CIP Wikipedia Project



Project records

The CIP Wikipedia Project is a project that introduces Wikimedia projects to Sabancı University's CIP101 students.

The CIP Project

CIP stands for Civic Involvement Projects. It has been an important part of Sabancı University's curriculum since its foundation back in 1999. Every student has to pass it at least once. The supervisors and overvisors for the next terms are selected from applicants who have passed the course before. The program consists of many projects.

These include projects about:

  • disability rights
  • human rights
  • gender studies
  • visiting retirement homes
  • ecological awareness
  • sign language
  • many others

The projects and materials are related to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and SDG's are talked about in most projects.

The Wikipedia Project in CIP

After a term with a pilot project, CIP started a full scale Wikipedia project in the Fall term of 2023. It consists of 4 Turkish language groups and 1 International, English language group.

Contents of the Course

The course aims to incorporate the following:

  • A solid grasp of Wikipedia and its sister projects
  • Open Culture
  • Wikipedia's values
  • Aggregating and disseminating knowledge about Sustainable Development Goals

Specific skills that are going to be taught:

  • Basic Wikipedia Editing
  • Understanding Wikidata
  • Using the Content Translation Tool
  • Whatever the students in that group happen to be interested in!

Structure of the lessons

The current lesson plan of CIP consists of 2 mutual lessons for every group (that the Supervisors aren't a part of), 4 discussion lessons, 1 week of organising a fair in the campus and 5 application lessons. The current approach in the Wikipedia lesson is to do the usual CIP lessons in the discussion lessons and to start the Wikipedia project within the application lessons.

Within the International group, the Wikipedia lessons will start from the very beginning and will be incorporated alongside the discussion lessons.

Attempts at sustainability for the course

In order to make sure that CIP Wikipedia project can continue well into the future, within this term, some lessons will be recorded, there will also be a weekly meeting of the supervisors in order to ensure that they have enough skills to teach the course within the term. All the recorded videos will be uploaded to Youtube with a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.