University of Cape Town Wikipedia History Dept workshop

The University of Cape Town Wikipedia Department of Historical Studies workshop is a series of workshops conducted by Wikimedia ZA in partnership with the Department of Historical Studies and the UCT Libraries at the University of Cape Town.

23 February 2019

YaguraStation presenting on how to perform a search query on WikiData.

Participants doing the 1Lib1Ref exercise to familiarise themselves with making Wikipedia edits.

Dr Bodhisattva Kar wrapping up the event and thanking participants.

The first event took place on the 23rd February 2019 at the Ulwazi room within the university library from 10:00 to 14:30. The event was designed for post-graduate students at the university's Department of Historical Studies so as to encourage more area experts (in this case South African history experts) to edit Wikipedia. It included a brief introduction to Wikipedia and Wikidata, things to keep in mind when editing and a practical 1Lib1Ref exercise. It finished off with Q&As as well as a demonstration on how to add written content from academic journals to selected Wikipedia articles.

It was attended by 27 students in addition to 2 UCT staff members and 4 volunteers from Wikimedia ZA.

Wikimedia ZA attendees:

Discott - Organised and ran the workshop, Wikipedia presentation
Dagelf - Participant support
A3 Baard - Participant support
YaguraStation - WikiData presentation

Metrics

During the course of the day on the 23 February participants:

18 Articles Edited
24 Total Edits
17 Editors
808 Words Added

Although the metrics numbers they were not the objective of this exercise. The main goal of this event was to introduce the concept and practice of editing Wikipedia to a diverse group that are more likely than average to edit Wikipedia in the future.

Dashboard

The event project dashboard can be seen here.