Students Write Wiktionary
editAuthor: Itamar Nehama, Wikimedia Israel
Summary: Over the last few weeks, an experimental project has been launched in Israel invites highschool students to write articles in the Hebrew Wiktionary. The students learn about expressions and dialects in Hebrew, research their sources and upload a dictionary article to the space of the articles.
After several years of working with students on writing and expanding articles in Wikipedia, we are trying another interesting field. The "Students Write Wiktionary" project enables more students to take part in the organization's educational program and contribute to the global knowledge. Writing dictionary articles about single words is a very complicated task, which is more appropriate for expert linguists, but writing articles about dialects and phrases is likely to be a fair task for youth, who receive proper guidance and training.
Wikimedia Israel has developed a frindly tool for writing an article about phrases in Wiktionary and has created a database of about 400 expressions from the curricula in secondary education, which are not yet available in Wiktionary. About one hundrend students from three schools chose one or more phrases and studied it in depth with the help of their teachers.
In the inquiry process, they learned the textual source from which the phrase is used, read existing dictionary definitions in dictionaries, and examined the use of the phrases in everyday language. Based on their research, students in one group have already drafted articles for new dictionary articles, and after having the drafts reviewed by an experienced Wiktionary editor, 31 new articles have been published.
After the success of the first group, we are very much looking forward to the end of the process in the other groups and are already thinking about ways to expand the project in the coming years.
Tags: Wikimedia Israel; Education; Wiktionary