By Professor Juliana Bastos Marques – UNIRIO (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil)

One late night in 2006, while I was struggling with my PhD thesis, I went looking for a quick reference for a Latin author in Portuguese Wikipedia, only to find out that there was nothing about him there (it was the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus). Indignant, I finally decided to register in order to write the new article myself. Soon I realized that was the tip of an iceberg: a lot of work was needed on other history-related topics, and I needed more help.

Wikipedian turned professor some years later, I thought it would be a good idea to recruit my students to write some good content and fix the disturbing mistakes we repeatedly found. Indeed, the state of the Portuguese Wikipedia, while counting more than 700,000 articles, is still usually written by non-specialists; this means several outdated theories and approaches, low-quality references and incomplete information. My other concern was quite practical: I needed to convince my own students that the additional information they used for my classes and exams was NOT to be looked for on Wikipedia, to avoid plagiarism for a start! In fact, all my friends who taught at primary and secondary schools also had the same problem: whether we want or not, Wikipedia is probably the most popular learning material in Brazil – and, in the current state, a bad one.

Serendipity came to my doorstep soon, when I first read an article about the Public Policy Initiative in Inside Higher Ed in September 2010, and later attended an event with Jessie Wild and Kul Wadhwa from Wikimedia Foundation on the following January, only to learn that WMF had plans for the expansion of the Global Education Program in Brazil. I also had the opportunity to attend the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit, last July, in Boston. While I was only a spectator there, for my class would start in August, it was very exciting to see that other professors had already come to similar conclusions as to the value of Wikipedia for the university.

With the course taught, mistakes made and also success achieved, I have some input to share on my experience. First of all, I’d have in mind that the goal of using Wikipedia in class is ultimately to improve weak articles. This works perfectly for the case of the Portuguese Wikipedia, and certainly with dozens of other languages. In the case of more developed Wikipedias such as the English one, I believe this means a careful selection of potential new or stub articles to work with.

The course I taught improved substantially a set of articles related to Roman History, but it was peculiar in the sense that it was an elective course with 25 students. They had a combination of traditional lectures with work in the lab, always with the aid of a Campus Ambassador (who happened not to be a student, but a very proficient and participating member of the Portuguese Wikimedia community), two also very proficient Online Ambassadors and a dedicated mailing list. All students worked in their sandboxes until I graded and revised the content, and the Ambassadors approved the technical Wikipedia format, code and writing. This was crucial in preventing early deletions and distrust from the community, which would certainly discourage the students. Also, I decided to engage the Portuguese-speaking Wikipedia community early on, mostly through the Wikimedia Brasil mailing list, in order to make them aware of what we were planning. The members were very supportive and eventually helped the students in their discussion pages, teaching them to avoid plagiarism and to write with neutrality.

In due time, I realized I should not be concerned whether I was creating a new set of editors, which I believe to be a somehow misleading goal. All Wikipedia editors are volunteers, and their will to contribute will always be beyond a class, a grade or our encouragement as teachers. However, I feel we have created multipliers: even if they never edit again, my students will eventually teach on their own, and they will tell their students about how knowledge is never ready and finished, is never to be trusted without critical reflection, and can be improved through their own learning and work.

The students very soon learned that the set of skills they needed to practice was somehow different from what it was expected in academia. After all, writing for encyclopedias requires strict objectivity, impartiality and anonymity, so that the voice of the writer is not to be distinguished. However, together with other skills such as knowing when and how to use references correctly, or learning how to distinguish and explain different points of view regarding a subject, these abilities helped them understand the subject and their own learning results in a much more clear and precise way than before. For instance, I had to go with them phrase per phrase sometimes, until they could really master what they meant to say – a careful dynamic that all professors know is impossible to follow when grading a pile of papers.

Last but not least, the students ultimately learned that an encyclopedia is a starting point. And it was their own work that could make it a solid starting point for both themselves and any other reader. For the next semester, starting here in Brazil in February, I will continue using the opportunity that Wikipedia gives for professors and students to teach, to learn and to work with quality and rigor, while sharing our knowledge from the often closed corridors of academia to the entire world. I’d easily say that this has been to me the biggest reward of using Wikipedia for teaching.

CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg was drawn into editing Wikipedia like many subject matter experts are – by editing pages in his area of expertise, art and design. As Michael began to tinker around with Wikipedia more and more, he started to think of ways to incorporate it into his coursework for his History of Design and Digital Media course at the College of Staten Island.

“Traditionally for term papers, students go and do some research about a particular topic, and they demonstrate their mastery by regurgitating some facts about it. Hopefully there’s a thesis, but sometimes it’s just a summary. Reading these papers is pretty boring, and the ritualistic production of those papers is kind of useless and in a way tedious for the students as well,” he says. “I decided to harness some of that creative energy for the greater good by channeling that work into something that has a utility beyond just the ritual of the classroom.”

Michael was no stranger to useful assignments; for previous courses, he’d had students redesign local nonprofits’ websites. In another assignment geared toward understanding licenses, he had asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Past students had also contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated. In the fall 2011 term, he wanted his students to write Wikipedia articles on designers or design principles referenced in the course’s textbook. Michael spent some time conceiving the course project, and then stumbled across the Wikipedia Education Program.

He recruited a reference librarian at College of Staten Island, Mark Polger, and asked one of his students, Nicole Boffa, to become Campus Ambassadors.User:SMasters filled out Michael’s pod as an Online Ambassador. Mark handled teaching students how to use the library and the basics of how to use references on Wikipedia, while Nicole helped students understand editing basics. User:SMasters was there to help when disputes arose, which did a handful of times, including twice in which the individuals where the subject matter of the Wikipedia articles students were writing reverted some of their edits.

That experience in itself – students’ relationship to power – is one of four reasons Michael is glad he asked his students to edit Wikipedia for class. He gave students extra credit for contacting the subject of their Wikipedia article to request they release a photo of themselves or their work under a CC-BY-SA license, and gave bonus points if the subject actually did so.

“These students are suddenly engaging with the subject of their writing directly,” Michael says. “Is it okay to email someone you’re writing a research paper about? No. Is it okay to write somebody you’re writing about on Wikipedia for your class? Completely. You can write them and say, ‘I’m writing for Wikipedia for my class. I would really like it if you could give me an image of your work or an image of you to put on that page.’ I watched the students who followed through on that become transformed as students. And many of them used the word ‘empowering’ in their reflective papers to describe the experience.”

The second reason, Michael says, is that students gained valuable research skills. He asked students to write reflective papers at the end of the term, and students reported that the work they did with Mark to prepare to write their Wikipedia articles was extremely valuable.

“They almost all said that it was the most research they had ever done,” Michael says. “They used the library more than they’d ever used, and they learned substantially about research.”

Third, Michael says, was that students were more motivated because they felt like their assignments were working toward a good cause or the greater good of society.

The fourth and final of Michael’s reasons for liking the Wikipedia assignment is that students who are used to getting by on college papers by close paraphrasing or outright plagiarizing works discover they simply can’t do that with a Wikipedia assignment, since students had to cite every sentence. Writing for Wikipedia made it easier for him to catch students’ plagiarism early, and he was able to help students understand why they needed to use original voice.

“This assignment was really hard for the students,” he says. “I asked them to write at least 1,200 words, and most of them ended up somewhere around 900 because writing for Wikipedia is different from the writing they’re used to and requires so much more work. They’re used to just filling up 5 pages and getting credit for it.” But, he adds, students came around to the idea. “In their reflection papers, almost all the students said they really didn’t want to do the assignment, that it was really hard, but they were glad they did. It was highly productive.”

Michael’s students also got the chance to see the real-world impact of their work through an event organized by the Wikimedia New York chapter, including Ambassador Richard Knipel. Ten of Michael’s students joined him and some Wikimedia New York editors at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where they received a tour of the Talk to Me exhibit with educators from the MOMA. Students then worked with Wikipedians from the chapter to create articles about the exhibit and its works. Michael says it was transformative for the students who went, as the museum educators and the Wikipedians treated students with respect, encouraging them to share their views and contribute to Wikipedia.

“For these students, it was mind-blowing that they could sit down and collaborate with these experienced Wikipedians. What the students realized was they had valuable knowledge, and that was really amazing for them,” he says. “The students who did that field trip came back to the classroom with much more confidence.”

Michael is excited by the experience his students had on Wikipedia last term, and he’s looking forward to giving his Ph.D. students at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2012 an assignment on Wikipedia as well. And just like his students, he’s glad their contributions are helping the greater good, enhancing the content freely available about design.

“We did something worthwhile,” he says. “This section of Wikipedia is a little less of a blind spot.”

For about ten days in December, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy, and I met with various professors, students, and local Wikipedians in Cairo, Egypt. The initial Arabic Catalyst Project trip from October showed that there is potential in working with faculty members and students on improving the Arabic Wikipedia; this December trip made clear that there is a very high level of interest among people at universities in Cairo to do so.

The Cairo pilot project – the newest part of the Wikipedia Education Program – will begin in early 2012. Its primary goal will be to improve the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia, which is currently very small (only about 150,000 articles) even though as the fifth most common language in the world Arabic has about 400 million speakers worldwide (compare this to Japanese, which has about 130 million speakers worldwide but almost 800,000 Wikipedia articles). As part of the Cairo pilot, students from Ain Shams University and Cairo University will contribute new content to the Arabic Wikipedia or translate content from another language into Arabic on Wikipedia. The plan is to have about 4-6 classes in the pilot, and only the top 3-15 students from each of these classes will actually contribute to Wikipedia. We want to keep the pilot very small, to make sure that we’ve figured out what works and doesn’t work before we expand the project to more people and more places.

We were surprised by how many instructors in Egypt were excited about participating in the project. Everybody we talked to was convinced that growing and enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia would be a good idea – in fact, many professors and students told us they felt the responsibility to make free knowledge in Arabic better. We have identified about six professors for participation in the pilot, based on their understanding of Wikipedia, their genuine interest in enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia, and the writing skills of their students. Almost all the students we met also showed genuine interest in learning more about Wikipedia and contributing to it.

We are also very happy to have the support of local Wikipedians. Essam Sharaf – a long-term Wikipedian and a student at Cairo University – connected us with professors and students, helped us maneuver the streets and campuses of Cairo, and enhanced our understanding of Egypt’s social, cultural, and political context. Frank, Moushira, and I also met with an active group of Cairo-based Arabic Wikipedians and went on a photo-walk with them, during which we took pictures of Old Cairo and then uploaded them onto Wikimedia Commons (including the panoramic photo now on this Wikipedia article). We’ve also been communicating with other members of the Arabic Wikipedia community, whom we’ve found to be extremely helpful and inspiring. We feel very fortunate that this group of enthusiastic, smart, and motivated volunteers has expressed genuine interest in becoming Wikipedia Ambassadors (who teach students how to edit Wikipedia) and laying the foundation to make the Cairo pilot a success.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager

If you’ve been to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the last 10 years, chances are you’ve admired the Milwaukee Art Museum’s building, especially its brise soleil, whose wing-like span closes at night. But until recently, the Wikipedia article on the museum lacked a video of the brise soleil in action.

Katy Lederer changed that in November. Katy is finishing up her final year of school at Alverno College, a women’s college in Milwaukee, and her professor this term joined the Wikipedia Education Program. Professor Jennifer Geigel Mikulay’s Advanced Media Studies course required students to create a video to add to a Wikipedia article. Longtime Wikipedians User:OrangeMike and User:Protonk served as Wikipedia Ambassadors for the class, offering students information about how Wikipedia works and how to add their videos to articles. Katy chose to make a video of the Milwaukee Art Museum’s brise soleil.

“Ever since the announcement about the addition to the art museum was made I have been captivated by the work. With every stage of its construction I waited anxiously for the next and could not wait to see it finished and working. I am very surprised a video didn’t exist already [on Wikipedia],” Katy says. “I don’t know if Milwaukee understands the magnificence of the brise soleil. I am truly shocked by the number of people–friends, peers, classmates, Milwaukee residents–who told me they had never seen the wings move before watching my video.”

Katy, a lifelong Milwaukee resident, has been thrilled by the reception her video has gotten since she uploaded it in mid-November. The video appeared as the Wikimedia Commons Media of the Day on November 26, leading to hundreds of people viewing her video. Katy says she really enjoyed putting the video together, and she was especially moved that her work for class would appear on a resource like Wikipedia that she uses often.

“I consider myself to be generally non-traditional so doing this assignment was a breath of fresh air. Stressful air, but fresh none the less!” she says. “I am grateful that we had this opportunity. With online resources being so prevalent in our lives today–and Wikipedia being such a valued resource–it’s important to understand how it works.”

Next up for Katy is finishing her degree in Professional Communication, but she says she hopes to create more videos for Wikipedia in the future. She and a classmate are talking about taking a river tour in Chicago of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, and Katy’s already scheming to create a narrated video for Wikipedia of the trip.

“I’m drawn to visual work, so the appeal of working with a camera always takes precedence over books,” she says.

Not only had Karl Wahlen never edited Wikipedia prior to September 2011, he didn’t even know he could. That all changed when Karl enrolled in a University of Pittsburgh class called Sociology of Marriage, taught by Wikipedian Piotr Konieczny, a graduate student and a Teaching Fellow from Department of Sociology, and the Pittsburgh native found himself having to write a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework.

“When I learned on the first day that that I was going to be doing a Wikipedia project, I was rather confused,” Karl admits. “Honestly, when I first thought about it, I wondered how you worked on it, as I did not know at that point that you could even have an account on wikipedia, much less how it worked or how you used it.”

Karl’s a busy student. He’s majoring in psychology, sociology, BPhil (BPhil is an honors degree where he does the equivalent of a master’s thesis in his undergraduate years), and biology, while also getting a certificate in the conceptual foundations of medicine, and a minor in economics and chemistry. His multidisciplinary interests led Karl to want to work on the article on Joint custody in the United States, which had elements of psychology and sociology. The article had languished for years without many sources or without being particularly well-written (you can see the version before Karl and his classmates started working on it here. Karl’s input helped bring the article up to meet the Did you know requirements, which landed the article on Wikipedia’s main page in late November. By early December, the article had passed the Good Article review process as well.

Karl credits help from his professor, Piotr Konieczny, for forcing students to write Wikipedia articles for class. A longtime supporter of the Schools and universities projects on Wikipedia, Piotr is also an Online Ambassador and instructor in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States. Piotr’s course was the first to participate in the American Sociology Association’s new Wikipedia Initiative.

“Our instructor really helped on every step of the way, especially when showing us how to interact with the community,” Karl says. “You occasionally get people who are not the nicest when they disagree with you, but in general individuals tend to remain respectful with each other, and for the most part all criticism ends up leading to a higher quality article in the end, which is a good thing.”

In fact, the research skills he gained through doing the Wikipedia assignment actually helped him tremendously in another class he’s taking this term on research methods. Learning to cite every sentence and making sure that every claim he made could be backed up to a reliable source for Wikipedia taught him valuable research and writing skills.

“I still maintain that this Wikipedia project made a world of difference in being able to write well,” Karl says. “And unlike a term paper, which is thrown away at the end of the semester, all the work that goes into a Wikipedia article continues to help people even after the class ends. I like knowing that the joint custody (United States) article is being read by 80+ people a day.”

Karl’s research for the Wikipedia assignment led him to want to add more to Wikipedia. He’s already created stub articles on Split custody and Sole custody, which he intends to expand in the near future.

“I will absolutely continue to edit after the class is over,” Karl says. “My instructor was outstanding and it will be a nice way to keep in touch with him. And not only can I do this to keep providing new information to others, but it also looks pretty darned good on a resume to say you spend your free time working on making articles to help people than sitting around watching TV. Thankfully, I enjoy doing this, so it is not like a chore to do.”

The Wikipedia Education Program has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception last year, as part of the Public Policy Initiative. In 2011, the program ventured beyond the United States into Canada and India, making the measurements of the program’s impact even more important. We want to use these metrics (some of which are outlined below) as tools that help us understand and improve the Wikipedia Education Program as a whole, while also understanding individual pieces of the system better.

a. Fall 2011 Numbers and Growth

b. Gender Representation

c. Wikipedia Education Program Metrics and Activities Meeting

(more…)

I was never a fan of Wikipedia. In fact, I was quite skeptical when I first heard about the Wikipedia Global Education Program. How things have changed.

About a year ago, I remember hearing that some folks from the Wikimedia Foundation were planning to visit our College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University to try to recruit faculty for the Wikipedia Education Program. I remember walking to the meeting thinking, hmm, well I guess as a professor in a communication school it’ll be cool to meet some people who work for a major social media site. I’m not a fan of Wikipedia though, I don’t trust it… (puff up chest here) I’m an academic after all; my work is well-researched, credible, trustworthy, not like that amateurish stuff on Wikipedia. Just let me find one of my students citing Wikipedia in a paper so that I can write on their submission in big, red letters YOU DO NOT CITE WIKIPEDIA IN MY CLASS.

The dirty little secret of course was that I was using Wikipedia all the time. Whenever I would begin a research project I would type a concept into Google and of course a Wikipedia article would come up. I’d take a quick look, check out the references, begin to map the concept in my mind, all the while feeling unsure that I could trust what I was reading. I did this all the time. As an academic, this was my dirty little secret.

One year later and how things have changed. I am now a Wikipedia Teaching Fellow as well as a volunteer member of the Wikipedia Education Program’s outreach team helping to connect universities in Canada to the initiative, determined to change the minds of skeptics all over the world who see Wikipedia as I once did.

So what’s changed? Look, I’ve used Facebook in the classroom, I’ve used Twitter. I’ve used closed wikis, blogs and other new media technologies and I am convinced (and I don’t think I’m overstating things here) that Wikipedia is among the most innovative tools for e-pedagogy and e-learning currently available.

This “Wikipedia in the classroom” project begins where most “traditional” research assignments leave off. Students are still researching topics related to course content, they’re still synthesizing sources, they’re still writing; that’s where most “traditional” research projects leave off. What the Wikipedia project then adds is new media literacy development. Students learn the technical and social skills needed to work with wiki-technology, they’re pushed to collaborate and engage with Wikipedia’s social network, they are thrust into a thriving open-source movement, and they are exposed to a growing and increasingly relevant wiki-culture. Students experience all of this, while simultaneously learning course content.

That’s just the beginning.

As I teach my students about new media literacy, I often refer to new perspectives that I’ve been exposed to while working with the Wikimedia Foundation. Lessons about what it means to understand the nature of the evolving information source, how knowledge is generated through debate (some would go so far as to say that we’re working with a dialectic process here… perhaps an overstatement) and most importantly, how it is essential the we be critical of our information sources, no matter what they are or where we find them. You are not safe anywhere when it comes to information sources. There is bias everywhere. There are mistakes everywhere. No information source is the source. Research widely and research often. Be an informed consumer of information.

Wikipedia is so many things. It’s an encyclopedia, it’s a social network, and it’s also an idea. When I first began using Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool for innovative e-pedagogy, I quickly realized that not only was I teaching students new media literacy, not only would I be providing them with a unique opportunity to collaborate online and receive feedback from a multitude of individuals, forcing them to reflect on their work from a variety of perspectives. Not only would students be leaving something behind, contributing to the amount of information available online about their area of interest – have you heard about the Georgetown student’s Wikipedia article – National Democratic Party (Egypt) – that’s received more than 100,000 hits since the “paper” was turned in? Not bad for a term paper that would in years past end up in the file cabinet or the garbage, seemingly lost forever. When we introduce Wikipedia into the classroom as a teaching tool, not only do our students enjoy these benefits, we provide them with a space to reflect and learn about the nature of knowledge, how it is created, built, shaped, learned, and how it evolves. Taken a step further, perhaps we are also providing them with a place to question the normative ideals of participatory, direct democracy, and how our information sources contribute to our societal system of knowledge.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. What is this Wikipedia project anyways? How does it work? Well, for more information, have a look at the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Global Education Program outreach page. To put it simply, professors replace “traditional” writing assignments with the Wikipedia assignment, requiring students to research and write material that then gets placed in Wikipedia articles. At the same time that students conduct research and edit Wikipedia (learning the social and technical components of the site), students also learn about wiki-culture as they connect to Wikipedia’s social network. This all happens while professors simultaneously teach course content. It’s two-courses in one in many respects.

Clearly I’m gushing, clearly my views have changed, and for good reason. As an educator I’m being given a tremendous opportunity to offer my students something relevant, cutting-edge, intellectually challenging and fun. Oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s free?

Come check out what the Wikimedia Foundation has put together, I promise that you’ll never feel dirty about your Wikipedia use again.

-Jonathan Obar
Michigan State University

Barry Newstead, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy and I (Sara Yap), traveled to the Middle East in October to meet with Wikipedians in the Arab world and begin the expansion of the Wikipedia Education Program. Adel Iskandar, a professor at Georgetown University who taught in the U.S. Global Education Program pilot, joined the team to meet with professors and Wikipedians in Qatar, Egypt, and Jordan. These meetings will inform the planning of the Arabic Education Program, which will be launched in 2012. Over the course of a 14-day visit to Egypt, Jordan and Qatar, the Wikimedia team connected with local experts, university staff, student groups, and attendees at an Arabic Wikipedia Convening in Doha which was co-hosted by WMF together with the Qatar Computing Research Institute. The convening focused on ways to catalyze high quality growth of the Arabic Wikipedia across the Middle East and North Africa.

In collaboration with local participants, Wikimedia Foundation aims to develop the quality and quantity of contributions in Arabic Wikipedia. The trip to Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan was extremely valuable due to the large contribution of the faculty and students we connected with at the universities. To gain a better vision of how to launch the program, we conducted about 30 interviews with professors who teach at Ain Shams, Cairo University, American University of Cairo, University of Jordan, and Qatar University. Through the recommendations of personal contacts and faculty, we met with professors who may be a part of the Global Education Program pilot in MENA. Some learnings include:

• The amount of Arabic readership has increased post-Arab Revolution; people want to learn more about current news and global events, especially within the MENA (pronounced MEH-NA).
• People shared the need for an increase of content in Arabic. Most convincing was a brochure (created by LiAnna Davis and David Peters) that outlined the huge digital divide between the Arabic Wikipedia and other Wikipedia language versions. Some people indicated that they were ashamed by how small the Arabic Wikipedia is compared to e.g. the Portuguese Wikipedia (especially given the fact that so many more people speak Arabic).
• We need to begin with the Education Program with a small pilot and then reiterate.

Wikimedia Meetup in Cairo

With volunteers as the foundation of Wikimedia’s projects, the meetup in Egypt connected our team with the community. For the Wikipedia Education Program, we need a network of local volunteers to support the pilot program (either as Campus Ambassadors, or simply by agreeing not to revert edits automatically), and the willingness to continue on with the Wikimedia project at large. We hope to have more meetups in the region soon and would be interested to hear your thoughts on ideas for future events. Questions and comments from the attendees included:

• Who leads and verifies the corrections on Wikipedia?
• Many people don’t know that they can edit Wikipedia – can the Wikipedia “edit” button be larger?
• If the Global Education Program continues in the MENA region, it will be important to emphasize in the curriculum: how to cite, why students should reference work and be provided with the tools to do so.

The Global Education Program team aims to hire a local team, formalize contacts with professors, and finalize a list of professors and schools to recommend for the program. The Wikimedia team will return to the region in the next few months to conduct trainings for the Global Education Program at universities. The Wikimedia Global Development team would like to hear your thoughts on working in the Arab world, a promising region that we believe will play a significant role in increasing content on Wikipedia.

Mea Salama | مع السلام | With Peace,

Sara Yap, Catalyst Projects, Global Development

Arabic Convening References:

[1] Barry Newstead’s Slides from the Arabic Wikipedia Convening in Doha, Qatar
[2] Frank Schulenburg’s slides on the Global Education Program
[3] Wikipedian Cipher’s Slides on MENA Region Insights and Statistics
[4] Moushira Elamrawy’s Slides from the Arabic Wikipedia Convening

Yesterday was the last day of our first ever Arabic Wikipedia Convening which was which was held in Doha and kindly hosted by QCRI. For 3 days, Arabic Wikipedians, academics and technical specialists, shared their thoughts on improving the quality of articles, increasing the number of contributors and the different models of engaging Wikipedia in education.

This is probably the first time Arabic Wikipedians, who are scattered across the Middle East, get a change to meet in person. It was our pleasure meeting each of Ciphers, Abanima, Ahmad, OsamaK as well as Rami Tarawneh, who is among the early founders of Arabic Wikipedia. On the first day and after brief introductions, Rami told us the story behind how Arabic Wikipedia started; what were the challenges that faced the community during the early days and how Arabic Wikipedia policies changed along with time. For the rest of the day and for the following couple of days, the discussions revolved mainly around three main topics: Machine translations, education and outreach. We listened to the lessons learned from a machine translation project that was carried out in 2009 on Arabic Wikipedia and we had a presentation by Bala Jeyaraman, who gave us a detailed and impressive talk about a similar project that was finished last March on Tamil Wikipedia. Naren Datha, from WikiBhasha team, also gave a small talk about how their tool works. In addition to machine translation, Frank Schulenburg gave a brief introduction to how our global education program operates in different countries, then we listened to a success story by the coordinator of WikiArabi project. Our last day included discussions around possible online and offline outreach strategies that can leverage both the content and the number of contributors of Arabic Wikipedia, we were also introduced to Arabic Web Day initiative.

The discussion helped the community communicate on a personal level, and present its culture and aesthetic to enthusiasts who are considering using Wikipedia as a platform for enhancing Arabic web content, and to the QCRI team who are currently helping our Global Development department render a number of solid projects on the ground across MENA.

The global development team will leave the 80°F/27°C Doha in a couple of hours, heading to Amman for a one day visit to The University of Jordan, before we go to Egypt, for meetings with professors at Cairo University, and with the Arabic Wikipedia Community.

A year ago, Arabic Wikipedia was nearly 120k articles, with a community striving to start an action on the ground in different places, by applying a chapter model in different locations across the region. Our MENA catalyst project is now bringing new possibilities, growing a more solid vision, with feasible funding and a work-in-progress action plan.

We shall keep you posted with our next steps and research findings, meanwhile, wish us luck in our MENA endeavors, a region which is hot, in many different ways.

Salaam!
Moushira Elamrawy
Global Development Team

Today is Day One for on-the-ground research in Cairo. The streets are packed with taxis, men bicycling with wooden trays of aish (meaning “bread” and “life”) on their heads and varieties of t-shirts being sold that are emblazoned with “I Love Egypt”. I’ve arrived at a sensitive, yet hopeful time in the country’s current state of affairs. The conversations are abuzz with people talking about politics, protests and what the future holds for the country. I will be in Egypt for the next nine days, as well as in Qatar for the Arabic Wikipedia Convening and in Jordan to research opportunities in the academic community as we find professors interested in adopting a project called the Global Education Program. I have been tasked by the Wikimedia Foundation to help with an initiative that aims to increase Arabic Wikipedia content, as alluded to in this recent post about the Arabic Catalyst Project.

My colleagues Barry Newstead, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy, Professor Adel Iskandar from Georgetown University, and I will be doing research for this project.

Today Adel and I set off to our first school, Ain Shams. The meeting with Dr. Iman (photo) proved hopeful because of her students’ subject matter for their research.  They are doing quite a bit of publishing in the realm of Egyptian history, theatre, drama and general research that could enrich the Arabic ecosystem on Wikipedia.

The challenges will be steep because of the lack of computer access on campus; however, the content for the project seems somewhat promising because of Dr. Iman’s track record at the school, her tight knit relationships with her students (graduates would still willingly share their research work even after finishing the university), the level of her students’ research (with citations) and her interest in the program. Some of the subjects her students have written thesis papers on include:

1. Phaedra
2. Cleopatra
3. Shakespeare
4. History of Censorship in Egypt
5. Egyptian Arabic Theatre
6. Dissidence in Society: Comparisons in Theatre Plays
7. Theatre of the Revolution
8. Voices of the Marginalized

Through discussions, the key lessons that may help the Global Education Program include:

• Learn from the current Wikimedia community in the MENA region
• Encourage new ways to successfully build the projects
• Find ways for students to succeed by having them write on topics they are actually interested in researching.
• Incentivize the program by finding academic rewards (whether it may be through grades, letters of recommendation, etc.)
• Leverage the current situation around the Arab Revolution to move students’ disenchantment with the academic system towards improving the relationship between the teachers and students at the university

This project comes at a time when many administration and faculty members are leaving the university. Tomorrow we set off to the campuses of Cairo University. It’s so good to be back in مصر/Egypt.