Education/News/November 2022/Students 24-hour competition on Wikipedia article writing
Students 24-hour competition on Wikipedia article writing
The article competition took place in the field of natural sciences, and the contestants were primary school and high school students. The subjects of the article were Estonian birds.
The topics were drawn among the teams at the beginning of the competition, and after that, the participants had 24 hours to collect material, come up with the article's structure, write the text and properly format the article in Wikipedia. As a result of the competition, five bird articles were written: Black woodpecker, Eurasian bittern, Sand martin, Corn crake, and Common kestrel.
Such a competition has already been organized in two previous years. Earlier, school students had to compete with university students. However, this year, it was decided to organize a separate competition for school students only. The prize fund of 1000 euros was financed by the Estonian STEM Education Union.
According to the representative of the winning team, Marja Liina Soasepp, the victory came as a surprise for them. "The biggest lesson we learned is that everything may not always go as planned; some important activities may take longer than expected. For example, inserting references at the last minute of the competition robbed all the time that we had planned for formatting and polishing our article," said Soasepp. She recommends everyone to participate in such a competition because it gives an opportunity to get away from the usual weekend and offers all: adrenalin, joy and brain-rattling at the same time, but most of all it gives new knowledge and the opportunity to contribute to Wikipedia.
The jury member, ornithologist Peep Veedla said that such a competition is very welcome as it develops the students' text composition, information search, and referencing skills. "It was a great pleasure for me that the birds were chosen as the subject of the competition because Estonian Wikipedia bird articles are very poor compared to, for example, German or English ones."
The article competition supports the teaching of media and digital literacy, and it was organized by Wikimedia Estonia. Additional information can be found on the wiki page (in Estonian).