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Português  • English

In English:

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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català  • English

In English

Catalan Wikipedia is especially active with GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) projects, but beginning in summer 2012, we started developing “Viquimodernisme“, an unprecedented wikiproject in Catalonia. For the first time, a research group on contemporary design and art history — Universitat de Barcelona’s GRACMON — and around 100 art history students at the same university have made a combined effort to improve Catalan Wikipedia’s content related to their area of expertise, Catalan modernism.

A preliminary audit (in Catalan) revealed that from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view, modernism articles on the Catalan Wikipedia needed serious improvement. And we took other key factors into account. First, Wikipedia’s prominent position among the main reference sources when information is sought on the Internet makes it reasonable to work to provide Wikipedia readers with high quality content. Second, Catalan modernism is one of the main assets of our artistic heritage, and Wikipedia is a very useful tool to explain Catalonia to the world. Also, we cannot forget that free knowledge projects in public education entail an important social return, which makes them even more valuable. Finally, plunging on such a wikiproject involved adopting a new paradigm of academic work: assignments became an open task, a permanent, free and widely available work in progress.

The wikiproject planning was based on data provided by the preliminary audit, and once devised, it was presented to students enrolled in several subjects related to Catalan modernism (plastic arts, theatre, design…). Each student commited to edit a Wikipedia article related to the subject they were learning, aiming to obtain or get as close as possible to a featured article. We reached a lucky crossroads: students acquired new knowledge and improved their command of references; professors — members of the research group — provided the needed criterion to assess the assignments and also optimised their research by providing Wikipedia with new data, while the community had an active participation by helping inexperienced editors and intervening when it was necessary. Despite that the experience was positive, several tense situations arose among students and the community, mainly due to a lack of knowledge of Wikipedia’s working dynamics by novice editors. Also, this experience helped us to spot a flaw we need to improve as soon as possible: the need to clarify Wikimedia Commons’ operation and special features, as their command was one of the most difficult issues students had to cope with.

Currently, we can only provide preliminary results of this wikiproject, as we have just started phase 2, which will last until June 2013. During this second semester we will be glad to welcome a fourth actor, Barcelona’s Museu de les Arts Escèniques, which will participate of the wikiproject by offering students a backstage pass to high quality references. But we can state that the results of the first phase of the wikiproject have been very satisfactory and have exceeded even the most optimistic estimates. The signs determined in the preliminary audit show an astonishing growth of Catalan modernism-related articles in Catalan wikipedia, either by number and quality.

Most assignments involved creating new articles, and Catalan wikipedia currently has 416 articles about Catalan modernism available, while in late summer 2012 there were 372! Also, a survey among phase 1 students revealed they were mainly satisfied with the project and their results. Among the most interesting comments, we must stress their willingness to take part again in a similar experience and their satisfaction to know that their assignment has been something useful to the society since the very beginning.

Viquimodernisme is a milestone-setting project among GLAM wikiprojects. Once finished, we will be able to determine protocols and mechanisms that will serve as a reference for future similar experiences. This unprecedented collaboration between academia and Wikipedia has revealed an amazing potential, but we are only on the tip of the iceberg: things are changing, and this is a shared success!

Esther Solé (User:ESM), Amical Viquipèdia

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Getting newcomers started effectively on Wikipedia is one of Wikimedia Foundation’s biggest challenges, and has been — in one way or another — the central focus of the Wikipedia Education Program. When we launched the Wikipedia Ambassador Program in 2010, it was all about in-person training: bringing together experienced Wikipedians and newcomers, and teaching the newcomers enough to find their own way on Wikipedia — and even teach others. To make the program scale, though, we knew we’d need more self-service training, something a professor or would-be Wikipedia Ambassador could do on their own time and at their own pace.

For English Wikipedia, we put together the first versions of the online trainings for professors and Wikipedia Ambassadors in mid-2012. Soon, we realized that a lot of what we’d developed for professors and Campus Ambassadors could also work well for students. So we took out the assignment design module, tweaked a little of the language, and voilà, the training for students was born!

A formal orientation program for students would be new territory, so we were anxious to see if students would find it useful — or have the patience for an hour-long training course. The training works well as a first assignment for a class in the Education Program, so we created a form at the end for students to show they completed it. The form also asks for feedback: what they liked and didn’t like, what was missing, and what was unnecessary.

Based on this early feedback along with a few live user tests, we could see that it might be usable, but there was plenty of room for improvment. So we iterated quickly to make the training more streamlined and to fix specific pain points as quickly as feedback came in. By the end of the year, we had fixed most of the simple issues, and most of the new feedback was positive.

2013 marked the first systematic use of our new structured course pages on English Wikipedia, and we built prominent links to the training into the couse pages students interact on, the reference materials we send to professors, and the information we provide to Wikipedia Ambassadors. One challenge with materials developed for the Education Program is that we essentially have two shots per year at making changes: immediately prior to the spring term and immediately prior to the fall term. And it looks like the changes we made at the end of 2012 to publicize the trainings more have really helped!

So far this term, we’ve had more than 375 users complete the training—compared to 42 last term. This level of feedback has given us the chance to focus on the little things that affect students’ overall experiences. For example, one recurring theme in the feedback has been the videos: students either really like them, or really don’t. The ones who don’t like watching videos, preferring to read through text at their own pace, didn’t like it when the videos went into more detail than the text. So we made the text parallel the videos more closely. Now users can choose whether to watch the videos, read the text, or both, and they get similar information either way.

These changes cycle back into the other trainings too, including both the educators and ambassadors training, and the short newcomers training that was spun off for a quick general intro for users who can’t be expected to do an hour-long training before they begin. Just since January, the training for students landing page has had more than 4,000 page views.

Next up: spreading it beyond English Wikipedia! Porting the training to Portuguese Wikipedia is already underway, with more languages to come.

Want to try the training yourself? The newcomers version takes about 20 minutes.

Sage Ross, Wikipedia Education Program Online Communications

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

This post is available in 2 languages:

français  • English

In English

I am Simon Villeneuve. I have taught physics and astronomy at the Cégep de Chicoutimi, a college in Quebec (Canada), since 2005. Since the 2008 fall semester, I have used the French Wikipedia in my astronomy class and have introduced my students to the commons-based peer production principle of public wikis. I coordinate their work with the Cégep de Chicoutimi pedagogical project.

Like it or not, the free encyclopedia will take an increasing place in the education world^[1]. I believe Wikipedia is a wonderful educational tool for learning a lot of stuff like critical thinking, peer production principle, ability to find and evaluate the quality of sources and, especially, production of online libre knowledge that anyone can reuse.

In this post, I discuss some results of my school project and resources we created in order to follow and frame more easily the students assignments.

A work in progress

It took me a long time to evaluate the kind of Wikipedian work I could ask my students. At first, I assigned them two tasks:

1. Contribute 20 edits in the main space, with a minimum of 10 astronomy-related edits.
2. In teams, significantly expand an astronomy article of your choice.

I tought the first assignment was sufficient for students to learn the ropes of the encyclopedia, enough to complete the second task. Impressed by the results of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem, I wanted to lead my students in the drafting of good and featured articles. It was a disaster, plain and simple.

I came to realize that mastering the basics of MediaWiki and the encyclopedic style are very difficult to the average human being. I overestimated the degree of computer skills from my supposed digital natives digital naives, as well as their ability to master the encyclopedic genre.

This led me to develop a learning process involving six, rather than two, assignments and focus their work on brand new articles or stubs.

Results

Here are some results:

The last four columns show the results of the main assignment in which I asked teams of students to significantly develop one article.^{[note 12]}

Since 2009, I also ask students to fill a short survey at the end of the semester. The survey is far from perfect, but it gives a general idea about the perception of the project by the students, including the gender gap.

You can get a detailed overview of the results on (fr) Wikipédia:Projets pédagogiques/Cégep de Chicoutimi/Résultats.

Other WMF projects

My use of wikis in the classroom is not restricted to Wikipedia. I also introduce the students to other Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Some contributed to Commons^{[note 13]} and participated in the 2012 Wiki Loves Monuments contest.

In the last weeks, the students wrote astronomy and astrophysics news items on Wikinews.^{[note 14]} One article, (fr) “fr:Le géocroiseur 2012 DA14 s’approche de la terre” was showcased on the site’s Main Page for several days.

I also introduced my students to Wikisource. One of them has started working on a French translation of the Einstein–Szilárd letter and of Churchill‘s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.^{[note 15]}

Resources

There are very few French resources and appropriate tools to help teachers to achieve educational activities using Wikipedia.

With the help of Wikipedians like Lilyu and Benoit Rochon, we created several templates and specialized categories to help us identifying students activities as well as articles they worked on. To get an idea of ​​these resources, see the (fr) Catégorie:Projet:Cégep de Chicoutimi.

Over time, I was able to gather a core of education stakeholders interested in creating open educational resources by organizing various activities, such as the (fr) 2011 copyleft day. Thus, with the help of such fellow Wikipedians/Science and Mathematics teachers Cantons-de-l’Est and Letartean, we have created a number of exercises.^{[note 16]}. While still very sketchy at this stage, I believe that this approach can serve as a guide to create a turnkey approach for an educational use of Wikipedia by fellow teachers.

Our latest initiative is the establishment of a partnership with the digital library Les Classiques des sciences sociales with the launch, in February 2013, of a new collection dedicated to natural sciences^[3]. We have taken this initiative because the eligibility policy on French WikiSource is much more restrictive than what is acceptable under Canadian law. The new collection, with free texts in 5 formats (.html, .pdf, .doc, .rtf, and .epub), provides access to the French text from renowned scientists such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, René Descartes, Albert Einstein, Gregor Mendel, and Ernest Rutherford.

That’s about all I can tell you for now. If my Wikimania 2013 presentation is accepted, I’ll be able tell you more face to face.

Simon Villeneuve, Cégep de Chicoutimi

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This post is available in 2 languages:

العربية  • English

In English

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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Greek  • English

In English

The Argostoli Evening High School in Kefalonia, Greece has been active on Wikimedia projects since 2007. It is one of the few schools in Greece to have its own article on Greek Wikipedia (after “surviving” a heated deletion debate). For the school year 2012-13, we decided to embark on two ambitious journeys: First Grade of Upper Secondary is studying the edible species of wild flora on the island, while Second Grade is investigating a local legend that says there are 365 villages on the island, one for each day of the year. What better place to publish the material we are gathering than a Wikimedia Commons gallery!

The Wild Flora of Kefalonia: Survival and Relish

Kefalonia is an island with bountiful natural assets. The wild flora of the island is mostly typical to regions of the Mediterranean basin, however with certain species that are particular to the Kefalonian flora (e.g. the black fir abies cephalonica). It is only logical that the locals turned to the flora in times of difficulty for their mere sustenance: older senior citizens in their late seventies, eighties and nineties have tales to tell of their survival “off the fruit of the land” during World War II.

But that’s not all: many of the native species are gastronomic delicacies in their own right! Greek chefs can often be found rummaging through open-market stalls, on the lookout for freshly cut pot-herbs and other wild flora ingredients for their recipes. In the larger cities, they will often pay dearly for such treats… while here in Kefalonia, they’re growing all around us. We decided to document as many edible species as possible, and started a gallery on Commons with the designation: photo 1 is a view of the tree, shrub or plant – photo 2 is a view of the edible part(s) – photo 3 is the species processed as food, with emphasis on preservation methods where applicable (pickled – preserves – dried etc.). For each species we will find the botanical name to use as a title for the photos, while also mentioning English and Greek common names in the descriptions (as well as local names, where applicable). Have a look at our ongoing work here.

365 Villages in Kefalonia: Myth or Reality?

Ask any native in Kefalonia “How many villages are there on your island?” and he/she will proudly respond “365! One for each day of the year”. Sounds interesting… but no-one has ever actually written a book or essay, or so much as made a list to prove it. The idea had been lingering in my mind for a couple of years, and this year I introduced it to my pupils. They were excited, so we embarked on the project.

Less than a month had passed when we identified major obstacles: Greece has been subject to numerous administrative reforms over the course of modern history, the latest being “Kallikratis,” by which many municipalities were “fused” into larger ones. This is what happened on our island: the long-standing seven municipalities — shaped in the previous “Kapodistrias” reform, but closely tied to the history of the island dating back to Ancient times — were pooled into one, the Municipality of Kefalonia. So, we figured, imagine how many villages were “usurped” during each of the previous reforms. How could we find a valid scientific method to document these currently non-existent villages, as each of them carried its own history, culture and ancestry? The answer was to visit the General State Archives’ local offices. The director was kind enough to open the premises in the evening (our school is for working pupils and adults aged 14 upwards) and talk to us about the research that she could help us carry out there. She also told us that we would have to look up the Government Gazette issues pertaining to each of the past reforms to find the now-obsolete villages.

OK, so now we have a method. Why not get started with the “easy stuff”, and leave the research for later? Pupils were broken down into groups, and each was handed a map and assigned a former municipality to cover with photos under the general designation: view OF village – view FROM village – landmark (church, ancient ruins or other point of interest). They grabbed their cameras and brought back their material, which we are continually uploading to our gallery in Commons.

Where does the local community step in?

Kefalonia is quite a large island: it’s the sixth largest in Greece. To reach either the northernmost or southernmost tip from the capital (Argostoli), you need to drive around 50km. In times of financial crisis, this is not affordable. One group of pupils set out in the early afternoon (17-year-old Kostas and 26-year-old Giorgos both work on weekends) to a distant location in late autumn, only to find that they could not cover the entire area, as the sun was setting and they couldn’t take any more pictures. It’s not easy for them to repeat the process. So where do we get the copyright-free, original material we need for our galleries? The answer: get the local community involved.

Kefalonians are proud of their rich history and culture, and eager to hear about projects illuminating aspects of their heritage: for example, there is ongoing excavation work with interesting finds that may prove that Homer’s Ithaca was not on the neighbouring island bearing the same name, but in southern Kefalonia. I believe that they will be intrigued to participate in proving the villages’ legend, and willing to share their photos; others may want to share knowledge on the edible wild flora (it’s amazing how many plants around us are edible, and we don’t even know it!)

The event is planned for mid-March. Apart from presenting the work we have already carried out, we intend to include a mini-lecture on Creative Commons licenses (so they know how the material they contribute will be shared). I will suggest that the material either be sent to me by e-mail, or brought to the school in person, or… why not engage the locals themselves in editing? That would mean an extra seminar on the basics of Wikimedia editing, which I would be happy to organise, if there are enough interested participants.

Notes

Project instructors: Mina Theofilatou (Saintfevrier), Vasiliki Karadimou. Video footage from school visit to General State Archives (Kefalonia) here In video: Ms Paraskevi Kroussou (replaced by V. Karadimou in 2nd semester), Ms Dora Zafiratou (Director of State Archives Kefalonia), myself and pupils Fodasnos7, Mixalispapadatos, Giorgos, Maria and Kostas.

Press release on wild flora project (with video from WWII-survivor interview and “teaser” for upcoming event) published in the local news portal here. School blog: http://esperinogymnasioargostoliou.blogspot.gr (sorry, no English translations/subtitles available yet)

MinaTheofilatou

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العربية  • English

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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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I thought about writing this piece about how great the current education program is here in Sweden, how our path so far has been sprinkled by happy faces, enthusiastic teachers, students and pupils, and most importantly perhaps, how this work so amazingly wonderful has contributed to the Wikimedia projects in such a superqualitative manner. But then I realised two things.

Firstly, that it would be a lie. And secondly, had I written such a blogpost, what would it have given you, the reader? Sure, I do enjoy reading stories about prosperity and progress which may be rather inspirational, and perhaps so do you. But do we learn from them? Perhaps if they are tangible enough to be understood in terms of what worked and how it may be utilised in another context. But sometimes they’re just shared as success stories. No harm in that I presume, but I do somehow carry a hope of our organisation as a whole, all chapters, all people engaged and supporting the idea of free knowledge, also being, in itself, a learning organisation. This is the reason to why I will dedicate this blogpost not to success, but to failure, or mistakes, call it what you will. But this is what has not really worked and what mistakes we have done here in Sweden.

1. To overdo it.

We held a workshop with very interested teachers about Wikipedia, which we do, quite a bit too much perhaps, hold dearly. The teachers were all new to a talkpage or a view history tab on Wikipedia, and so far so good, as we told them about it and showed them where to find it and what to look for. Then we began to talk about the joy and extraordinary adventures of using, and contributing to Wikipedia, what one of the users had recently written on someone else’s talkpage, and how that user has come to be a bit more pleasant than earlier.

I think we lost them somewhere in a discussion about the structure of a biographical article: Should the date of the person’s birth be told before his or her reason for being in an encyclopedia? They could not have cared less. We were so excited though, that we, for quite a long time, missed that these teachers did not know the usernames of the people we spoke about, nor if they had been more or less pleasant to work with. We simply thought that they were so much in love with this huge group that they wanted to know it all, every little tiny detail of it.

How wrong we were. If nothing else, I think they were somewhat smitten with our enthusiasm, rather than the quality of content of the workshop. We lose ourselves in the excitement of Wikipedia and in our joy to share to the world the greatness of the phenomenon. But the teachers were at a conference and needed and longed for tangible, easily understood tools to use with their pupils. So, next time, I will not cut down on the enthusiasm per se, but find ways to channel this energy into something useful and more easily understandable for a group of people who have previously done nothing apart from reading articles redirected from Google.

2. From abstract to tangible.

Students in Sweden present on their contributions to Wikipedia.

In the past four months since I have had the honour to be employed as an education manager at Wikimedia Sverige, I have held quite a lot of lectures and talks. About Wikipedia, and more specifically, Wikipedia in education. And I have spoken myself warm of the greatness of the world’s largest groupwork, the philosophy that underpins Wikipedia, the beauty in assuming good faith and how great that is for our synapses movement in finding these patterns so that we may view people we meet, generally, with this assumption of good faith. I hardly get people who disagree when I tell them of this: The greatness of the contributors who write, categorise, care for, clean, and structure Wikipedia, all voluntarily. People, just as I am, seem to be warmed with hope for humanity and hope for a bright future full of free knowledge, accessible to all.

So all good? No. Definitely not. They walk away with this joy, and perhaps a bit of fulfillment from the knowledge of people contributing their knowledge, jointly, without a direct tangible reward. So they’re happy. But then they seem to think, “Hmm. Wikipedia is great.” Okay, that is great. “I like Wikipedia.” Okay, even better. “I would like to contribute to Wikipedia.” Ah, lovely! “I would like to do it with my pupils or students.” Super great! But then, have I given them any tools to do so? No.

They’re happy, but without tools to learn how to contribute themselves. I realised that I had an idea about people simply having to be eager, passionate and excited enough, to find their own way into actually taking part in this spectacular thing. Let me tell you, if this is not already clear to all of you but me, it is not. They still have no idea what to do or how to do it. So less talking about Wikipedia’s abstract greatness and underlying philosophy, and more about the examples, the hands-on ways of using Wikipedia in education. And perhaps even this in bullet points, or better, steps! I guess I was quite wrong in believing that curiosity and eagerness would drive people to get to know Wikipedia themselves as long as I came along and sparked their curiosity a bit more.

And well, yes, they asked and do ask plenty of questions, and love to hear stories about controversial subjects, famous people who have written about themselves, what has gone wrong and who actually does rule Wikipedia. But perhaps solely as passive listeners, who enjoy the entertainment of listening to a talk about a phenomenon they know. Not as active and eager to start to use contributors. Perhaps for that, hands-on examples are simply needed.

As with creativity, it is born and fostered not in a vacuum, but within a set of frames. If the examples of education and Wikipedia are the frames, they may wonder their own paths in their brain, connecting these examples to their current situation. Writing this out on a sheet of paper makes me think that this should have been so super obvious to me. So, if this is, and was, only me. Do feel free to think that this was a rather stupid non-working way of getting people interested in actually contributing.

3. To find a balance.

Sometimes in workshops, students, pupils, and teachers complain about the syntax. Oh it is simply so difficult and almost impossible to learn. Others find it quite easy and intriguing. Sooner or later they seem to either get to enjoy it, or at least learn to use it. Another aspect seems to be a bit more difficult: what to choose to write about or contribute to. May I here dare say that people are, in various ways, quite beloved with their own ideas, hobbies, and lives in general? This has a great effect on what people tend to want to write about. There’s nothing weird in that, but I do find it is quite a balance to have teachers who just want to start to contribute and are oh so eager to have their students or pupils write, and then ask if they could start by writing about the horse stable which they like that is around the corner from their school. Or if they could possibly add the picture of them standing in front of the museum in the article about the museum. Well, probably not a great idea, but I had said contributing was easy. And now, all of a sudden, it’s not. I’ve given them a tool that I am now trying to wrench from them. They were eager and keen to initiate their enthusiastic first contributions to Wikipedia, which I had energetically supported them in, then contrary to that, told them that most of their ideas from articles and contributions would fall outside the frames of relevance.

So, lesson learned. Do not be too enthusiastic, Sophie (memo to self), remember not to ‘sell’ Wikipedia as an easy to use tool for everybody. Perhaps it is not. This lesson, which I am not so sure about, is about balance. I know that. What I am not sure about though, is what this balance looks like. The cultural bar to start to contribute should not be too high, but not so low such that people experience a huge disappointment when their contributions are removed.

Hopefully this may help you make fewer mistakes, or at least different mistakes than these mentioned above. When you do, please share them.

Sophie Österberg, Wikimedia Sverige