Wikipedia at the Brazilian Linguistics Olympiad
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Wiki Movimento Brasil supported the Brazilian Linguistics Olympiad
On April 17th, Wiki Movimento Brasil (WMB) participated in the announcement of the Obelepédia winners – competition that is part of Phase 3 of the Brazilian Linguistics Olympiad (OBL, in Portuguese). Érica Azellini, WMB's Community Officer, had the honor of announcing the winners alongside Amanda Chevtchouk Jurno, WMB's Education and Scientific Dissemination Officer, and Artur Corrêa, one of the event's organizers. This was the first edition of Obelepédia that had tutorship by the team and volunteers from Wiki Movimento Brasil, during its two weeks, as part of the activity's programming.
Obelepédia is one of the Olympic activities of the OBL for students participating in the Autumn Linguistics School, considered the last phase of the Olympics. In this activity, each student writes an encyclopedic article about a language and then publishes it on Wikipedia. With the help of a tutor, a list of required topics, and a bibliography selected by the Olympiad organizers, students produce high-quality papers in just two weeks. This process results in great learning of linguistics and writing for the participants, in addition to a return to the community with the dissemination of quality information about different languages of the world.
This year's competition was held between March 14th and 26th and had 54 participating students. Together, they edited 54 Wikipedia articles and created 16 new ones. There were almost 400 thousand words and 2 million bytes added to the Portuguese online encyclopedia during Obelepédia.
Check out the four winning articles:
🏆 Língua letã: it won the Golden Star. Considered Latvia's official language, the Latvian language is the most spoken in the country – more than 60% of the population have it as their first language.
🏆 Língua cingalesa: it won the Silver Star. Sinhalese is the language spoken by about 18 million people in the world, with 16 million of the speakers concentrated in Sri Lanka.
🏆 Língua resígaro: it won the Bronze Star. This language currently has only one living speaker. Well, now two, including the editor that wrote the article.
🏆 Língua de sinais de Adamorobe: it won the Honorable Star. The sign language of Adamorobe is the first sign language article ever written in the competition. And this is the best sign language article that exists in the Portuguese Wikipedia.
XXIII Wikimedia & Education Workshop
At the XXIII Wikimedia & Education Workshop, João Alexandre Peschanski, the executive director of Wiki Movimento Brasil, presented a book chapter recently published at Springer, together with three other researchers: "The Wikipedia Education Program as Open Educational Practice: Global Stories". The event was held on April 20th, at 5 pm (UTC-3).
He discussed the results of a comparative survey between education programs carried out in the US/Canada, Serbia, Israel, and Brazil. Such research was carried out by LiAnna L. Davis, Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Filip Maljković, and João Alexandre Peschanski, and published as a chapter of the book "Open Educational Resources in Higher Education: A Global Perspective".
In addition to discussing the chapter, João Alexandre brought specific data and graphs about the Brazilian panorama that were not published in the book. It was quite interesting to understand how the area of those interested in the pedagogical uses of Wikimedia Projects has developed over the years and how the pattern of the programs, and the participants' profiles, has changed over time.
Then, the Wiki Movimento Brasil's Education and Scientific Dissemination Officer, Amanda Chevtchouk Jurno, presented the Wikipedia Library. She taught what needs to be done to gain access to its huge collection of academic and scientific databases, which includes the chapter presented at the workshop.
Wikipedia workshop for Brazilian Northeastern universities
On April 24th, Wiki Movimento Brasil held a Wikipedia editing workshop for three Brazilian northeastern universities: the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN - Brazil), Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB - Brazil) and State University of Health Sciences of Alagoas (UNCISAL - Brazil).
The activity was organized by Professor Eliene Araújo, from the UFRN and aimed at teaching basic editing skills for graduate students in Audiology (study of hearing). It is related to the Wikipedia Education Program as an Active Learning Methodology and Collective Collaboration Tool in Hearing Health projects.
Amanda Chevtchouk Jurno, WMB's Education and Scientific Dissemination Officer, gave the workshop to 21 participants that are going to edit Wikipedia articles linked to the curricular subject "Development, evaluation and intervention in hearing", which is related to the theme of the discipline.
The workshop is part of a project funded by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation, Brazil) in 2022, in which researchers from six Brazilian universities are collaborating with Wiki Movimento Brazil to develop a MOOC at Wikiversity as an introduction to Audiology (study of hearing) – a work in progress.
Master's thesis on Wikipedia
A master's thesis on Wikipedia was defended at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC - Brazil) at the end of 2022. The document was recently uploaded to the university's repository and is freely available at this link.
"Science education and possibilities of knowledge through Wikipedia", was written by Felipe Ramos Lima (Wiki Movimento Brasil) and supervised by Juliano Camillo and Elizandro M. Brick.
The study situates Wikipedia's potential contributions to science education by using Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as a theoretical and methodological framework. The author tried to understand the place that an activity such as an online encyclopedia, with free content production, occupies in the processes of world transformation and, in this sense, takes this perception as a potential use for emancipatory educational activities.
He identified an important bottleneck in the production of content circulating on the internet as a limiting factor for the content production ecosystem – the content license – and suggested some possibilities to contribute to overcoming this bottleneck. All the work has as a backdrop the intentionality of human development in the sense of producing activities that advocate for justice and social equality.
At the conclusion, he defends that it is not enough for knowledge to be free and accessible, it is necessary to liberate knowledge-consumption processes.