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On May 18th, 2013, we gathered for a big WikiParty in Moscow, Russia. It was dedicated to three important events: the millionth article in Russian Wikipedia, the twelfth anniversary of Russian Wikipedia, and the traditional WikiAwards for achievements of Russian Wikipedia’s contributors during 2012.

Russian University of Economics was the main venue, however the event began in the Sokol district with a tour by Wikipedian Andreykor, who wrote good and featured articles about this area. In addition to the celebration, Wikipedians Vladimir Soloviev and Sergei Vladimirov held workshops and the university held an Open Day. The university’s event organizers even enriched the celebration with a master class in carving lemons, a pun and symbol of the million articles.

The day of the celebration happened to also be the countrywide Russian day of planting forests. On this day, people planted 27 million new trees in the area of 8700 hectares during various events, setting a record in Russia. Among these trees were Alley of Free Knowledge oaks, planted by Wikipedians from the Russian Economic University, and Wikipedia Avenue pines, which will become a part of a forest destroyed by fires few years ago near the town of Roshal, in the Moscow region.

In addition to these celebrations, on May 22 we celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Sakha Wikipedia at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in St. Petersburg. Sakha Wikipedia is a project in one of the many languages spoken in Russia.

The celebrations took place amid increased public attention to the government’s attempts to blacklist several Wikipedia pages about drugs and suicide. Earlier, the Russian Wikipedia went on strike against the legislation that enables such decisions; however, what’s more important is Wikipedia’s achivements and the possibility to hold such diverse celebrations.

Anastasia Lvova, Wikimedia Russia

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Wikiexpedtion logo

A Polish national railways class EU07

Wikimedia Polska, the Polish Wikimedia Chapter, is about to organize a Railways Expedition in collaboration with the Polish Railways Company. The photography expedition is devoted to train infrastructure in Poland and will give participants unprecedented access to sites they wouldn’t otherwise see so closely.

Polish Railways has offered the opportunity to teach Wikipedians to navigate the railway premises, after which they will receive ID cards entitling them to enter and photograph objects normally inaccessible to the public. Polish Railways will provide us with free monthly railway tickets for all participants and special passes to legally enter and photograph rail tracks, workshops, rail yards, cargo railway stations and museums belonging to Polish Railways. Wikimedia Polska will cover the costs of accommodation and food (travel to Poland is not covered).

We are looking for people interested in this form of Wikiexpedition. We want to form 2-3 person teams, with Polish-speaking leaders and participants from other countries. We’d like to underscore the fact that you will not need to speak Polish to participate; we’re happy to help you navigate the language. Teams would be moving independently, both in terms of time and location. We think it would be useful to organize several teams that could work in different areas of Poland. The Wikiexpedtion will take place this summer, sometime between June and September, 2013.

If you want to join the railways expedition, just add yourself to the list on the Wikimedia Polska wiki. Basically, the only requirements are that you a) have an obsession with trains and railways and b) that you are excited to spend around a week (or more) traveling in slow trains that stop at all manner of tiny stations around Poland.

Tomas Ganicz, Wikimedia Polska

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The Spring 2013 semester was a busy one for Wikipedia projects at ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México in Mexico, building on the success of prior work and starting new activities.

Medical English class

Two classes of Medical English, an advanced-level English as a foreign language course for medical professionals, worked with Wikipedia in Spanish and English as well as Wikimedia Commons. The Commons project was first, with students uploading more than 60 photos related to their future professions, including photographs of hospitals, campus classrooms, and laboratory activities for their other courses. The next project was to translate medicine related articles from the English Wikipedia to the Spanish Wikipedia. Not only is this process a good way to introduce Wikipedia writing style, formatting and technological requirements, but it is also helpful to the Spanish Wikipedia, which has fewer medicine-related articles than the English version. Twenty four articles were translated including Artificial pancreas, Amaurosis Fugax, Binge drinking and Abdominal pregnancy. The final project was to create a new article or augment an existing article in English Wikipedia, preferably one with a topic related to Mexico. This effort resulted in 29 articles created or expanded including Dorsal nexus, Embryology of the heart, Instituto Nacional de Ciencias Médicas y Nutrición Salvador Zubirán, the Mexican Red Cross, and the History of smallpox in Mexico.

International Baccalaureate CAS

Students from the International Baccalaureate program at the high school level have now been working with Wikipedia for three semesters to fulfill hours needed for the CAS (Creativity, Action and Service) hours, working on various projects. Participating students for the this semester were Xibsuarz, MichiKiske17, Salcedo95, Piskysama4, Aerozt, and EdmundoGuadarrama.

They have continued to work on articles related to the ongoing project with the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, translating articles on artists such as Álvaro Zardoni as well as creating articles in English. Following their own interests, other articles were translated from English to Spanish, such as Incidente de la colina Flagstaff, Antojito (expanded), Cheonggyecheon, Laima, Abrahadabra (Thelema), Aeon (Thelema), Tsundere, and Fujiko F. Fujio. In addition to creating content on their own, students assisted with the judging of the Holy Week in Mexico photo contest and the descriptions and uploading of the donation of 2,100 images from ITESM campus archives into Wikimedia Commons (both detailed below).

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So, what has the Swedish education programme been up to since its founding in October last year? What’s been going on past these around 180 days? Well, let us look at some of the things that has been going on!

But hey, perhaps we should initially look at the overarching aim of an education programme in Sweden. The overall goal is to have Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects) accepted as learning tools among teachers at various educational levels in Sweden.

Employment

On 1 October, Sophie Österberg was employed as Education manager as to initiate and lead the education programme in Sweden. Then, the world’s first Wikipedian in Academy was employed the spring of 2013 by a Swedish University, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. We’ve recently spoken to another university here in Sweden who is quite interested in the idea of employing a Wikipedian. So we might see another Wikipedian in Academy this autumn.

Funding

The education programme managed to get funding for a quarter of the manager’s salary from an internet fund for a specific educational project. The project is a collaboration with an educational institution where we offer Wikipedia training to teachers of immigrants who are learning Swedish. When they’re on a more advanced level, a possibility is to translate a Swedish Wikipedia article about something typically Swedish and hence learn about a historical person or phenomenon, and writing this article in their native language on their Wikipedia language version. So far we’ve found, and had to meet-ups with the interested teachers who will engage their students in this the coming fall. Look at the list of examples of what to write about which is arguably typically Swedish. (What might a list look like on your language version? What are typical German, British, Spanish, Arabic articles?)

Invitations (at least a few of them)

The education programme has kindly and generously been invited to various events around in Sweden, mostly in Stockholm and Gothenburg, our two largest cities. We’ve been talking at large conferences, exhibiting the education programme at various events, held seminars and co-hosted teachers evenings and various workshops. At the Internet days here in Sweden we participated in a panel discussion regarding digital resources in education. At SETT (yes, it’s like BETT and is the Swedish version of it) we held lectures on both the days of the huge exhibition. We were also invited to have a seat at the jury for a well-established school competition in April. These are a few of the events we’ve been invited to, and the invitations keep on coming! (It must be due to the amazingly gorgeous t-shirts!)

Collaborations

The education programme is supporting a network of teachers in Sweden who are using the flipped-classroom idea. There has been a lack of a good place to store these movies so Commons seemed as a rather splendid alternative. The dialogue was initiated between the education manager and one of the most engaged flipped-classroom teachers in Sweden, Karin Brånebäck, in the end of March, and the first movie is now up after a page has been created for this purpose on Commons.

Moreover, the Swedish Educational broadcasting radio (which also does TV) has had its largest ever TV production aiming at immigrants learning Swedish and the teachers engaged in their education. Through the Wikipedia education programme, a part of the production is to have teachers share their experiences, knowledge and ways to teach Swedish via Wikiversity which is promoted by the Swedish Educational broadcasting radio. They will also create a short movie about Wikiversity and how one may contribute to the project.

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(This is a guest post by Carol Ann O’Hare of the French Wikimedia chapter.)

Wikimedia France is pleased to announce the first winner of the Wikimedia France Research Award:

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

Over the next couple of years, the Wikimedia Foundation will be building capacity among program leaders around evaluation and program design. A better understanding of how to increase impact through better planning, execution and evaluation of programs and activities will help us to move a step closer to achieving our mission of offering a free, high quality encyclopedia to our readers around the world.

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the first Program Evaluation and Design Workshop, on 22-23 June 2013 in Budapest, Hungary.

We have only 20 slots available for this workshop and the application deadline ends on May 17th. This two-day event will be followed by a pre-conference workshop at Wikimania 2013. Ideally, applicants would commit to attending both events.

The first Program Evaluation & Design workshop will be held in the shadows of the Buda Castle, Budapest, Hungary

Our long-term goals for the workshop are:

• Participants will gain a basic shared understanding of program evaluation
• Participants will work collaboratively to map and prioritize measurable outcomes, beginning with a focus on the most common programs and activities
• Participants will gain increased fluency in common language of evaluation (i.e. goals versus objectives, inputs and outputs versus outcomes and impact)
• Participants will learn and practice how to extract and report data using the UserMetrics API
• Participants will commit to working as a community of evaluation leaders who will implement evaluation strategies in their programs and activities and report back at the pre-conference workshop at Wikimania 2013
• …and participants will have a lot of fun and enjoy networking with other program leaders!

We will publish a detailed agenda for the event in Budapest soon on Meta-Wiki.

During the workshop in Budapest, we will only have a limited amount of time. Therefore, we will be focusing on the some of the more common programs and activities:

• Wikipedia editing workshops where participants learn how to or actively edit (i.e. edit-a-thon, wikiparty, hands-on Wikipedia workshop)
• Content donations through partnerships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) and related organizations
• Wiki Takes/Expeditions where volunteers participate in day-long or weekend events to photograph site specific content
• Wiki Loves Monuments, which takes place in September
• Education program and classroom editing where volunteers support educators who have students editing Wikipedia in the classroom
• Writing competitions, which generally take place online in the form of contests, the WikiCup  and other challenges – often engaging experienced editors to improve content.

Contributors who play an active role in planning and executing programs and activities as described above in the Wikimedia community are highly encouraged to apply. Your experience and knowledge will make this workshop a success!

Hotels, flights and other transportation costs will be the responsibility of your chapter; the Wikimedia Foundation will provide the venue, handouts, breakfasts, light lunches, and a dinner for all participants on Saturday. If you’re not affiliated with a chapter and cannot afford to attend the event, please email me after you apply – we have a small amount of money set aside for those cases.

Remember, applications are open until May 17. You can apply via this Google Form.

Thanks for your interest, and I look forward to a great group of participants!

Sarah Stierch, Program Evaluation and Design Community Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

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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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At Rice University, students pursuing a minor in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities (PJHC) must complete two core courses addressing poverty, justice, and human development. Since Spring 2010, Professor Diana Strassmann has given students in her courses the same final assignment: to create or expand Wikipedia articles about poverty and about the links between gender equality and economic development in various regions of the world. She has also trained the other professors who teach the minor’s core courses so that they can include the Wikipedia assignment.

Nadhika Ramachandran, a rising senior studying political science and international relations in addition to the PJHC minor, signed on for the first of the two core courses in Spring 2012 and learned that she would be editing Wikipedia. Nadhika was both excited and nervous.

“So many people turn to Wikipedia for information that you know your contribution can have a real impact in terms of how people view a certain subject,” she says. “Of course, that also made me a bit nervous because if I did not include certain information or an important viewpoint I would misinform people.”

For that term’s class, she significantly expanded the peacebuilding article, which introduced her to Wikipedia editing. Since Professor Strassmann has set this assignment up for both of the two core courses in the minor, Nadhika enrolled in the second class a year later. In that class, Nadhika created the Women in the Arab Spring article because she “felt it was an important issue that had no coverage” on English Wikipedia. The article explores women’s involvement in the political protests and demonstrations, including their role online.

“I love knowing that my work will educate people all over the world about an important but often-ignored topic,” Nadhika says. “The Arab world has a reputation of treating women as second-class citizens in areas like political participation, economic independence, personal freedoms, and general social status. When the Arab Spring first began, it seemed like a unique opportunity to boost the status of women in the Arab world. The protesters were pushing for democracy, increased political participation, respect for human rights, and better economic opportunities, all of which would improve the status of women. Additionally, women actually participated in the revolution as street protestors and in some countries, as leaders. However, as the new governments formed and Islamist parties won elections in most places people began to fear that they would actually curtail women’s rights. The impact of the Arab Spring remains to be seen.”

Nadhika’s class was supported by Wikipedia Ambassadors, who helped her and her classmates learn how to edit Wikipedia. The students received in-person support from university staff member Christine Cox as well as Virginia White and Joyce Chou, students who had taken the class in previous semesters. They could also seek assistance from long-time Wikipedia editors Mike Christie, Justin Knapp, and Pat Earley.

“The dedication of the other editors in the community reinforced the impact of our work and their support made me feel more comfortable when editing,” Nadhika said. After spending a few days responding to those editors’ constructive feedback, she submitted the new article to appear on the main page of Wikipedia as a Did You Know, and it appeared on March 25, with more than 1,500 views. Soon after creating the article, she was already able to achieve her goal of sharing the fruits of her academic studies with more people.

Thanks to Professor Strassmann’s advocacy for Wikipedia assignments, many students at Rice are editing Wikipedia during multiple terms. The students don’t necessarily edit in between assignments, but they’re returning to Wikipedia with a stronger editing background and familiarity with norms, so they have more time and energy to create even better content. Even though Nadhika has completed her class assignment, she plans to expand the section about the aftermath of the Arab Spring protests once her schedule clears at the end of the term.

Jami Mathewson
Wikipedia Education Program United States and Canada Associate

Chanitra Bishop.

Every day, students come to Chanitra Bishop for advice about information — everything from how to find certain articles, to what books will help their research projects. Ms. Bishop certainly has the right pedigree. At Indiana University Bloomington, she’s the Digital Scholarship and Emerging Technologies Librarian at the Herman B Wells Library, which contains more than 4.6 million volumes, including special collections in African Studies, Russian and East European Studies, Uralic and Altaic Studies, East Asian Studies, and West European Studies.

“I wanted to work in the library,” says Ms. Bishop, “because I enjoy working with people, doing research, and helping people find information.”

Ms. Bishop has found that same connection with Wikipedia. In the fall of 2010, she began helping IU Bloomington students who were writing articles for the Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative. That initiative, which evolved into the Wikipedia Education Program, had students write public-policy-oriented articles as a formal classroom assignment. As a Wikipedia Ambassador, Ms. Bishop works not just with students but with professors in the program. One of Ms. Bishop’s first realizations: While every student already read Wikipedia, few students realized they could actually edit and contribute to Wikipedia’s articles. Students also assumed that each Wikipedia article was written in full by just one person.

“When we explain Wikipedia,” says Ms. Bishop about the volunteer instructors, “we usually go in and do an initial talk, and a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I never knew all of that.’ I like to show one of the videos that is about the ‘Edit’ button and how people often just ignore it. Even though it’s there, it’s like it’s not there. I tell them, ‘If you see something that’s inaccurate on Wikipedia, you don’t have to wait for someone else to fix it. You can fix it yourself. You don’t even need an account; all you have to do is click ‘edit.’”

Ms. Bishop also shows students a Wikipedia article’s “History” function, “so they can also see that even though an article today might have several different sections and be may be many pages long, when it first started out, it may have been six sentences. Often it may just start off as a sentence, or a paragraph, and then the community kind of helps build that article. So it doesn’t always just start off with someone just writing all of the information. Just one person kind of gradually can build up to its current state. So a lot of students also are surprised to see the initial, first view of the article.”

From her initial volunteering in 2010, Ms. Bishop is now Wikipedia Regional Ambassador for Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, meaning she works with Wikipedia Education Program classes throughout those three states. Ms. Bishop, who has a Bachelor’s degree in English and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, was raised in Chicago, which is just 120 miles from Bloomington. Being Wikipedia Regional Ambassador means she often connects with students online — while never having to leave Bloomington. Ms. Bishop feels like she’s part of the bigger Wikimedia community of readers, contributors and volunteers.

“The community is what really drives Wikipedia,” says Ms. Bishop, whose Wikipedia user name is “Etlib” — a derivation of “Emerging Technologies Librarian.” “There’s not one person that’s in charge and makes all the decisions about how Wikipedia works. It’s very much community driven and it’s something that anyone can be involved in. Even though anyone can be involved in it, it’s like any other community, so the more you contribute to that community, the more people will believe what you put on there, the more respect you’ll have in that community.”

Jonathan Curiel, Development Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation