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

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

Employment

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

Funding

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

Invitations (at least a few of them)

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

Collaborations

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

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

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This post is available in 2 languages:

Svenska • English

English

Friday, the 22^nd of March, was a different and exciting day at work as Wikimedia Sverige had its biggest edit-a-thon to date – with 47 participants! Also the participants and the topic of the event were something that we unfortunately don’t always connect to Wikipedia: that is, women and fashion.

Participants in the Wikimedia Sverige fashion editathon.

Wikipedia, as you might know, is very male dominated (only 9 percent of all editors are female!) and the topic of fashion is very poorly represented when compared, for example, to World War II. With this in mind this fashion edit-a-thon was the first in a series of fashion events that will take place around Europe in the following two years, coordinated by Europeana Fashion.

This edit-a-thon in Stockholm was organized in collaboration with Wikimedia Sverige, Europeana, the Nordiska museet, Europeana Fashion and the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University. It was especially fun that the Nordiska museet and the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp, as part of the preparations for the edit-a-thon, released hundreds of fashion images to Wikimedia Commons! For MoMu this upload was their first time working with Wikimedia and using Wikimedia Commons.

In preparation for the event, we had organized a workshop about editing in Wikipedia with the fashion students so that the actual edit-a-thon could, after some short presentations, get right down to the business of writing fashion-related articles. To keep up interest, and blood sugar, we served snacks during the day, as well as a lunch. We also took breaks and got inspired with a guided tour of the Nordiska museets’s fashion exhibitions, such as one on the power of fashion Modemakt. In the end, the productive day came together with a mingle with wine and canapés.

Almost all the participants stayed until the mingle, and several didn’t leave until 8 p.m., when the guards wanted to close the museum. At that point the event had lasted for almost 10 hours. Many of the participants also came up to us and thanked us for a nice event, telling us how proud they felt when pressing save and publishing their first edits on Wikipedia. These are the things that make me most happy and proud about this event. The goal with an edit-a-thon is, after all, not just to get more articles, but to get more active editors to Wikipedia and to raise awareness of how Wikipedia works in society.

Of course it’s also interesting to know what the direct outcomes of the event were:

• We had 47 participants that registered their attendance at the Nordiska museet. Of these participants, a total of 30 were women (or 64 percent!)
• 23 new users created accounts, either at the edit-a-thon, or at the preparatory workshop. Some of the editors sat together and used only one account.
• Of the eight uploaded photos from MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp, four of these are used in Wikipedia. They are used a total of 12 times on various language versions.
• Of the 362 images uploaded from the Nordiska museet, 57(!) of the images are now used on Wikipedia. They are used a total of 72 times on various language versions.
• Ten new articles were created, from biographies to fashion photography and Sami costumes. In total, 67 different articles were edited during the day. Several participants also published their articles some days after the edit-a-thon.
• Articles were edited in eight different languages (Polish, German, English, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Russian and Italian). Most of the contributions were made to the English and the Swedish Wikipedia.
• 73 photos were taken during the edit-a-thon and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons! Could this be a new record from a single edit-a-thon?
• Also five images from the Nordiska museet’s library were scanned and uploaded and are now used in various articles.

We are very happy with the outcome and hope to arrange more fashion edit-a-thons in the future! Perhaps this could be one way of changing the enormous gender gap? We hope so.

John Andersson (WMSE) (talk), Project leader for the Europeana Awareness project at Wikimedia Sverige

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On January 18, 2013, Wikimedia Sweden and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences launched a unique collaboration. The collaboration was so rare that we had to invent a new position – “Wikipedian in Academy” – in addition to the “Wikipedian in Residence” already prevalent at different GLAM-institutions. Now it is time to take up residency at the universities. Swedish universities have three statutory responsibilities – research, education, and science outreace (in Sweden labelled “den tredje uppgiften” [the third task]). Contributing to Wikipedia is of course the single most effective way to achieve science outreach (fulfill the third task) in higher education; there is simply no other platform which allows you to reach so many readers.

Currently, Wikipedia projects linked to universities are so far based on contributions from students and individual researchers, but to this day there is no project where researchers officially affiliated with a particular university have written about science on Wikipedia in an organized form. Since no university has taken this challenge seriously, SLU collaborated with Wikimedia Sweden to pioneer the scientific community’s commitment to Wikipedia.

This project was launched at a Wikipedia day on January 18, 2013, with invited international key note speakers and will be followed up with development of manuals, workshops, and a help desk run by a project manager (Wikipedian in Academy) during a five-month period. This project will be monitored and reported at a conference a year later with the goal of at least 100 researchers having made a substantial contribution to Wikipedia (defined as part of an article).

The intention is to have an annual Wikipedia day when researchers participate in workshops and training and/or write about their field of research in Swedish and foreign language Wikipedia. We are also initiating and developing a network of Wikipedia Ambassadors at the university, who will continue the work after the project has ended.

This project has been designed, developed and implemented by Arild Vågen and education manager Sophie Österberg from Wikimedia Sweden, and researcher Olle Terenius and head of communications Tina Zethraeus at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Arild Vågen, Wikipedian in Academy at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

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

Herein will follow an update from the Swedish education program. Perhaps to call it an update would be to overestimate its size and current importance. A first glimpse of what is to hopefully become something rather exciting is perhaps a more appropriate label.

Workshop with pupils about Wikipedia, democracy, free knowledge, gender issues where they presented various ideas and perspectives.

To actually have as a part of the Swedish Wikimedia organisation an education program is a rather new and thrilling idea. The year of 2012 is the year where the Swedish education program has seen the light of day and where the first goals were set as to what should be regarded a good result for a first step in creating and shaping an education program.

I, Sophie Österberg, became engaged in Wikimedia Sverige as an intern undergoing a six-week internship which led to the great opportunity of being offered a job as education manager. With pride and great joy I commenced this position in the beginning of October. Let me though tell you that these two months have felt rather more like a year, be it the intensive work, the conferences, the bright ideas thrown at my table, the inspiration from beautiful minds all over Sweden and foremost, the joint motivation to create something worthwhile, lasting and qualitative, not for Wikipedia or Wikimedia solely, nor for only students or their teachers. But for us all, as a great global society. Well. That might perhaps be a goal to far-fetched to reach, but at least there is a vision in place.

We have looked at the current programs in place around the world to learn from their experiences and to gain knowledge in what we could reuse here in a Swedish context. We have mostly spoken to and looked at the German and the American examples of education programs, but we have been flirting a bit with the Indian and Egyptian as well.

To date we have met teachers at conferences, had individual meetings, lunches, coffees (coffee is huge in Sweden, read more about this here), held workshops, shared ideas to teachers about how to use Wikipedia, met public institutions, held lectures, been part of public debates, created and translated material, thought about how a program should best be organised, read about current trends in education in Sweden, been open to learn about the new Swedish curricula and find out how best to match Wikipedia in education with it.

Our Wikipedia in education t-shirts which we use at workshops, conferences and various other events. Orange is the theme colour of the educational program.

But most importantly, wee have given ourselves a face. We have become people who actually exists. It may sound ridiculous, but let me tell you that the most common comment we have been met by is ‘Wow, do you guys actually exist?”. Yes we do. We have simply been rather silent about it. But this is the end to that silence!

Hello world and at the moment, Hello Sweden! This may sound trivial, but it is not. People have found that there is someone, there are people, with whom they can build trust and communication. We exist, we are real and we are to be trusted. Let us not forget that this is the strongest currency there is between humans, no material or other physical resources may ever be as important as the intangible trust which we build between and in relation to one another.

Let me though share the more practical aspects of what have been done, in a rather sincere and honest tone. I do think that this programme initially did lack some confidence; read more about the Swedish mentality here. We didn’t have an understating of how many teachers and professors would be interested. This has led us in a rather interesting direction, which is now to be turned into something more long-lasting and fruitful.

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The historic Landsort Lighthouse, depicted in today’s Picture of the Day on Wikimedia Commons, is the southernmost point of the Stockholm archipelago in Sweden. The lighthouse is located on the island of Öja, which is isolated with no road access. Commons contributor Arild Vågen (User:ArildV), who lives in Stockholm, took a boat to the island and spent the day there taking photos.

In the afternoon, as Vågen was preparing to leave the island, he decided to take one last walk while waiting for his boat home. Along with a friend of his who volunteers at the Landsort Bird Observatory, Vågen explored the area around the lighthouse, climbing around the rocks to get this picture. By then, the weather had taken a turn for the worse–the temperature dropped and the sky became cloudy, but Vågen didn’t mind. “I like the light and the weather here,” he said.  ”It’s more exciting and interesting than a sunny picture, and it might remind us that life on the islands has been tough for long periods and that the islands are exposed to rough weather.” Vågen also pointed out the naval guns visible in the shot, “which reminds us of the Baltic Sea’s dramatic history.” The island has a long history as a military base, he said, and it only became completely open to visitors after the Cold War.

For his trip to Öja that day, Vågen borrowed a camera and lens from Wikimedia Sverige, which offers a technology pool which any of its members can borrow photographic equipment from. Since 2012, Vågen has also been a board member of the Swedish Wikimedia chapter.

He first got involved with the Wikimedia projects in 2008, when he started editing Wikipedia. He mostly wrote articles about Stockholm architecture and history, and he initially only took pictures if they were directly required by articles on Wikipedia.

However, he gradually started making more contributions to Wikimedia Commons. “In the last year, I have also documented areas that are changing, many old port and industrial areas turned into residential and commercial areas. Both now and in future it is important to have pictures of how the area looked before,” said Vågen. ”And there is often an interesting story to document with the camera.” One example of such an area is the island of Kvarnholmen, Nacka, which Vågen “documented for Commons before the old environment is lost.”

Vågen primarily enjoys shooting buildings and landscapes, especially the Swedish mountains and the Stockholm archipelago, but also urban landscapes. He was a project manager for Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 in Sweden. He has always been interested in photography, but only in recent years has he pursued it more seriously. The Wikimedia Commons community has been a valuable learning resource, he said.

“I started contributing to Wikipedia and Commons because I share the vision: ‘Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.’ That’s what we’re doing,” he said. “And it’s great fun to contribute!”

(View more of Vågen’s images)

Elaine Mao, Communications Intern

About a month ago Wikimedia Sweden started Projekt Internet in Sverige (Project Internet in Sweden) on the Swedish Wikipedia, aiming to improve articles concerning the Internet in Sweden.

Funded by Stiftelsen för Internetinfrastruktur (The Foundation for Internet Infrastructure) best known for handling the .se top-level domain, Wikimedia Sweden hired me to conduct meta work related to the project from March to July 2011. As far as we know, this is the first time someone has been employed to work specifically on the Swedish-language version of Wikipedia.

“]

Jan Ainali (left), who has leads the project, and me (right).

So, what do I do? I try to find articles dedicated to topics covering the Internet in Sweden. I put them on an importance scale and assess for quality — the point being to find articles that are central to the Internet, but need more work. I analyze the work to see if what we’re doing is actually helping. We hope the project will inspire more people to get involved in Wikipedia and make contacts between experts in the field and Wikipedia editors. Even better, we hope these experts will begin editing articles themselves. In a nutshell, my job is to bring attention to the relevant Swedish-language articles (the good, as well as the bad ones), be of as much help as possible to make them better, and hopefully educate people about Wikipedia in the process.

So far, working on the project has been great fun. A little bit too much so, perhaps. I spend my day doing Wikipedia-related things and afterwards, in the evenings, I continue editing articles as a volunteer. I’ve been an editor for almost seven years now, so it’s been great to have the opportunity to think about Wikipedia during the day as my “real job” and then continue editing as part of the community.

At Wikimedia Sweden, we hope, of course, our work will help bring focus to articles about the Internet in Sweden and making them easier to find, clarifying where we need more help and inspiring editors to make them better. The public could certainly use it: Swedish Wikipedia might be the eleventh Wikipedia by article count, but compared to the really large language versions, such as German, English or French Wikipedia, our number of active users is fairly small, and many of the articles related to the Internet in Sweden seem to have gone on without the love and attention they need.

But not only that, this project might also help different sorts of organizations realize that this is a way for them to assist in sharing knowledge. Support us. Help us. Free up what Wikipedia demands most: time.

Johan Jönsson

User: Julle

Wikimedia Sweden

This week, Wikimedia Sverige announced an important ongoing partnership with international media group, Bonnier, releasing freely-licensed photographs to Wikimedia Commons. The media group has released 27 photographs of notable Swedish authors to Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license and plans to continue releasing photographs in the future. Authors included in the first release include: Inger Alfvén, Karin Johannisson and Martin Widmark.

This partnership was the result of important educational outreach and relationship building conducted by representatives of Wikimedia Sverige. The relationship was sparked by Bonnier’s curiosity about how to edit Wikipedia and interest in understanding how free licensing works on Wikimedia Commons. The partnership with Bonnier is just one example of the important educational outreach work Wikimedia Sverige has conducted. This September, for the third year, the chapter will conduct outreach activities at the Gothenburg Book Fair, the largest in Scandinavia.

Congratulations to Wikimedia Sverige!

Moka Pantages, Communications