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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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

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.

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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