Submissions/Wikipedia at schools. The Catalan experience.

From Wikimania 2010 • Gdańsk, Poland • July 9-11, 2010


Information

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2010.


Slideshow

Title of the submission

Wikipedia at schools. The Catalan experience.

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation.

Authors of the submission
  • Pau Cabot
  • Joan Ramon Gomà
E-mail address
  • jrgoma at gmail dot com
  • paucabot at gmail dot com
Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Amical Viquipèdia

Personal homepage or blog
Abstract

The Catalan Wikipedia is extensive enough to have very interesting material but is still in a phase of development where there are lacking contents that the students of high school they can complete.

When students write directly in Wikipedia it implies many difficulties in a pedagogic process: All the community is interfering in their work, material can be added by regular wikipedians or non relevant contents can be erased following Wikipedia rules.

In the Catalan Wikipedia a project has been developed that has had a remarkable success. This project is characterized by a series of singular features:

  1. It combines a course about Wikipedia and its application in the classrooms for the teachers with a competition of editing for their students.
  2. The effective participation of the pupils in the competition is the key point to pass the evaluation for the teacher’s course.
  3. All the process is developed in a parallel Wiki until the contents have been revised and evaluated by the teachers.
  4. Only the contents with the suitable level are moved to Wikipedia.

During Course 2009-2010 a pilot test has been made in the Balearic Islands. 13 teachers, 160 pupils, have participated. 601 articles on the web have been created in viquibalear (The parallel wiki) and 472 of these articles have been incorporated into the Catalan Wikipedia.

For course 2010-2011 it is foreseen to draw the project in a larger territory and in more academic areas. In the pilot test only Catalan language materials has been developed but for this course there are schools interested in working also in Occitan French and Italian. This will bring new opportunities and add a new complexity to the process. This will also introduce the problem of working with more mature Wikipedias.

The presentation will explain the process of this experience, the organization for the Balearic experience, the role played by the academic authorities, the Association Amical Viquipèdia, the voluntary wikimedians, the teachers and the pupils. The obtained results and its evaluation will also be explained.

Finally the improvements foreseen for course 2010-2011 and the enlargement to schools of Catalonia, Andorra, Italy and possibly France will be presented, explaining the advantages and difficulties that this enlargement will predictably entail and the measures the organization is taking to cope with them.

It would also be of interest an open discussion to analyze the sustainability of the system as the Wikipedia keeps growing and its contents are becoming more and more complete. We are also interested in discussing the interest of Wikimedia Chapters in participating in the same project or parallel projects .

Track

Knowledge and Collaboration

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Sure. Both authors.

Slides

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  1. El Ágora 21:38, 20 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Nevinho 23:05, 20 May 2010 (UTC) (very interested in discussing it as we have here in Brasilian Chapter this so called Mutirão)...[reply]
  3. Marinna 15:08, 24 May 2010 (UTC).[reply]
  4. Psychology 12:12, 30 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Kocio 21:36, 2 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  6. --Góngora 13:23, 3 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  7. F3RaN 17:40, 9 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Amir E. Aharoni 06:38, 22 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]