Community digest: Practical science experiments are being recorded in high definition for Commons, news in brief

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Video by Andrejdam, CC BY-SA 4.0.

 
Oliver Zajkov is a physics professor at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, Macedonia. The video above, shot by the Shared Knowledge Wikimedians group in Macedonia, features him doing the low-pressure glow discharge. This is one of 45 physics and chemistry experiments recorded by Shared Knowledge to be published on Wikimedia Commons and used on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
Shared Knowledge has been filiming high-quality videos featuring simple physics and chemistry experiments in a new project called WikiExperiments. The project aims to provide high-quality short films visualizing the theoretical ideas students study at school and read about on Wikipedia.
The educational videos will be helpful for students and “anyone interested in understanding some general concepts in physics and chemistry,” according to Toni Ristovski, Board Member and Treasurer of Shared Knowledge.
Shared Knowledge is a group of Wikimedians from Macedonia who started in March 2014 with the goal of holding initiatives and projects to support the Wikimedia movement. However, the WikiExperiments videos, which they started in December 2015, were made without narration and with descriptions in both English and Macedonian to ease global use.
The project began with an idea by the group member and physicist Tsvetko Nedelkovski in early 2015. Shared Knowledge loved the idea and contacted Skopje University to collaborate on making the videos. “Following the success with recording physics experiments,” Ristovski says, the group wanted to expand the project and make videos for other chemistry experiments. A group of students took the lead in connecting Shared Knowledge with Vladimir Petruševski, who went on to perform the chemistry experiments.
“Recording [these] videos of science experiments documents laws of physics and chemical reactions,” Ristovski explains. “Many schools only teach theory without practical demonstrations, [which is] a crucial part of the learning process.”

In brief

Polish and Czech Wikipedians join forces for a WikiExpedition: Photographs of over 100 towns and villages were taken by Polish and Czech Wikipedians during the joint WikiExpedition held by Wikimedia Polska and Wikimedia Ceska Republika. The expedition was held between October 21 and 30 in the Silesian region, near the Polish–Czech border, with a goal of taking 1500 photos of the area for Wikimedia Commons. While Wikipedia is rich with articles about the villages, towns, parks and museums in the region, both in the Polish and Czech Wikipedia, many of them still lack photos.

The tenth round of the WikiCup is over and the winners have been announced. The WikiCup is a ten-month editing competition on the English Wikipedia that aims at promoting Wikipedia’s quality content in a fun editing atmosphere. The competition has been held on Wikipedia since 2007.

Medical Wikipedia is now in the Odia language: The offline app that gives access to medical content on Wikipedia is now available in the Odia language. Odia is spoken by 40 million people in India. It is the first Indic language to be adopted on the app.

#1lib1ref 2017 is kicking off soon; a call for volunteers: For Wikipedia’s 16th birthday next January, a new round of #1lib1ref will start, a campaign that challenges librarians to add one reference to an article on Wikipedia. Volunteers for local coordination of the campaign are now being accepted.

Smartwatch tool to notify users when the subject of an unphotographed Wikipedia article is nearby: Wikipedian Sage Ross, known as ragesoss in the Wikipedia community, designs a new watchface for the Pebble smartwatch. The tool alerts you when you are close to the subject of a Wikipedia article that has no photo so that you can take the needed photo to illustrate the article.

Submissions for WikiArabia 2017 are now open: WikiArabia, the annual conference of the Arabic Wikipedia, will be held in March 2017 in Egypt. Submissions for presentations, talks, discussion panels and workshops are now being accepted until November 15.

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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[…] Elsharbaty trabalha com conteúdo digital na Fundação Wikimedia. O texto Community Digest: Practical Science Experiments Are Being Recorded in High Definition for Commons, N…  foi publicado em 09 de novembro de 2016 no blog da Fundação […]