User talk:Chess/Archive 15
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You will be able to find or mark bugs and suggestions in Phabricator that are specific for your language or wiki. [1]
- Notifications have been upgraded with more detailed and easier-to-access information. See the documentation. Cross-wiki notifications will be available soon on the two test wikis. [2]
Changes this week
- The visual editor uses the TemplateData extension to make editing templates easier. You will now get a warning when you edit a TemplateData form and leave it without saving. [3]
MediaWiki will get a new authentication and authorization system called AuthManager. This is planned to happen in a month or two. Some bots will need to change how they log in. Two new and more stable authentication methods will be available now: Owner-only OAuth credentials and bot passwords. You can read more about the change. [4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 19 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 20 January. It will be on all Wikipedias from 21 January (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 19 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is governance model. The meeting will be on 20 January at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.
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17:55, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
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The Signpost: 20 January 2016
- News and notes: Vote of no confidence; WMF trustee speaks out
- In the media: 15th anniversary news round-up
- Traffic report: Danse Macabre
- Featured content: This week's featured content
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:21, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
This week's article for improvement (week 4, 2016)
Hello, Chess.
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Chowder • Deity Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:07, 25 January 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • |
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can now follow when pages are added or removed from a category on German Wikipedia. The plan is to add it to Wikimedia Commons and other Wikipedias this week. [5][6]
- Administrators can hide individual entries of a page with RevisionDelete. There is now a button to choose "all", "none" or "inverse" in Special:Log. The article history will get the same buttons soon. Wikis that have done this locally with JavaScript will be able to remove that code. [7]
Changes this week
- You will be able to see the references when you preview a section you are editing. This will happen even if there is no <references /> tag in that section. [8]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 January. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 January. It will be on all wikis from 28 January (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 26 January at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- There is now an extension called ArticlePlaceholder. It can automatically generate content on Wikipedia with data from Wikidata if there is no Wikipedia article. It will have a tag to remind the reader it is not an article and ask the reader to create one. The developer is now looking for smaller Wikipedias that want to try the extension. [9]
- The OTRS system will be upgraded. The plan is to do this on 3 February at 08:00 (UTC). It will probably take 6 to 8 hours. OTRS will be down during the upgrade. [10]
- Users will soon be automatically congratulated when they reach some edit count milestones. [11]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:39, 25 January 2016 (UTC)
Wikimedia Highlights from December 2015
- Wikipedia celebrates 15 years of free knowledge
- Fifteen years ago, Wikipedia was a very different place: Magnus Manske
- Making our pageview data easily accessible
- In brief
Please comment on Talk:Fleshlight
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The Bugle: Issue CXVIII, January 2016
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The Signpost: 27 January 2016
- News and notes: Geshuri steps down from the Board
- In the media: Media coverage of the Arnnon Geshuri no-confidence vote
- Recent research: Bursty edits; how politics beat religion but then lost to sports; notability as a glass ceiling
- Traffic report: Death and taxes
- Featured content: This week's featured content
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:24, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
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This week's article for improvement (week 5, 2016)
 The slaughtered swine (1652) by Barent Fabricius, a depiction of a killed animal
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Izakaya • Chowder Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:07, 1 February 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • |
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
- Sites with a
wikimedia.orgaddress were by mistake redirected to the Wikimedia Foundation wiki on 26 January. This included Meta and Wikimedia Commons. The mistake was fixed after an hour. [12] - Some users had problems logging in and out around 22 January. Bots also had problems and edit previews did not work properly. This was because of problems related to the new component SessionManager. It was undone on 23 January. [13][14]
- Because of new problems with SessionManager the latest version of MediaWiki was removed from the Wikimedia wikis again on 31 January. The new version this week will be without SessionManager. [15]
Changes this week
- The page history will get a help link. This will go to Help:Page history on Meta. Wikis can exchange it for a link to their local pages. [16]
- Notifications will only show part of a page name if it is very long. You will also have another way to mark notifications as read. [17][18]
- The Universal Language Selector input methods are now available with the visual editor. This means many who write in non-Latin scripts can now use the visual editor. [19]
- The visual editor will now give you more tools to edit tables. You can move rows and columns in a table and copy parts of tables to make new ones. You can also copy and paste more than one cell at the same time. [20][21][22]
- The visual editor has a new warning message when you leave a page you are editing without saving. Non-English wikis might need to translate it. [23][24]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 February. It will be on all wikis from 4 February (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 2 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is expiring watch list entries. The meeting will be on 3 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The
rest.wikimedia.orgdomain will be shut down. This is planned to happen in March. You should use/api/rest_v1/at each individual project domain instead. [25]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
21:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
Invitation to the Google Doodle task force
|
| Hello, Chess. You're invited to join the Google Doodle task force of the Today's articles for improvement project. We aim to improve articles on current and previous Google Doodles to turn them into a valuable and inspiring resource for interested readers.
If interested in joining, please add your name to the list of members. Thank you for your consideration. |
– Sent using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:54, 2 February 2016 (UTC) on behalf of WikiProject Today's articles for improvement
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This week's article for improvement (week 6, 2016)
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Killing of animals • Izakaya Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 02:00, 8 February 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • |
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Please comment on Talk:Unfinished Business (2015 film)
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Syntax highlighting support is now available for 53 more computer languages. [26]
- When you get a notification that an edit has been reverted, the notification now quotes part of the edit summary. [27]
- RESTBase is now using
scrub_wikitextinstead ofscrubWikitext. [28]
Changes this week
- Wikidata will have a new data type called "math". It will be used for formulas. [29][30]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 9 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 10 February. It will be on all wikis from 11 February (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 9 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is per-language URLs for pages of multilingual wikis. The meeting will be on 10 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- Other sites will be able to tell when visitors come from links on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. They used to be able to do this until we started using forced HTTPS in June 2015. This is planned to happen on 15 February. [31][32]
- Wikidata will have a new data type called "external-id". It will be used for references to external resources. It will be enabled on February 16. Some properties will be changed to the new data type. [33][34][35]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:58, 8 February 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 03 February 2016
- From the editors: Help wanted
- Special report: Board chair and new trustee speak with the Signpost
- Arbitration report: Catching up on arbitration
- Traffic report: Bowled
- Featured content: This week's featured content
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:29, 9 February 2016 (UTC)
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This week's article for improvement (week 7, 2016)
Hello, Chess.
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Delivery (commerce) • Killing of animals Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:07, 15 February 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • |
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Please comment on Talk:Political correctness
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The Signpost: 10 February 2016
- News and notes: Another WMF departure
- In the media: Jeb Bush swings at Wikipedia and connects
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: A river of revilement
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- You can now edit pages on the mobile site version without JavaScript. [36]
- You can now use the Math extension to write chemistry formulas. [37]
Problems
- A few editors might have been logged in as someone else because of a bug. For security reasons everyone was logged out on 9 February. If you have seen this bug, you can report it. [38][39]
Changes this week
- There is a beta feature that adds links to the subject on other Wikimedia projects. The plan was to have it leave beta testing and be enabled for everyone in January. It will happen on 16 February instead. Wikis that don't want this can decide to have it disabled. [40][41]
- Cross-wiki notifications will be available as a beta feature on Wikidata, MediaWiki, Commons, and all Hebrew and French wikis on 19 February. [42]
- The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 February. It will be on all wikis from 18 February (calendar).
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 16 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- The search function on Wikimedia wikis will get a completion suggester that tries to find the right pages as the user is typing. It will also recognize some typos. This will probably happen in March. It is currently in beta. [43]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:16, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
Please comment on Talk:Development of Grand Theft Auto V
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Please comment on Talk:Red Hot (song)
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Books & Bytes - Issue 15
The Wikipedia Library
Books & Bytes
Issue 15, December-January 2016
by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs), Sadads (talk · contribs), Nikkimaria (talk · contribs), UY Scuti (talk · contribs)
- New donations - Ships, medical resources, plus Arabic and Farsi resources
- #1lib1ref campaign summary and highlights
- New branches and coordinators
The Interior via MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:19, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
The Signpost: 17 February 2016
- Featured content: This week's featured content
- Traffic report: Super Bowling
- Technology report: Tech news in brief
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- MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 21:32, 19 February 2016 (UTC)
Please comment on Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)
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Please comment on Talk:A Free Ride
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This week's article for improvement (week 8, 2016)
 Several of the commonly known molecules.
The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Cold • Delivery (commerce) Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk 00:08, 22 February 2016 (UTC) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • |
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Please comment on Talk:Republican Party presidential candidates, 2016
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Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
- Phabricator has been upgraded. [44][45]
Problems
- There was no new MediaWiki version last week. Changes that were planned to happen last week will happen this week instead. This is because of a bug that made saving pages take longer time. [46][47]
Changes this week
- After February 23, you can use Wikidata for inter-language links on Wikiversity. [48]
Meetings
- You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 23 February at 20:00 (UTC). See how to join.
- You can join the next meeting with the Architecture committee. The topic this week is Assign RFCs to ArchCom shepherds. The meeting will be on 24 February at 22:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
18:22, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Wikimedia Highlights from January 2016
- Content Translation tool has now been used for 50,000 articles
- Who edits Wikipedia?
- “Wikipedia is a testament to what we can create together as a global community”: Sara Mörtsell
- In brief
Please comment on Talk:Campus sexual assault
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Please comment on Talk:Adeaze
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Support request with team editing experiment project
Dear tech ambassadors, instead of spamming the Village Pump of each Wikipedia about my tiny project proposal for researching team editing (see here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Research_team_editing), I have decided to leave to your own discretion if the matter is relevant enough to inform a wider audience already. I would appreciate if you could appraise if the Wikipedia community you are more familiar with could have interest in testing group editing "on their own grounds" and with their own guidance. In a nutshell: it consists in editing pages as a group instead of as an individual. This social experiment might involve redefining some aspects of the workflow we are all used to, with the hope of creating a more friendly and collaborative environment since editing under a group umbrella creates less social exposure than traditional "individual editing". I send you this message also as a proof that the Inspire Campaign is already gearing up. As said I would appreciate of *you* just a comment on the talk page/endorsement of my project noting your general perception about the idea. Nothing else. Your contribution helps to shape the future! (which I hope it will be very bright, with colors, and Wikipedia everywhere) Regards from User:Micru on meta.
This week's article for improvement (week 48, 2015)
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The following is WikiProject Today's articles for improvement's weekly selection: Please be bold and help to improve this article! Previous selections: Goods and services • Marie Serneholt Get involved with the TAFI project. You can: Nominate an article • Review nominations Posted by: MusikBot talk using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) on behalf of WikiProject TAFI • |
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Reply: Thanks for reporting the user who was spamming daugerrotypes
Thanks Chess for your help, sorry about my crabiness and focus on this.
This Month in Education: [March 2016]
By Walaa Abdel Manaem (Wikipedia Education Program Egypt) & (Egypt Wikimedians user group)
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Snippet: Education Leaders at WISE Doha 2015 introducing Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt to WISE Conference attendees, as an example of a program in the Arab World, to share their experience to inspire other universities and institutions starting new programs in the area.
WISE 2015 Sessions and Plenaries were designed around three main pillars such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals; education and the economy; fostering innovation in education systems. Each pillar examined a variety of key topics including: the linkages between education, employment, and entrepreneurship; education reform and innovation in the MENA region and Qatar; emerging models of education financing, attracting, rewarding and retaining quality teachers; and the importance of investing in early childhood development.
Representatives of Wikipedia Education Program Walaa Abdel Manaem and Reem Al-Kashif participated in WISE Doha 2015 in Qatar, the annual World Innovation Summit for Education is the premier international platform dedicated to innovation and creative action in education where top decision-makers share insights with on-the-ground practitioners and collaborate to rethink education. Also, WISE 2015 was the first global education conference following the ratification of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015. Contributions ranged from Arabic Brochure of Editing Wikipedia for students in WEP in Egypt and everybody who would like to edit Wikipedia without problems, The Arabic version of Welcome to Wikipedia reference guideline, PDF of brochure handed out during Arabic Wikipedia Convening, Doha, Qatar, 2011 and Introduction to Wikipedia. These contributions are related to show a case study of Wikipedia Education program in Egypt and how it worked since February 2012 till the November 2015, as the seventh edition ended last October. All discussions were about the program's mechanism and what were the motivations keeping it going. The program helped increasing gender diversity and supported the featured content on Arabic Wikipedia. Wikipedia Education Program, like any other initiative, has achievements and dark sides, for that reason, the representatives had to locate both of them and how they influence the Arabic community and how the community interact with this phenomenon.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education program in the Arab World here (in Arabic).
Snippet: A first-of-its-kind, for-credit, elective course that focuses on contributing to Wikipedia has opened at Tel Aviv University and is now available to all B.A. students on campus
On October 19th a new for-credit elective course called "Wikipedia: Skills for producing and consuming knowledge"[1] has opened at Tel Aviv University (TAU). The semester-long course (13 weeks) is available to all B.A. students on campus and this semester about 50 students from various disciplines are taking part in this first-of-its-kind course in Israel.
The course draws from "flipped classroom" concepts and uses "blended learning" methods, which practically means combining in-class lectures, workshops and small-group activities, as well as online individual learning. Both the Moodle learning management system (LMS) and the Wikipedia Education Extension are used to monitor the students' work and progress throughout the course.
The course has 2 main assignments - expanding an existing stub, as well as writing a new article, in the hopes that the content added during the course will assist not only the students themselves, but also future generations of learners as well as the general public. Though the course focuses on adding quality content to Wikipedia, it also aims to help students sharpen their academic skills and their 21st century skills, highlighting collaborative learning, joint online research and interdisciplinary collaborations in the process of constructing knowledge.
This course was initiated and is led by Shani Evenstein, an educator, Wikimedian and member of the Wikipedia Education Collaborative, in collaboration with the Orange Institute for Internet Studies, as well as the School of Education at TAU. The syllabus for the new course builds on the success of Wiki-Med, a for-credit elective course, which was designed in 2013 and is led by Evenstein at the Sackler school of Medicine for the third consecutive year. While Wiki-med is focused on contributing medical content to Wikipedia and is only available to Medical Students on campus, the new course is designed to accommodate students from different academic disciplines and varying backgrounds.
The course was chosen to be part of TAU's cross-discipline elective courses system ("Kelim Shluvim") and was approved by the Vice-Rector, who heads the program. In that, the course marks an important precedent in the collaboration between Academia and the Wikipedia Education Program, as it is the first time a higher institution acknowledges the importance of a course focusing on Wikipedia on a university level, offering it to all students, rather than a faculty level or individual lecturers as mostly practiced. It is our hope that other higher education institutions will follow this example and offer similar courses to students both in Israel and around the world.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Israel here.
By Melina Masnatta, Wikimedia Argentina
Snippet: University professors become Wikipedians in an online course during just a week.
Educators with different profiles and from different latin america countries, but most of them professors at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) from different faculties, have just participated in the online training and free course "Educational scenarios with technology. Among the real and the possible" organized by the Center for Innovation in Technology and Pedagogy (CITEP) of this university.
Different educational activities were carried out simultaneously. During the week and under the topic “Open movement”, Wikimedia Argentina participated with three different proposals: starting with an interview of Patricio Lorente accompanied with a short text to know more about the movement. To make an immersive experience we designed " Knowing Wikipedia by first-hand or Wikipedia in the first person" to work directly on the platform translating articles from english to spanish from a list created especially for that purpose. Along with this specific proposal, educators participated in a videoconference with Galileo Vidoni (available in Spanish), where participants could talk and learn more about how are the first steps to become a Wikipedian and the importance of the movement at the local and regional level.
With only seven days and without being mandatory, different educators discovered how to edit on Wikipedia, indeed many of them mentioned that they had it as a pending to learn and participate on the free encyclopedia, but never had the time or the real chance. The enthusiasm was also present on social networks, where they shared the experience with the hashtag #escenariostec.
The result
More than 100 educators got involved and exchanged their experience in an online forum with more of 280 messages that reflected their learning process while experiencing with the activity. 80 of them were new users, and they created 61 new articles in spanish. An important fact: 78 of them were women, which means that working with educators is a key issue to continue closing the digital gender gap.
Finally from CITEP, they shared the following insights regarding the question that ran through all the activities that took place during the week dedicated to the open movement. Some thoughts can be sum up as follows:
The collaborative production in open environments: chaos or construction? (...) For the teacher also means accepting new challenges: encourage students to produce knowledge in an environment of divergent nature, it requires permanent operations and convergence. In a space that fosters interventions unmarked, the teacher needs to frame depending on the purpose of education and teaching purposes. (…) Wikipedia is the best example of the challenges posed by the digital era in the educational field, it forces us to rethink the relationship between technology and the production of knowledge and allows us to confirm that the collaborative work does not lead to chaos, if not to the construction. (. ..) [Authors: Angeles Solectic and Miri Latorre]
We share some of the voices of the protagonists in social networks with storify (available in Spanish). Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina here.
By Vojtěch Dostál (Wikimedia Czech Republic)
Snippet: The second largest university in the Czech Republic has employed a Wikipedian in residence, leading to a boom of Wikimedia activities in the city of Brno.
Collaboration between Wikipedia and Czech institutions has always been a priority for Wikimedia Czech Republic, but the year 2015 has taken this to another level. First, an official memorandum of collaboration with the National Heritage Institute (NPÚ) was signed in May 2015, to be followed by official collaboration with Masaryk University in Brno (the second largest city and university in the Czech Republic), which was contracted in November 2015. In fact, Wikimedia activities in Brno have been blooming for several years now, mainly as a result of the community's own development, but aided substantially by the external interest in Wikipedia by Masaryk University alumni society, demonstrated as early as March 2013.
In February 2015, the university employed one of the most experienced Czech Wikipedians – Marek Blahuš (Blahma) – who was appointed to become the university's first "Wikipedian in residence". Marek Blahuš has been in the center of the Wikimedia community in Brno for about two years, organizing regular Wikipedia meetups, the 2014 edition of the annual WikiConference (more in English here) and creating the Czech-Slovak Wikipedia translation tool, which has famously led to the creation of >9000 articles on Czech and Slovak Wikipedias (more in English here). His current work as Wikipedian in residence is funded by Masaryk University and runs under the patronage of Wikimedia Czech Republic as well as Masaryk University's rector Mikuláš Bek.
Since February, Wikipedia has taken a prominent role within Masaryk University. Marek Blahuš started a "Masaryk University Wikipedians team", gathering local Wikipedians and facilitating contacts with the university, aided by his status of a graduate and current employee in its language center. Articles about Masaryk University alumni and faculties have been identified and improved after consultations with Masaryk University archives and libraries which provided helpful resources. Wikipedia citation templates can now be directly generated from the university's on-line archive of theses. In September, a public conference called "Masaryk University Is Getting High on Wikipedia" took place on university grounds, featuring the experienced Wikipedian Jan Sokol (Sokoljan), who is a philosopher, university teacher and a former presidential candidate. The talks focused on the use of Wikipedia in university education, in line with the successful Czech "Students Write Wikipedia" program. One of the teachers, Jiří Rambousek, expressed his desire to organize a Wikipedia Club as a regular meetup where articles would be improved in a collaborative effort and new editors introduced to Wikipedia.
The program is actively preparing for 2016 when we expect Wikimedia Czech Republic to take a more active role in overseeing the initiatives as well as the creation of a position of a "Wikipedian in Brno" – person officially in charge of the wide array of Wikimedia activities happening in the city. The chapter's annual plan includes initiatives to increase the number of university courses which incorporate Wikipedia into the curriculum, public presentations of Wikipedia at various events, scanning and uploading of images from institutional and personal archives, and much more. Let's wish that our plans come true!
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in the Czech Republic here.
By Leigh Thelmadatter (Wiki Learning-Tec de Monterrey)
Snippet: Student participation is more than just text!
For the Fall 2015 Wiki Learning-Tec de Monterrey held two wiki expeditions in Mexico City and began a collaboration with the Museo de Arte Popular. We also received our first grant!
Wiki expeditions
The 32-campus Tec de Monterrey system has each semester an event called "Semana i" (i Week), when students forego normal classes for an entire week to work on challenging projects called "retos." For the Mexico City and Santa Fe campuses, one option for students was to work with Wikimedia, with the aptly named projects "Reto Wikimedia." Both campuses opted to do wiki-expeditions to different parts of Mexico City. The Mexico City campus had the larger group with almost 90 students registered, who covered the two southern boroughs of Xochimilco and Tlalpan. The Santa Fe group had 35 participants, and covered the San Ángel neighborhood found not far from this campus.
Both campus took photos of landmarks with the Mexico City campus also focusing on photos of everyday life in the south of the city. The Mexico City campus tallied 5264 photos, 8 videos and 36 articles, including articles related to the area into French, Swedish and Danish. The Santa Fe group tallied 605 photos, and ten articles in Spanish on landmarks in San Ángel.
In addition, the Mexico City campus had a special speaker the borough chronicler of Xochmilco, Sebastián Flores Farfán. A short montage video of the event is in the works.
Some student photos:
Some video clips of the event:
Animation clips with the Museo de Arte Popular
Wikiservicio, students working with Wikimedia for their community service requirement, added a new component. To attract more students and encourage more students to do all of their community service hours with Wikimedia, a collaboration was set up with the Museo de Arte Popular (MAP)... the first of many we hope! Six students from the digital art and animation major (see last newsletter) have continued working with Wikimedia, but focusing their efforts in creating short animation clips in relation to the mission of promoting and preserving Mexican folk art. One clip has been completed and can be see to the right of this text. So far, the video has subtitles in English, German, French and Punjabi. A second clip is nearing completion at the time of this writing.
Classes and Wikimetrics
Fifteen students completed work with Wikiservicio doing translations, writing new articles and doing photography projects. As of this date, 7 have indicated interest in working with Wikiservicio on campus and another six with MAP.
Five university level classes and one high school class on the Mexico City (South) campus have had projects, all in writing and translation, with some video work.
Wikimetrics for the semester are:
According to Wikimetrics tool....
- 9,589,918 bytes to Spanish Wikipedia
- 3,098 edits to the mainspace of Spanish Wikipedia
- 367 pages created in the mainspace of Spanish Wikipedia
Manual count
- 302 student and teacher participants
- 281 Spanish Wikipedia articles created or expanded
- 6,057 photographs
- 10 videos
- 9 articles in English Wikipedia
- 2 articles in French Wikipedia
- 1 article in Swedish Wikipedia
- 1 article in Danish Wikipedia
First grant Wiki Learning received its first grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The long-term goal of this grant is to establish a system for financing Wiki Learning. The grant, which totals a modest 12,500 Mexican pesos, will be used for swag, such as t shirts, stickers, buttons, etc, especially for Semana i activities and promotion of wiki activities to other campus. The money will also be used for incidental travel expenses, especially for projects needing to move expensive camera equipment.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Mexico here.
By Christian Cariño (Wikimedia México) and Melina Masnatta (Wikimedia Argentina)
Snippet: Aprender para Educar writes about Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina.
The digital free magazine Aprender para Educar (Learning to educate) of the National Technological University (UTN) is recognized in the community of education and technology in Argentina to write about innovation issues in Spanish, which is not common in the academic dissemination and teacher training field.
Cristina Velazquez, general editor of the magazine invited Wikimedia Argentina to write an article that generally describes their activities in the Education Program, after reading the proposal she decided to publish it as the main article of the 12th edition.
To describe the education program, WMAR wrote two notes completing one another, as doing a zoom: from the local to the global and from the global to the local, showing how a movement of this magnitude does not stand alone, it is part of a huge network.
Melina Masnatta, education manager in WMAR and Patricio Lorente, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees wrote those two notes.The first one focuses on the Education Program, implementation, challenges and obstacles that they had at the beginning, plans to integrate it into the classrooms in Argentina and how different Wikimedia Projects are also relevant in education. The most important thing, Melina adds, is to strengthen the values that inspire them, show how the free culture give meaning to education in general and digital culture in particular.
Meanwhile in the second part, Lorente focuses on the global movement, the community pillars, the agenda of today's challenges and the effort of their volunteers as protagonists. It is not easy show the world what drives us and why we work as volunteers in different countries. In education very few people understand the value of building free knowledge. There is still a great prejudice or negative perceptions of Wikipedia in the classroom because teachers ignore how Wikipedia is built.
Everybody reads Wikipedia, but few people edit it. We can change this fact by spreading in spaces such as the Journal of the UTN and inviting more people to collaborate and be the protagonist of this huge collective work for humanity.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina here.
By Walaa Abdel Manaem (Wikipedia Education Program Egypt) & (Egypt Wikimedians user group)
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Snippet: Online ambassador helped spanish students course in Cairo University to nominate their articles, scoring an exceptional record of WEP excellent content.
Bassem Fleifel, an online ambassador of Cairo university spanish course, played a prominent role to help all students to encourage them to nominate their excellent content to be a featured and good articles in Arabic Wikipedia. Those articles are History of bread (Featured article); Walt Disney; Daniel Radcliffe; Al-Andalus; Poet in New York; and Popol Vuh.
The seventh term, the program started in Cairo University with promoting posts on Wikipedia and social media websites to help new participants understand the general idea of the program as well as holding meetings with professors from the departments of History, chinese, English language and Spanish language. Walaa Abdel Manaem (program leader in Cairo University) and Bassem Fleifel (online ambassador) have held some workshops in campus and online for the whole students to teach them "How to edit Wikipedia". On the other hand, Prof. Abeer Abdel-Hafiz has exerted great efforts with her students in addition to introducing Walaa to new classes of senior students for whom she has organized general seminars about Wikipedia and the education program. At the same time Walaa was assigning her Spanish department students of the first and second year to edit Wikipedia.
This term, Prof. Abeer let the chance to her students to choose any articles they would like to translate from the Spanish Wikipedia to the Arabic Wikipedia or working on articles about history. They already have chosen some articles to translate with the target of nominating them to be a featured and good articles.
Most of students worked on articles about different topics like history, writers, actors, history of food and drink, mayan literature, islam and politics, etc. This course itself achieved an exceptional record of Wikipedia Education program excellent content and the best term ever in the history of WEP in Egypt in general and in the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University in specific. Walaa has held 2 online webinars to follow up with her students in addition to the workshops held at the campus. Regarding numbers, 38 students joined this course, of which 35 are female and 3 are male students. They worked on 1748 articles adding more than 12,282,943 million bytes to the article namespace on the Arabic Wikipedia, with the help of the online ambassador, who also participated as a student.
See the course page of this group on the Arabic Wikipedia here.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.
By Jorid Martinsen (Wikimedia Norge)
Snippet: This fall masters students in History and Archeology at the University of Oslo take on the task of Wikipedia editing as one of the main parts in a subject on communication of History.
The University of Oslo is Norway’s largest higher education institution, and it is the first time Wikimedia Norway collaborates with this University in forming and using Wikipedia editing as a integrated part of higher education. The collaboration started by Wikimedia Norway contacting assistant professor John McNicol, who already had gotten some media attention on his eagerness to make students skilled in knowledge sharing.
Starting off with a two hour lecture on the secret world of Wikipedia and a two hour editing workshop in mid-September, and in October the students will evaluate the life of their articles. Has there been many additional edits on their articles? Discussions? Request to delete everything? For Wikimedia Norge it is fun to see the students both engaging in Wikipedia editing and using the ways of Wikipedia to discuss how knowledge is formed.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Norway here.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:26, 1 March 2016 (UTC).
- ^ Link to the course page at the TAU website (in Hebrew) - http://www2.tau.ac.il/yedion/syllabus.asp?course=1880180101&year=2015