NDEC Wikipedia Editorial and Research Team

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NDEC Wikipedia Editorial and Research Team is a specialized team of Notre Dame English Club; a Notre Dame College, Dhaka based extra-curricular organization led by the students of this educational institution. This extra-curricular organization is basically devoted to developing the English language skills and the leadership skills of the students of this higher-secondary level educational institution. The urge to contribute to the open knowledge ecosystem led this organization to form this team.

Being the first extra-curricular organization to initiate a well-structured and organized Open Knowledge Movement in the educational institutions of Bangladesh, Notre Dame English Club formed this specialized team. Open knowledge activists believe that knowledge belongs to everyone and no discrimination should be made to access, evaluate, create and share knowledge in any form anywhere. No social, economic, linguistic, or technical barrier should prevent anyone from gathering and disseminating knowledge. This team will work to encourage its members to take part in the process of ensuring free knowledge for everyone and especially, it will work to conduct study and research projects on the history of Notre Dame College, Dhaka and related topics and will ensure proper “open-knowledge coverage” of these topics.

Goals

Increasing encyclopedic coverage of “Notre Dame College, Dhaka” and related articles.
Creating awareness regarding open knowledge among the students of Bangladesh.
Introducing the use of Open-Education Resources (OER) among the stakeholders of the education system of Bangladesh.
Using Open Knowledge Resources (OERs) and open platforms like Wikipedia to develop the English language teaching method of NDEC through contributing to Wikimedia projects and interacting with the global community.

Work Procedure

The work of this team can be divided into mainly three phases.

Collection of Knowledgeː At the very first phase, we identify & collect knowledge of our target topic from online and offline resources. Our strategies may include convincing people to share particular knowledge with us, interviewing knowledgeable persons, using libraries (usually Notre Dame College Library), taking photographs and videos of the subject if needed and so on.
Storing Knowledgeː After the first phase, we need to ensure that the collected knowledge is perfectly stored in a safe place and can be found whenever needed. We can't actually store everything in a public place because most of the time, our collection includes copyrighted books, photographs, contact details, personally identifiable information and so on.
Dissemination of Knowledgeː The third and the last phase is disseminating the knowledge we collected and stored earlier. Our prime concern for dissemination is open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia. We believe that knowledge belongs to everyone. We may also use magazines, websites, social media to spread the knowledge among everyone whenever they're ready to be shared. We also train and encourage the students of Notre Dame College to practice this knowledge and push them a step further by sharing. Our strategies in the third phase may include encouraging the responsible authority to release important media and other files under Creative Commons license, using collected books and other materials as references on Wikipedia, enriching Wikipedia articles with the information we collected, translating the articles into as many languages as possible, sharing the knowledge with anyone who is interested and so on.

Besides these three phases of our mainstream work procedure, we have to conduct recruitment and training process regularly which may include workshops, edit-a-thons and so on.

Projects

Notre Dame Workshop and Edit-a-thon 2020

Poster of Notre Dame Workshop & Edit-a-thon 2020

On November 12, 2020, Notre Dame English Club arranged an online workshop in collaboration with Wikimedia Bangladesh to train its members on contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects. A week-long edit-a-thon was also arranged to give the attendees of the workshop a chance to show their knowledge in action. More than 70 students attended the online workshop and 23 students attended the edit-a-thon. All the edit-a-thon participants received certificates from NDEC. This workshop and edit-a-thon helped NDEC to get a wide perspective of the open knowledge ecosystem. During the edit-a-thon, participants translated 106 articles from English Wikipedia to Bangla Wikipedia and 80 articles were accepted by the jury board. Find more details on the club website and wmbd documentation site.

This project is actually a part of the recruitment process of the team's work procedure.

Project In Search of the Roots

Main article: NDEC Wikipedia Editorial and Research Team/Project In Search of the Roots

Project Logo of "In Search of the Roots"

Project In Search of the Roots is an ambitious project by NDEC Wikipedia Editorial and Research Team which primarily focuses on collecting offline resources like historical photographs, offline references, interviewing knowledgeable persons related to the history of Notre Dame College, Dhaka. This is also the first formal project by this team which also serves as an "On-the-job training" for its members. The members didn't only collect resources but also got a deep understanding of how the whole Wikipedia ecosystem runs and how the volunteer community ensures quality.

This project is mainly a part of the first phase (Collection of Knowledge) of the team's work procedure.

The Translation Project

The Translation Project by NDEC Wikipedia Editorial & Research Team is another ambitious and experimental project where the members of this team will translate the articles related to Notre Dame College, Dhaka and try to spread the information about these topics to as many language versions of Wikipedia as possible. We've noticed that there are some Knowledge Divides between different language versions of Wikipedia. Small Wikipedia communities lack necessary volunteers as well as good coverage of internationally important topics. At the same time, small wikis may have good coverage on the local culture of the geographical area that particular language covers but the same knowledge about those cultures are absent in almost all other wikis. To bridge this gap, this team of enthusiastic college students thinks the interaction between different Wikipedia language communities and inter-culture efforts can be crucial.

With very limited resources and experience, this team is trying to see their ideas in action. At their very initial steps, the team is trying to translate the article of Notre Dame College, Dhaka from Bangla to English. This team has intentions to enlist these articles as a Good article or Featured article in English Wikipedia. Almost all the members of this team are complete newbies. So, they needed to learn the syntax first. This project is being led by one of the leading members of "Project Featured ArticleːNDC" (in Bangla Wikipedia) where despite having possible Conflict of interest issues, a group of the students of "Notre Dame College, Dhaka" led their college article to the Featured Articles list of Bangla Wikipedia after a long process of peer review and community engagement. Most of the members of that group was also completely unaware of the ecosystem of Wikipedia communities.

This project is mainly a part of the third phase (Dissemination of Knowledge) of the team's work procedure.

About Notre Dame English Club

Notre Dame English Club (NDEC shortly) is the 19th extra-curricular organization of Notre Dame College, Dhaka which focuses on the improvement of the language and leadership skills of the students of this educational institution. This organization is completely led by the students of Notre Dame College under the supervision of the teachers and the college authority. It is operated as a non-profit and is responsible to the college authority for its actions.

This club is thought to be the first extra-curricular organization to work on English skills in the educational institutions of Bangladesh. It is also thought to be the organizer of the biggest English-language-based carnival in the country.

Does NDEC share the same goal with Wikimedia Movement?

Whole universe in one soul

Learn English to reach the goal

With this motto, this organization is fighting knowledge gap in the education sector in Bangladesh by increasing the English proficiency level of the students of Notre Dame College, Dhaka and the students from all over Bangladesh.

According to Washington Post, among 7.2 billion people on the earth, English has only 527 million native speakers (7.32 percent) whereas Bangla has 250 million native speakers (3.47 percent). There are almost 7100 living languages in the world, says the same article. In contrast, 63.6% of the contents on the internet is in English whereas less than 0.01% is in Bangla according to W3Techs Usage statistics of content languages for websites and Usage statistics of Bengali for websites. Most of these aren't openly available to be consumed by all. This leads to a huge knowledge gap. Bangla is just an example here. You can easily replace Bangla with any of the 7100 languages.

To bridge this gap, we can think of two possible ways, bringing the internet in Bangla for the native Bangla speakers or enabling our native Bangla speakers to create and consume English content online and ask them to help translate the internet into Bangla for native Bangla speakers. Both of them are needed badly. And of course, we also need to "open the knowledge" for all. We're preparing our future generation to interact with the internet (and in real life) in English so that they don't miss the opportunity to leverage the "sum of all human knowledge" and make this knowledge available for the people of all languages, races, regions and educational backgrounds.

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to drop them on the Discussion page.

You can also mail us at "ndec_research googlegroups.com"