Students around the world have returned to classes this term to learn that they will be contributing to Wikipedia articles for their coursework.

Now in its second year, the Wikipedia Education Program is modeled from the learnings of the Public Policy Initiative pilot. Volunteer Wikipedia Ambassadors help students learn how to contribute to Wikipedia articles as part of their course assignments. Campus Ambassadors help students in-person with basics of Wikipedia editing, while Online Ambassadors serve as virtual mentors for students on-wiki.

Programs have already started in the United States, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Czech Republic, Macedonia, and Mexico, and programs will start in 2012 in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

United States

The program in the United States is off to a strong start, with more than 40 classes participating. In both the United States and Canada, a new set of Participation Requirements is in place for this term. The requirements limit the Ambassador:student ratio to 1:15 and require that each class has at least one experienced Wikipedian supporting it. Although the new set of requirements has limited the number of participating courses this term, we hope they will ensure that every student participating in our program has adequate support to complete a Wikipedia assignment successfully.

Canada

The Canada program is in the second phase of a small pilot, with eight classes participating this term. Like the U.S. program, the Canada program is limited by the new Participation Requirements, meaning we’ve purposefully chosen to focus on quality over quantity.

Egypt

The Cairo Pilot is our first venture into the Arabic language countries (see previous blog post for more background information). Local Arabic Wikipedians led a training of 10 new Campus Ambassadors in Cairo in mid-January, and another 10 Campus Ambassadors will be trained later this month. In addition, 16 Online Ambassadors have signed up to help students on-wiki. Seven classes are participating, and all of the professors participated in a faculty orientation in January led by two local Arabic Wikipedians and U.S. program professor Rochelle Davis. Between three and fifteen of the best students from each class will be taking part in the project this term, limiting the total students to a manageable number.

Germany

Wikimedia Deutschland has trained “tutoren” to assist professors and students who are editing Wikipedia for the first time in their pilot program, with five classes participating.

Czech Republic

The Czech WikiProject Protected Areas project ran during the 2011-2012 winter semester in cooperation with Jiří Reif, a university teacher at Institute for Environmental Studies, a part of the Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. During the semester, 30 students were involved in adding content to the Czech Wikipedia. They had to visit one protected area of their choice, take several images of the area, write an article for the Czech Wikipedia and give a public presentation for other students in the class. According to the results of a survey, the project was popular with the students. A full report with results from this cooperation is available in English on Czech Wikipedia. And as a result, the Czech Wikipedia was enriched by 30 high quality articles about protected areas.

Macedonia

Four universities in Macedonia are already on board with a Macedonian Education Program that began in 2011, including a class that is translating English Wikipedia articles to the Macedonian Wikipedia. The program is led by volunteers from Wikimedia Macedonia.

Mexico

The program in Mexico began in Fall 2011 at ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México with a Club Wikipedia and several independent study students using Wikipedia as the base for their advanced English-as-a-foreign-language course (see this blog post for more details). It was shortly followed by the establishment of a second club at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). For the Spring 2012 semester, ITESM has started a pilot with the International Baccalaureate program to allow these students to work on Wikipedia projects to fulfill their “CAS,” or community service requirements. To date, these students have been working on articles related to the Teylers Museum Challenge. They are also editing articles related to Mexican handcrafts and folk art in preparation for the upcoming edit-a-thon at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City on 3 March. UNAM’s Facultad de Letras y Humanidades has permitted students to create six articles of “good” or better quality to fulfill of Mexico’s social service requirement of all undergraduate students.

Other countries

Several other programs are being planned for academic terms starting later in 2012.

• After a small pilot in 2011, the Brazil Education Program plans to expand the number of Campus Ambassadors and Online Ambassadors to help a growing number of students who will be contributing to the Portuguese Wikipedia when the next term begins in March.

• Wikimedia U.K. is doing ground research to find supportive professors and potential Ambassadors for a forthcoming project. They’re also planning an EduWiki Conference in September 2012.

Get involved!

More programs around the world are starting every month. If you’ve started a program, add it to the Wikipedia Education Program page. Want to become an Ambassador or a participating professor in your region? Check out the Get Involved page on our program portal.

We look forward to seeing the amazing work that students put out this term.

From February 6-12, the fifth Campus Party Brasil took place, hosted in São Paulo, and we (the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Brasil) had the great opportunity to represent the Brazilian Wikimedia community through our attendance. Fifteen volunteers from the community got tickets to attend and worked alongside Kul Wadhwa, Pats Peña, and me (Jessie Wild), who came in from San Francisco. We had and accomplished a few specific goals:

• Motivate Brazilians towards collaborative knowledge! Kul gave a keynote presentation which highlighted the importance of asking why you are choosing the direction of your life.
  

  Wikimedia Brasil @ Campus Party

• Determine the plausibility of a MediaWiki Hackathon in Brazil! The verdict: we should do it! There is obviously a lot of interest across communities in Brazil, and Pats, Mateus, Jonas, and others helped network with key organizations and development communities which were also present at the event. They got many tips, formed some collaborative partnerships, and raised awareness for the upcoming event. So get your hacker-hands ready and stay tuned for details…
• Recruit new editors and member for Wikimedia Brasil! The volunteers led a “Mutirão,” or an activity designed to teach people how to set-up a user account and do a quick one hour editing sprint. As a result, we had three winners who contributed to articles which are part of the “Grand Prix” editing sprint currently taking place on the Portuguese Wikipedia, and were awarded T-shirts.

In addition to the above, we were all able to make a lot of new friends! We had the privilege of sharing a table with the Mozilla community and the Garoa Hacker Club community (we also adopted one Angry Bird). This led to great connections for us all, and we are excited about the potential to work together more, as compatible communities going forward.

There are certainly things we can improve on. Primarily, though we had a lot of volunteers sign up for tickets, unfortunately not all came or did not participate in the outreach event. Next time, it may help us to be more explicit in the different roles each of us can have in supporting Wikipedia/Wikimedia while at the conference, so that everyone knows how they are to be involved in promoting Wikipedia.

But – all in all, another great event in São Paulo (although very exhausting)…

Jessie Wild, Special Projects Manager, Global Development

The British Library, one of the largest libraries in the world, whose collection grows by around 10 kilometers (6 miles) of shelf space each year, is soliciting applications from experienced Wikipedians with a good understanding of Wikimedia and GLAM projects for the six-month position of a Wikimedian in Residence. The post has funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The programme of activities will be run as part of an ongoing partnership with Wikimedia UK, where the institution has already hosted events such as an editathon, where its curators met with Wikipedians to improve content on Wikipedia using the library’s resources.

As the chapter’s Ashley Van Haeften told Wired UK, “the main purpose of the position is to ensure a successful programme of collaboration with British Library staff and curators supporting volunteers with a passion for sharing open knowledge about the library’s collections and projects. I have met many curators that are astonishingly passionate about openly sharing the knowledge that the library preserves.”

The concept of Wikipedian/Wikimedian in Residence was pioneered in 2010 by Liam Wyatt at the nearby British Museum. Since then, it has spread to other venerable cultural institutions around the world. Recently, Dominic McDevitt-Parks, Wikipedian in Residence at the US National Archives, proudly announced that it was releasing a newly discovered audio recording from the John F. Kennedy assassination to Wikimedia Commons.

The deadline to apply at the British Library is February 23.

Tilman Bayer
Movement Communications

The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace. According to research, it will outpace the desktop internet web in 2014, when approximately 1.7 billion users will access the net on their mobile phone, many of them from the Global South, compared to 1.65 billion desktop web users. As part of our mission to provide free knowledge to everyone, we are committed to enhancing our mobile platform, and have made several improvements to the reading user experience. But most importantly, we recently launched a partnership with Orange to provide Wikipedia at no data cost to mobile readers in Africa and the Middle East.

To understand our current Wikipedia mobile users across different geographies and prioritize product features, we conducted a survey of Wikipedia mobile readers. You can read more about its methodology on Meta wiki.

Looking at the data from the survey, there is a strong case to be made for making Wikipedia accessible without data charges on mobile devices.  Over half of Wikipedia mobile readers (52 percent) said that having Wikipedia free for their mobile data plans would increase their Wikipedia usage. Moreover, 28 percent indicated that it would increase their likelihood to buy from that mobile provider.  Another 16 percent said that they would be willing to switch their mobile providers to have free Wikipedia access.

 

Looking globally, we found that Wikipedia readers in the Global South, specifically in Brazil, Latin America and MENA, indicated that they would use Wikipedia more often if no data costs were accrued, and even suggested this as a key motivating factor for switching to or considering alternative service providers.

 

We found high interest in Wikipedia access without data charges despite a majority of readers (54 percent) stating that their mobile data plan is not a significant monthly expense for their household.  But it should be noted that the data is based on current mobile readers, and doesn’t survey those who don’t have current mobile Wikipedia access, some of whom might not have access to the mobile web due to high cost.  Only 14 percent of respondents stated that their data plan was either a significant expense with their household actively managing usage, or too expensive leading to issues of affordability. In addition, about 32 percent stated that it was a significant expense, but that they were not concerned about it.

If you are interested in more data from the mobile survey, please check out the toplines or read our summary report or read key findings.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

As part of our commitment to provide free knowledge to everyone, the foundation has been redesigning our mobile platform (m.wikipedia.org and mobile.wikipedia.org) to enhance the reading experience and allow editing.  As a first step towards the redesign of the mobile gateway to better meet the needs of our users in the Global South, we conducted user experience research in India and Brazil among current and future users of Wikipedia mobile last summer.  We also carried out user experience research in the US to have a comparison with a mobile market which is more mature in terms of smartphone and 3G penetration, and has a more widespread adoption of tablets.

Our research in India and Brazil brought forth the following three opportunities with the greatest perceived impact for the mobile platform:

1. Improving our search:  Our research revealed that there was a need to provide search suggestions, autocomplete, autocorrect and other tools that ease typing and search burdens on mobile devices; support search in all language Wikipedias as well as allowing users to chose and switch between languages; incorporate transliteration tools for languages with fonts and characters that have poor mobile support; support and even enhance users’ existing habits to use Google to reach Wikipedia articles; and enable users to search within a Wikipedia page. We are happy to report that drawing from the research our mobile team has already implemented some of these opportunities like full page search, autocomplete  and inter-wiki links into our mobile beta site.
2. Optimizing our reading experience for mobile devices and generalized use.  Through our research, especially in India, we found that we were not redirecting a large breadth of devices in use to our mobile site. The mobile team quickly fixed this issue with the adoption of the open source library tera-WURFL for detecting mobile devices.  After speaking with respondents in India and Brazil, we found that there was a desire among users to modify or set one-time preferences for the display of images, the font size, and any element that affects page loading time and size. Similarly, there is an opportunity for allowing  preferences for language and navigation; the ability to watch or bookmark articles; or save content offline; offer content in more digestible pieces, or with quicker access (i.e. preview or easy access to the first paragraph, or a new “mobile summary”); search offline, i.e., while in transit or without a data plan; and generally follow expectations set by mobile web interactions and standards.  Some of these recommendations have been incorporated into our mobile product strategy.  Through this research we felt it was crucial to offer both an official iOS and Android app (which was officially released in January) that offers at minimum a simple and easy search and reading experience.
3. Using the mobile platform to both increase user engagement and awareness of features on Wikipedia as well as providing new opportunities for participation. The mobile site and potential apps provide many new pathways for both engagement, participation, and contribution.  At present, the mobile site can be used to build awareness around existing features on the site that current users are blind to (i.e. watchlists, accounts, editing, inter-language links, history); to provide features that make opening a Wikipedia account worth having, something that the majority of our participants do not currently see any reason to have; increase visibility of local language Wikipedias, especially in India since many English readers were not aware of the existence of Indic Wikipedias; prompt users to download an official app when possible; and interface with other web content on mobile devices (Google, news, entertainment, and sports content, for example “Wikitap”).  The contributions that showed the highest potential for adoption were adding photographs, “flagging” or “marking” something that needs to be edited, removing or marking vandalism, adding links, adding location or geodata, and potentially making small typing or formatting edits.
4. Mobile Editing. And finally, the mobile site can support the editing practice of existing editors by first offering those features in a mobile friendly format which are currently in high use on the site.  Those with the highest demand and potential are the “recent changes” page, which is consumed like an update feed or email; accessing watch lists; making reverts, especially with respect to vandalism; logging in and accessing account and user pages; and serving discussion pages and article histories.

 

If you are interested in reading about our research in India and Brazil in detail, we have compiled the insights in a report which is available in PDF and wiki format. You can also watch video highlights from the interviews and check out some photographs from the field work in India and Brazil.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

We recently concluded our annual fundraiser, and it was a great success. With over one million individuals pitching in from almost every country, our donors are a diverse and interesting group in themselves. While we don’t directly collect demographic or other information from our donors, we used our readers survey as a means of understanding who our donors are, and what motivates them to donate to Wikipedia. Please note that these results are from a sample of our reader population, not drawn from actual donor data.

a. Only about half of our readers realize that Wikipedia is a non-profit, editors much more likely to donate
b. An appeal from Jimmy is a popular reason for donating, but people in different regions are motivated differently
c. About one-fourth of our respondents said they would donate; readers from US, Egypt and India most likely to do so
d. Readers cite affordability as the biggest reason for not donating
(more…)

Yesterday, we wrapped up our visit to Tunisia, which comes as part of our Arabic language initiative that WMF launched earlier in October 2011 with the Doha convening. Our initial outreach activities mainly rely on meetings with the small Wikipedia community scattered in Arabic speaking countries and exploring the possibilities of expansion of those communities, by connecting them to like-minded groups/communities that can help facilitate on ground activities and workshops in their geographies. Our first stop in this tour was Tunisia. Our first day included a lecture that was hosted by the national school of engineering. A Wikimedia staff and two Arabic Wikipedia volunteers (Ciphers and OsamaK) were part of the lecture organized by WMF on open licenses, free acess to knowledge and the use of Wikipedia in education. It was a good chance to answer questions and misconceptions related to the use of Wikipedia in education and the general status of the Arabic Wikipedia. It was also a great opportunity to meet with students of open source clubs who will form a starting point of Wikipedia clubs in their schools. Tunisia has an internet penetration of nearly 35%; with 3.5 million people having access to the internet, the country contributes 1.4% of Arabic Wikipedia content, which comes as the 3rd most viewed language after French and English. The current numbers aren’t high, however, with regard to support of open source policies (such as opengov) and the expansion of open source and open content activities that have grown recently (thanks to the revolution!), it looks like Tunisia has a good potential to increment Wikipedia contributors on Arabic and other languages, especially on mobile, which has 105.5% penetration rate.

Our visit was promising on many levels: In addition to kicking off the start of Wikipedia awareness activities in universities and other independent spaces (thanks to Nawat that agreed to host Wikipedia workshops), and helping connect current editors with new enthusiasts, we also met with the managers of the national library of Tunisia and agreed on a numbers of steps, including releasing the collection of digitized old books, periodicals, postcards and magazines to Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons, adopting a system on all their public computers that displays Wikipedia as the default search option, and on a longer term, release all their collection of digitized Arabic books (nearly 3000) to be used as sources for Wikipedia articles. In line with adding content to Commons, we also met with a consultant to the president for cultural affairs who is excited about releasing the presidential photography collection under a CC license, however, still pending digitization of the material themselves.

Wikimedia’s visit was recognized by Radio Maliss, which interviewed our WMF staff (interview is in Arabic)

Tunisia came first in our tour, and it was a good start with lots of promising steps that need our follow up, which we will keep you updated with. Coming up next will be Jordan then Algeria, please drop us a line if you will be there. :-)

 

Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

In a previous blog post, we discussed our readers’ perception of article quality. In addition, we asked our readers to compare Wikipedia as a whole to other prominent websites – Facebook, Twitter, New York Times, Google, YouTube, Yahoo and CNN. Of course, there are several key differences between them, but we wanted to understand how Wikipedia stacks up against other high-traffic websites.

Readers from all 16 countries in our sample compared Wikipedia’s interface and ease of navigation to other Internet properties. If we look at the sample as whole, Wikipedia (8.09 on 10) was rated a close second to Google (8.44) on these measures. What makes this even more interesting is Wikipedia’s relationship with the search engine, which we mentioned in an earlier blog post. Although ratings varied across countries quite significantly, in most cases there was little deviation in ratings relative to other websites, with some exceptions.

Interface/look and feel

When asked about the Wikipedia interface, readers scored Wikipedia 7.92 out of 10 on average, just behind Google (8.3). About 46 percent of our readers scored the interface 9+ out of 10, compared to 54 percent for Google. We did not find significant deviations across countries or languages, with one exception: Readers in Egypt (and by extension, Arabic speakers) rated Wikipedia lower than YouTube, Facebook and Yahoo. A desire for better right-to-left support is one plausible explanation for the result.

Ease of Navigation

Readers scored Wikipedia 8.27 on this metric, slightly lower than Google (8.59). 53 percent of our readers rated the ease of navigation 9+ out of 10, compared to 63 percent for Google. As above, Arabic/Egyptian readers rated Wikipedia below YouTube, Facebook, and Yahoo.

 

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

We recently conducted an online survey of Wikipedia readers, limited to 250 participants each in 16 countries. This is the seventh in a series of blog posts summarizing our findings. If you are interested, you can find out more about the methodology of the survey here.

Después de la versión en inglés, abajo, versión en español

Sometimes innovation is the result of being in the right place at the right time as well as being flexible. I am an English as a foreign language teacher in central Mexico and a long time learner of Spanish. Needing intensive Spanish reading practice, I discovered the benefits of writing Wikipedia articles about Mexico (researching in Spanish, writing in English) to both myself and to the encyclopedia. Wanting to share this experience with my students, in Fall 2007, I designed and taught a Wikipedia-based class for ITESM-Campus Toluca’s most advanced English students as an experiment with support of my department.

As these students were already well-versed in vocabulary and grammar, real world practice or “authentic communication” was more important. As most language learners know, the best way to learn a language is to be immersed in a situation where its use is necessary. Computer technology, especially the virtual world of the Internet, has created a number of virtual “worlds” and social groups, not the least of which is the Wikipedia community. The goal in the Fall 2007 class was to introduce this virtual world of English language Wikipedia and explore ways to participate, culminating in the writing of a complete article from scratch as a final project. Mind you, this was before the advent of many of the programs the Wikimedia Foundation has today, such as the Wikipedia Global Education Program.

The class revolved around intercultural communication – learning about potential differences and strategies for coping. For this aspect of the course, the Wikipedia community was introduced as a culture, a group of people with a shared set of values and means by which they interrelate… something the students would have to adapt to as they learned how to write articles and deal with wiki mark up. As it was very different from any other English class they had ever experienced, almost all the students struggled in some way in the course. However, most improved their English language skills, based on TOEFL test scores taken before and after the semester. These findings were presented to the MexTESOL 2008 conference in León, Guanajuato, Mexico.

In 2008, I transferred to the Ciudad de México (Mexico City) or CCM campus of the same school system to establish and run their self access language learning laboratory (think of a hybrid of a traditional language lab and library). Since that time, I have done smaller Wikipedia-based assignments with students, writing smaller articles in groups and moving to translation exercises – mostly English language Wikipedia articles into Spanish. Translation has proven to be a good introduction to Wikipedia editing for many students. It is one way students can improve Wikipedia in their native language. It is easier to translate from one’s non-native language into one’s native language, but it has been noted that the English of the original article still causes transference errors into the Spanish version. This problem has been dealt with through peer review – students doing translation in groups, checking each other’s work and then groups exchanging translated articles for final review. This often leads to interesting discussions about how English and Spanish differ rhetorically, that is, how each writing style prefers to express information. This, too, is part of intercultural communication.

So far, there have been two major lessons learned from the use of Wikipedia. First, the demands of acculturating oneself into the Wikipedia community is a good experience in that many students experience the real frustrations and symptoms of culture shock. But this benefit is not for everyone. It is by far best for students who see the value in the experience, despite whatever frustrations might occur. In the Fall of 2011, I worked with four such students, who led on projects such as creating articles on Mexico’s Festival Internacional Cervantino. Not only did these students research and write articles in both Spanish and English, they also contacted Festival organizers and various international artists to obtain photographs and other assistance. Second, the use of translation assignments is also extremely useful. It provides a template of how Wikipedia articles are generally set up and is a good introduction to technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It allows for learning through imitation, rather than learning abstract rules then guessing how to apply them. It also provides a way to work with Wikipedia which is less intense and easier to incorporate into classes, especially language classes.

ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México continues to be committed to developing working with Wikipedia. The campus library director, Lourdes Epstein has dedicated space in the facility for Club Wikipedia and students working on Wikipedia-related assignments. Several departments, including Global Studies, promote involvement with Wikipedia to their students and faculty. For the Spring 2012, a pilot program with the campus’s high school level International Baccalaureate program begins. A select group of students will set up semester-long projects based on their interests and abilities mentored by myself as part of their CAS or social service requirement.

Wikipedia es una cultura extranjera

A veces la innovación es el resultado tanto de encontrarse en el lugar indicado, en el momento indicado, como de ser una persona flexible. Yo enseño inglés en México y hace mucho tiempo que estudio y hablo español. Viéndome en la necesidad de practicar lectura en español de manera intensiva, descubrí los beneficios (tanto para mí como para la enciclopedia) de redactar artículos de Wikipedia sobre México (investigando en español y redactándolos en inglés). Con el deseo de compartir esta experiencia con mis alumnos, en la segunda mitad de 2007, diseñé e impartí, en el Campus Toluca del ITESM, un curso basado en Wikipedia, para los alumnos de inglés más avanzados, con el apoyo del departamento para el que trabajaba.

Como esos alumnos ya habían estudiado vocabulario y gramática en varios cursos, lo más importante, en términos de aprendizaje, consistía en la práctica de situaciones conversacionales auténticas. Como la mayoría de los estudiantes sabe, la mejor manera de aprender una lengua es la inmersión en una situación donde hablar sea imprescindible. La tecnología informática, sobre todo el mundo virtual de la Internet, ha creado muchos “mundos virtuales” y grupos sociales. La comunidad de colaboradores de Wikipedia es una de las más importantes. La meta de aquel curso de 2007 era doble: presentar el mundo virtual de Wikipedia en inglés y explorar las formas de colaboración con ese mundo; y esa meta se conseguía redactando de cero un artículo, como proyecto final. Hay que recordar que esto ocurrió antes del inicio de muchos de los programas actuales de la Fundación Wikimedia, tales como el Global Education.

El curso se centraba en la comunicación intercultural – aprender sobre las diferencias potenciales entre ambas culturas y las posibles estrategias de adaptación. Para cumplir con ese objetivo, se presentó a Wikipedia como una “cultura”; es decir, como a un grupo con valores compartidos y maneras de interactuar…algo que los alumnos debían adoptar mientras aprendían a redactar artículos y se familiarizaban con los aspectos tecnológicos del sitio. Dado que la propuesta difería mucho de cualquier otra clase de inglés que hubieran cursado previamente, casi todos los alumnos experimentaron distintos tipos de dificultades durante el semestre. Sin embargo, la mayoría mejoró su desempeño lingüístico en inglés, como lo mostraron los resultados del examen TOEFL (realizado antes y después del curso). Presenté toda la información recogida entonces en la conferencia de MexTESOL, realizada en León, Estado de Guanajuato (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), en 2008.

En 2008, comencé a trabajar en el Campus Ciudad de México con el fin de establecer y coordinar el laboratorio de aprendizaje autodirigido (self access), que es una mezcla de laboratorio de idiomas tradicional y biblioteca. Desde entonces, junto con mis alumnos, realizo tareas menores para Wikipedia, como redactar en grupos artículos más breves y encomendar la traducción de artículos, principalmente del inglés al español. A muchos estudiantes, la traducción les resultó una buena introducción a la preparación de artículos de Wikipedia. Es una manera de que ellos mejoren Wikipedia en su lengua materna. Es más fácil traducir de otra lengua a la propia, aunque todavía se nota que el inglés de los originales causa errores de transferencia en la versión española. Esta cuestión se resolvió mediante la revisión de las distintas versiones entre los mismos traductores. La traducción se realiza en grupos, revisando cada uno de los traductores los borradores de sus compañeros, y después se intercambian los artículos completos en vistas de una revisión final. Frecuentemente, esto lleva a debates interesantes acerca de las diferencias retóricas entre el inglés y el español; o sea, acerca de cómo, en cada lengua, las figuras retóricas expresan la misma información. Esto, también, forma parte de la comunicación cultural.

Hasta la fecha, se obtuvieron dos lecciones importantes gracias al uso de Wikipedia. Primero, las exigencias de aculturación de cada participante a la comunidad de Wikipedia es una experiencia valiosa, porque así muchos alumnos pueden experimentar las dificultades y los síntomas reales del choque cultural. Sin embargo, no todos se benefician de esto; los que más provecho sacan son los alumnos que perciben el valor de la experiencia a pesar de los obstáculos. En la segunda mitad de 2011, trabajé con cuatro de estos alumnos, que se abocaron a la redacción de los artículos relativos al Festival Internacional Cervantino. Estos estudiantes no solo investigaron y redactaron los artículos en inglés y español, sino que también se comunicaron con los organizadores del festival y con varios artistas internacionales para obtener fotografías y otros tipos de ayuda. En segundo lugar, las tareas de traducción son extremadamente útiles porque proveen un molde para el formato de los artículos de Wikipedia y son buenas también para introducir los aspectos técnicos de Wikipedia. Traducir permite aprender por imitación en lugar de primero aprender reglas abstractas y luego intentar aplicarlas de alguna manera. También muestra un modo de trabajar con Wikipedia que es menos intenso y más fácil de incorporar en las clases, sobretodo en clases de lenguas extranjeras.

El Campus Ciudad de México no ha cejado en su compromiso de colaborar con Wikipedia. Lourdes Epstein, Directora de la Biblioteca del campus, apartó un espacio especial, en el mismo edificio de la biblioteca, para el Club Wikipedia y para otros alumnos que colaboren en tareas afines. Varios departamentos universitarios, como el de Estudios Globales, promueven la participación de sus alumnos y docentes. En el primer semestre del corriente año, dará comienzo un programa piloto en el que participarán los alumnos del Programa del Diploma del Bachillerato Internacional del campus. A fin de cumplir con el requisito de servicio social “CAS”, un grupo seleccionado de alumnos va a idear proyectos, asesorados por mí, de un semestre de duración, basados en sus intereses y habilidades.

Please find below the summary part of the mid-year status report from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Development department, regarding the 2011-12 annual plan. The full report including the core activity review and priorities for next six months can be accessed on Meta.

Overall, the global development team continues to make progress in building our team, however we are moving more slowly than would be preferred in some areas. I’m happy that we have made a huge amount of progress in Mobile over the past six months. I would like to be further along in deploying pilot programs in India and Brazil as well as in expanding our grants program. The slower than desired pace is a result of our desire to do a better job of working with the communities where we are deeply engaged, a desire to do more upfront consultation and design work, and due to our relatively thinly spread leadership resource (me). We are also actively reflecting on the Pune Pilot and integrating lessons into how we work across the board, not just in the Global Education Project or in India.

WMF Goal #1: Mobile

We are on track to meet our plan for our mobile target of 2 billion page views for 2011/12 and partnerships with mobile operators representing 500 million subscribers. In December 2011, we had 1.534 billion page views to our mobile sites across all Wikipedias as compared with 802 million in June 2011.^[1] We have made excellent progress across the organization on mobile over the past six months and are in a fundamentally better place than we were. Our mobile partnerships team has built a pipeline of partnerships with mobile operators around the world that start launching in January. Our current partnership list covers key markets in Latin America, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Turkey and Russia representing over 700 million subscribers. Not every deal will come to fruition, but we are confident that some major ones will and we’ll begin to attract wider interest in partnerships. In most cases, our partners will be offering Wikipedia access for free to their subscribers and we are working on marketing programs that will expand reach.

The Global Development team works closely with engineering on mobile research, product feature decision making and on technical support for partners. Our engineering team has deployed a much-improved mobile gateway and enhanced its functionality, and is working hard to release an Android app, which closes a hole in our portfolio. They are building out our engineering resources to enable continuous improvement of our mobile position. GD/Eng’s mobile research work (we have done two major studies) has helped inform engineering decisions on the product development pathway. Results from the Mobile Readers Survey 2011 are being analyzed, and will be shared soon. Findings from the mobile research work conducted in India and Brazil can be found at Wikipedia Mobile User Research.

WMF Goal #2: Editor growth

Progress on editor growth has been more challenging. We are behind in getting pilot initiatives deployed to really understand the potential for direct impact on editor growth. Our primary effort to date has been the Global Education Program including the Pune Pilot in India. While the program in the US and Canada continues to grow, it has had a small and temporary impact on editor numbers. The program has not been oriented toward creating new Wikipedians, but has added almost 2,000 editors during the Fall 2011 semester, more than thrice the number from Spring 2011 (500+).

The Pune Pilot, which we launched in June, has wrapped up, but was a failure. There were a range of problems involving student plagiarism and the program took on too many students with too few support resources to manage the problems that came up. We also taxed the English Wikipedia community in a way that we had not intended and was regrettable. We learned a lot…and are engaged in a thorough review of the pilot with outside help to ensure we capture the lessons and make better and different mistakes in the future.

We did not have the capacity in place to launch other pilot initiatives in the past six months. We slowed down our plans for Brazil to create space to build a strong relationship with the Brazilian community and conduct some research into the current state of PT:WP. Our India program was at full capacity dealing with the Pune Pilot, supporting the Wikiconference India, and basic program setup requirements. Our India team also took some time to strengthen their links to the community and do a better job of getting early community partnership in program work.

An unplanned for opportunity emerged to accelerate catalyst activities in MENA focused on Arabic Wikipedia. It was not in the annual plan to work in MENA this year, but we took the opportunity presented by the interest of the Qatar Computing Research Institute in supporting Wikipedia. They hosted a small workshop where we met with leading Arabic Wikipedians and laid the groundwork for program work in the beginning of 2012.

Global Development core activity review

see full report

Global Development Priorities for the next six months

see full report

 

Barry Newstead

Chief Global Development Officer