Learning patterns/A hybrid learning curve from a Wikipedia Education Program

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A hybrid learning curve from a Wikipedia Education Program

problemIt has always been a problem to cultivate new editors for Indian language Wikipedia projects as Indian languages are complex, and so are the input methods as learning the same is mostly not part of the school syllabus in India. Encyclopedic writing, Wiki markup and guidelines with an added layer of linguistic and language input complexity has been a bigger obstacle in cultivating new editors.

solutionStudents, instead of learning editing Wikipedia, learn to type in their languages and Wiki mark up in Wikisource for a semester. After successful completion of digitizing a few pages on Wikisource as an assignment, they get promoted to edit Wikipedia. This helps overcome the fear of the first few articles being deleted because of qualitative issues.

creator• Pavanaja

created on04:41, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

What problem does this solve?

Helps in taking the students into the digital domain of Indian languages in Wikipedia via Wikisource

What is the solution?

Indian language books released under CC-BY-SA are scanned and uploaded to respective Indian language Wikisource. Students type some pages of the text into Wikisource. There are many keyboard layouts available for each Indian language Wiki project. Students select the one that they like most and type the text. The expertise achieved during this process helps the students to edit the respective Indian language Wikipedia.

Things to consider

• Building help pages, image/video tutorials for new editors to learn basic Wikipedia editing.
• Bringing experienced Wikimedians on-board from the community which helps; a) creating a strong community bonding and b) an easy way to introduce new editors to the community. Most importantly, the new editors get to learn a lot from experienced editors and this almost prevents them in breaking any possible community standards in the first place.
• Train the faculty on recruiting student-editors on a wiki platform with basic Wikipedia orientation so they could easily evaluate the students' work.

When to use

• Wikipedia Education Program for college and university students.

Endorsements

• Subhashish Panigrahi (talk)

See also

• Video tutorials to learn editing Hindi Wikipedia
• Video tutorials to learn editing Kannada Wikipedia

Related patterns

• Reimagining traditional classroom assignments