2012. Walaa, a native of Giza, Egypt, was enrolled in Dr. Abeer Abd El-Hafez’s Spanish course at Cairo University. The course was participating in the pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt, and Dr. Abeer asked Walaa and her classmates to translate articles from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia about Latin American authors.

For Walaa, the experience was eye-opening. A master’s student in modern Spanish literature at Cairo University, Walaa found that she loved contributing to Wikipedia. She started by creating an article on Juan José Arreola, a Mexican short story writer, on April 5, 2012. And Walaa was hooked.

“I was very happy to participate in Wikipedia,” Walaa says. “I like studying Spanish and Latin American literature. Dr. Abeer was teaching us the method and the application of the translation of Spanish to Arabic and vice versa, and her specialty is Latin American literature. She told us that there is a little information about the Latin American writers in the Arabic Wikipedia.”

So Walaa set out to change that. Today, she has more than 8,500 edits, with 68 articles created. Her article on Juan José Arreola has reached Good Article status on the Arabic Wikipedia, and her article on The Well of Loneliness, a novel by British writer Radclyffe Hall, is soon to be a Featured Article on the Arabic Wikipedia. And Walaa is steadily climbing in the list of the top 500 editors to the Arabic Wikipedia.

More recently, Walaa has expanded her volunteer work for Wikipedia to include serving as a Campus Ambassador for Dr. Abeer’s class. She’s also helping out other classes doing Spanish and English translations as an Online Ambassador.

“I like working with Dr. Abeer because of her enthusiasm with her students to publish free knowledge,” Walaa says. “This assignment is very good and more suitable to our time, because our generation doesn’t use papers like a more traditional assignment.”

Although Walaa finished her M.A. preliminary year at Cairo University, she intends to keep contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia and expanding the availability of information available, especially in her favorite area, literature.

“My knowledge is published for all the world,” Walaa says about why she likes contributing to the Arabic Wikipedia. “I’m very happy when my work appears in Google as a part of Wikipedia and everyone can use it easily.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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“Wikipedia’s world is a beautiful world,” says Doaa Seif of Egypt. “You can see all cultures of the world through the window of a language that you know.”

Doaa hadn’t always known much about the Wikipedia world; a year ago, she was introduced to Wikipedia when the Wikipedia Education Program Cairo Pilot started at her university, Ain Shams University in Cairo. Doaa, a Cairo native, was excited about the prospect of becoming a Campus Ambassador for the program, and quickly signed up. Her classes did extremely well, and Doaa was hooked, so when she became a Teaching Assistant for the Faculty of Al-Alsun (languages) at Ain Shams, she immediately joined the program so her students in two separate courses, Hebrew and Research Methods, could also contribute to the Arabic Wikipedia.

“I know very well that my students have strong skills in language, and I want to invest these skills to enrich the Arabic content of the encyclopaedia in different languages — Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Turkish,” Doaa says. “In addition, I believe that we, as Arabs, have to enrich the Arabic content by ourselves.”

Editing the Arabic Wikipedia has become a daily habit for Doaa, and she envisions the additions she makes to the Arabic Wikipedia are improving knowledge of people in remote locations.

“Many of us are looking for information in a specific field and may not find anything about it on the Arabic Wikipedia,” she explains. “If I and also my students can add other useful information, why not do it? We know how to write about the culture of this language, or about its people or culture or politics, economy, tourism and senior political figures and literary state that speaks this language.”

In this way, Doaa believes, she and her students are helping improve information available not only about Arab countries, but also countries and people worldwide. In particular, Doaa specialized in studying Israeli society and the Hebrew language. She focused her scholarly work on Israeli theatre, and she wants to add content to the Arabic Wikipedia about these topics.

Doaa doesn’t just work within the classroom. In 2012, she organized a conference on how to edit Wikipedia, attended by more than 200 people at Ain Shams University. (See photos from the event here.) She wants to organize another international conference in Egypt, this time with thousands of attendees who are interested in spreading knowledge through contributing to Wikipedia.

“I dream of the day when the Arabic Wikipedia will be first in the number of articles and in the accuracy of the content,” Doaa says. “I also dream that Arabs will transcend barrier of writing in other languages to express ourselves and our culture in the other language Wikipedias.”

LiAnna Davis, Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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Iara Camargo had one term of teaching experience when a professor in her Ph.D. program at the University of São Paulo forwarded her an open call from the Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil. The program was looking for faculty members who were interested in assigning students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework. Iara, excited by the prospect, signed up.

“I got very excited about the idea of writing articles with my students on Wikipedia,” she says. “I think most academics have a little prejudice about Wikipedia, saying that some information could be not quite real. But I’ve always used Wikipedia as a starting point to research a subject. The idea is not to use it as a reference, only to have some idea about the subject. Then, when I started to look at it more critically, I found many good articles in my research field… and of course some poor ones.”

Iara asked her students in her Editorial Design course at Faculdades Integradas Rio Branco to improve those poor articles. Her students researched and wrote articles ranging from famous designers like Bea Feitler to concepts like legibility to publishers like Penguin Books. Iara even started an article herself, on book design.

“I like incorporating Wikipedia in my class for these reasons,” she says. “First, to stimulate the students to read and write more. Second, I believe that is good because they are actually publishing something, it is not a paper that they are writing just to me to have an evaluation. Third, they have to be conscious and judicious to write well, because a lot of people might use it in the future.”

In particular, Iara says, her students get more from the Wikipedia assignment than they would from many traditional assignments in the design field. Since design is mostly a visual medium, students do not have the chance to develop as much researching and writing skills, but those are critical skills for their careers. Iara believes the Wikipedia assignment helps students learn these skills while teaching them the fundamentals of the discipline.

“It is great in terms of writing, you have to be impartial and write objectively, which is in some ways scientific writing because you cannot add subjective writing to Wikipedia,” she says. “And I think it is great because they really have to find reliable sources instead of using the argument ‘I’ve heard it is like that’ or ‘I thought it was like that’.”

Iara’s department head Professor Paulo Durão enthusiastically supported her and her students as they worked on the Wikipedia assignments. In fact, the institution’s academic director Professor Alexandre Uehara liked the idea so much that Iara and her Campus Ambassadors, Cauê Henrique Rodrigues, Denise Akemi Matsuda, and Maira Rodrigues, were featured in a video shown in the school cafeteria for one month. Iara and her students also had help from two Portuguese Wikipedians serving as Online Ambassadors, Vitor Mazuco and Gabryelsl. The wikicode was initially scary for Iara, but with the help of the Ambassadors, she learned how to edit Wikipedia and is even excited about using her wikicode skills.

“My favorite part was the challenge of working with it!” Iara says. “It’s a wonderful tool and Wikipedia is not only a website, it is a very important cultural phenomenon. We are in a different time and maybe learning and studying nowadays has to be integrated with this new Internet life we are living.”

LiAnna Davis
Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager

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