Wikimedia Armenia/Reports/2016-06

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2016
June

Wikiseminar for teachers

WLS and Teachers seminar group photo

Wikimedia Armenia organizes wikiseminar for teachers of different regions of Armenia twice a year during school holidays to spread the reach of wiki-movement throughout the country, to involve new editors and volunteers in the WM AM projects. The first wikiseminar was organized in Aghveran in October 2015 and the second one in Dilijan in June 2016. It should be noted that each time the number of applicants to take part in the seminar increased which means that more and more people are interested in learning and being involved in the Wikipedia Education program. We had 100 applicants for the first wikiseminar of which only 29 were chosen and from 146 applicants 51 were chosen for the second seminar.

During the seminars, the teachers learned about the wiki-movement, its ideology, wikiprojects, how to edit different wikiprojects, the main rules, and tools. Of course, there were teachers who run into difficulties during the first days while learning editing tools and main principles of Wikipedia but as soon as they mastered their skills they kept up with the rest of the teachers and began to improve and create articles. It is very significant to state that there were teachers who have applied to the seminar being inspired by their students and children (for more details please see the "Stories"). After the seminar, many of the teachers actively try to organize different events in their schools. As the criteria to be a participant of the wikiseminar was relatively low we have got many applicants. However, we decided to make the application form more detailed and increase the criteria for participating in the next seminar, thus we expect to have fewer participants.

Here is the metrics:

	Edits	Pages created	Bytes positive	Bytes negative
Wikipedia	9706	866	7599487	-306097
Wiktionary	2489	102	179047	-18456
Wikisource	167	83	207286	-355

Blogposts about wikiseminars in WMF Education newsletter:

Teachers as the main center of wiki-movement at their schools

At the beginning of our education program, most of the workshops and promotion of the program was done by the Wikimedia Armenia's volunteers and/or staff members. As the education program enlarges, Wikimedia Armenia started to need more human resources to implement workshops, assess, promote and maintain the education program in different institutions of Armenia. Mostly because of this lack, Education Team proposed to launch teacher training seminars, where teachers from different regions and institutions of Armenia will learn Wikipedia and Education program basics, try to promote the program in their institutions thus involving new students and spreading the wiki movement. This is a valuable learning for us because it gave us the possibility to increase the reach of the wiki projects even more and involve new educators.

Wikisource as a part of education program

The main breakthrough after the Wiktionary based education program was realizing that other Wikimedia projects could be as effective education tools as Wikipedia, so there were attempts to implement other iterations. Wikisource was the next one, it was initially used in June 2016 during the WikiCamp. On the basis of digitized materials from the Digitization program, several books were chosen which were provided to the education program participants, who after learning the basics of Wikisource, started to proofread. At the initial stages, the Education Team tried to choose easy books because Armenian OCR is not of the best quality so there is usually a lot to proofread.

After the official and successful launching at the Summer WikiCamp 2015, proofreading process continued mainly in the WikiClubs thus increasing the number of digitized and proofread content on Armenian Wikisource and using Wikisource as a tool in the education program.

Wiki Loves Science

Wikimedia Armenia has organized a two day “Wiki Loves Science” editathon that ran from 17th till 19th of June. 16 people have participated in WLS editathon. During the two days participants have enriched the Armenian Wikipedia with their professional articles. A total of 60 articles has been created during this editathon.

	Wiki Loves Science (June 17 - 19)
	Number of participants	Wikipedia
participants	16
created/improved articles/entries		60
edits		517
bytes (net sum)		376,577