Education/News/March 2019/“Edit-a-thons give us opportunity to distract from common interests” The club members write articles about New Year

“Edit-a-thons give us opportunity to distract from common interests”. The club members write articles about New Year

Author: Tamara Grigoryan, Armenuhi Voskanyan, Violla Mosikyan (Wikimedia Armenia)

Social Media channels or hashtags:Armenian Wikipedia, WikiClubs of Wikimedia Armenia, Karvachar WikiClub, Lernapat WikiClub

Summary: Organising edit-a-thons dedicated to important holidays and global trends has already become a tradition in the WikiClubs of Wikimedia Armenia. These edit-a-thons help participants to relate their current life and preferences to editing in Wikipedia.

Edit-a-thon dedicated to New Year was held in the WikiClubs in Karvachar and Lernapat. During these edit-a-thons 32 and 29 articles were written. The articles created during the edit-a-thon in Lernapat are dedicated to the festivals held in winter in different parts of the world, films and cartoons about New Year miracles. That of the WikiClub in Karvachar are about New Year movies, cartoons, songs and the New Year celebrating traditions.

Active participant of the edit-a-thon and WikiClub Lena Ghazaryan tells us:

“During the edit-a-thons we all use the same list of the articles. In this way it is easier to choose topic and becomes more interesting for us. We often advice each other which article to write. We both compete and help each other” .

One of the most active participants of the WikiClub in Lernapat Christine Horomsimyan wrote 12 articles during the edit-a-thon. She mentions, that she always participates in edit-a-thons with pleasure.

“I'm editing in Wikipedia for two years. During this period I wrote different articles about various topics, at the same time I participated in series of edit-a-thons. One of them was the edit-a-thon held in the end of the last year, in scope of which I chose my articles mostly from the given list”, Says Christine and adds, that it's effective as it is a good opportunity to distract from your common interests, to consider new subjects and to learn something new.

Roma Fahradyan from the WikiClub in Karvachar is comparatively a new member in WikiClub. He is one of the participants, who created the largest amount of articles.

“I used to participate in the edit-a-thon excitedly. To tell the truth I really wished to win and did my best to write as many articles as possible”, tells Roma.

After summarizing the results of the edit-a-thon encouraging prizes were given to two participants for writing the maximum number of articles and another two for writing articles, that are the highest in quality.

“Before the edit-a-thon I was sure I wouldn't manage to write a large number of articles as I'm used to working slowly. I'm happy that we also received prizes for articles high in quality, as I prefer to write less but quality articles”, says Elen Gevorgyan, 12-year-old editor of the club.

Thematic edit-a-thons help the teens acquire skills to translate articles on a certain topic. They enrich their vocabulary concerning to the topic, offer topics for the next edit-a-thon according to their preferences and become one of the authors of the quality content being created in Wikipedia.