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Basque Wikimedians User Group/Reports/2019

< Basque Wikimedians User Group

2019 has been a very active year for the Basque Wikimedians. Most of the focus has been on education on account of the extensive Education Program started in 2017. The Donostia-San Sebastián Wikimedia Education Conference taking place on 5–7 April marked a milestone in the annual activity record.

Front page of Berria,the main newspaper in Basque (28-06-2019): "The growth of Wikipedia in Basque. With the contributions of the students, 800 new articles have been created and 1,200 have been improved. As for the number of articles, the Basque language has been put as the 29th language of the world".

Education Outreach continues to take a focus on university, the public UPV/EHU and UPNA, the Basque Summer University, UEU, and Mondragon Unibertsitatea, offering courses and workshops, as well as producing, for one, several multimedia files for use in education. Cooperation with the Elhuyar Foundation is also worth highlighting, related to the transfer of terminology into Wikidata.

This year has seen the development of Txikipedia, the junior version of the Basque Wikipedia, including it in education by means of guided editing and activities within and out of the classroom, especially directed at Secondary School pupils. Heritage is a topic on the rise, with the Basque version of WikimediaLoves Monuments highlighting and focusing on regional sites of cultural interest.

GLAM

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Activities

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Education

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Education program

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Students at the Medical School learning how to edit Wikipedia. This is one of the many Wikipedia workshops done in 2019
 
Tale recorded to an oral literature student (November 2019)

The most important section of our project is the Education Program. In this program we are training students and teachers to write Wikipedia. It is difficult to list all the courses here, but we can mention which have been the main works done and some general results.

Since we started the Education Program we have been in at least 152 classrooms. Many of us have not signed up for our system for different reasons: because they are underage, because the work they are going to do is not susceptible to follow up, or simply because we have given them a lecture without further articles. Thus, about 170 classrooms will have heard our presentation.

In our system, 2,537 students have registered, but as said before, many of them have not been tracked because of privacy issues. On the other hand, many students have done their work in groups, and only one has registered. With a quick calculation we can think that we have been working something with about 3,000 students, and that another 2,000 students have heard about the operation of Wikipedia without participating in any program. However, this is a quick calculation, because it is difficult to follow up thoroughly when large conferences are offered in the centres.

These students have added at least 2,900,000 words to Wikipedia in Basque, about 5.5% of our content. Changes made to Txikipedia or promoted to Wikisource are not counted in this statistic. They have added 3,320 bibliographical references using the standard reference system (there will be more if we take into account those introduced in an inappropriate format).

Students have edited 2,260 articles, of which 882 are new articles. In this statistic we do not include the work done in Txikipedia because it cannot be tracked yet. It can be calculated that about 300 articles have been created in Txikipedia, so at least 2,500 articles have been edited and about 1,200 articles have been created. 1,440 images have been added to the Commons (many of them belonging to the project with Ahotsak also appears here). The most important thing: these articles made by the students have had 473,000 visits (once again, without taking into account the Txikipedia). In total, it is estimated that the works made by the students have had about 500,000 visits.

In addition, one of those students (Xabier Garmendia, EUmineralbot) semiautomatically created articles in Basque for 539 minerals (Kategoria:Mineralak_Mindat) based on the work performed before in Catalan Wikipedia by @Mineralbot (see tweet by Basque Wikpedia and tweet by Catalan Wikipedia).

You can read the full report here.

Wikimedia+Education Conference

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Wikimedia+Education Conference took place in Donostia, on 5–7 April 2019, and welcomed 120 attendees from both the Wikimedia and the education community: volunteers, program managers, educators, teachers and researchers. The first edition of this new format was the first conference built by and for the education enthusiasts in our movement (and Wikimedia enthusiasts in education), to encourage the community to meet, share knowledge around Wikimeda, and collaborate in new and innovative projects in the future.

This conference was organized by Basque Wikimedians User Group, with the help of ten volunteers from the community. The sessions, keynotes, talks, workshops and overall participation was satisfactory, and the main goals were met.

You can read the full report here.

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    Group photo
  • Flashes of ongoing education initiatives attending the Conference
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    Lunch time
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    Basque Wikimedians & Katherine Maher
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    Opening ceremony at the city hall
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    Opening address and Q&A at Tabakalera

Other activities

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  • Presentation Wikipedia Euskal Kultura Irakasteko Tresna ("Wikipedia as a Tool for Instruction on Basque Culture"), conducted by Iñaki Lopez de Luzuriaga at the Summer Courses of University UPV-EHU. Donostia-San Sebastián, 11 July 2019.
  • Research paper entitled Adapting NMT to caption translation in Wikimedia Commons for low-resource languages, presented in the Conference SEPLN2019 (Bilbao, September 26, 2019), and published in the Journal Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural, 63, September 2019, pp. 33–40. The paper presents a successful domain adaptation of a general neural machine translation (NMT) system using a bilingual corpus created with captions for images in Wiki-mediad Commons for the Spanish-Basque and English-Irish pairs. This work was developped by Alberto Poncelas, Meghan Dowling (Irish Wikipedia), and Andy Way from ADAPT Centre, School of Computing, Dublin City University, and by Kepa Sarasola (Basque Wikipedia), Gorka Labaka, Inaki Alegria (Basque Wikipedia) from Ixa Group, Faculty of Informatics (University of The Basque Country UPV/EHU) Tweet by @kavango
  • Berritsu taberna: It's a forum of state schools where new projects and their practical experiences are explained. Txikipedia project in Zumaia High School was presented in this forum. Berritsu taberna, Txikipediaren esperientzia Zumaia BHI. Donostia-San Sebastian, 2 May 2019.


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    Meeting of the group for language diversity on the lawn, Wikimania 2019, Stockholm
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    Feeding the Txikipedia with the youngest schoolchildren in Uharte-Arakil, Navarre, in November 2019
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    Wikinagusiak workshop, Eibar, 15 February 2019
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    A session in Kabia, section for digital and technological initiatives, Fair of Durango

Itinerancies and divulgation

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Media coverage

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Wikimedia+Education Conference

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Full coverage in media, interviews on public television and an interview with Katherine Maher for 7K, among a really wide variety of media coverage for those days.

Txikipedia

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