The Welsh Wiki-Education project
Author: Jason Evans
Social Media channels or hashtags:
Twitter @Wiki_NLW
Summary: There are about 600,000 Welsh speakers in Wales and many of them are young people who have learned Welsh at School. However we have found that many turn to the English Wikipedia to help with their school work as there is better information than on the Welsh version. This project aims to start correcting this inequality, giving students and teachers the confidence to use Welsh Wikipedia in the classroom.
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An introduction to the Wici Addysg (Wiki Education) project
The Welsh Government funded this project to improve Welsh language content on Wikipedia and to engage more students with Wikipedia in the classroom. The project is being managed by the National Wikimedian at the National Library of Wales in partnership with Menter Iaith Mon who deliver award winning Welsh language activities and projects in schools and communities on the Island of Anglesey. It's a trial project, looking at one school subject (History) and working with teachers to identify the 100 most important articles for teaching this subject across primary and secondary education. We then identify existing Welsh language learning resources from a number of sources and negotiate their release on an open licence so that we can rework them into Wikipedia articles. If there are no relevant resources we either translate English content of work with a subject specialist to write or improve existing articles. Articles are carefully structured to ensure information is complete and summarized in simple language. We are also incorporating short educational videos into a number of articles and creating an educational infobox to highlight the learning resources used to create the articles.
You can learn more about the project by watching the short film above, which we recently put together for a presentation at the Celtic Knot Wikimedia languages conference.