Education/Newsletter/December 2014/Articles of interest in other publications

Articles of interest in other publications

Wiki co-founder shares $1m Knowledge Award Knowledge

Jimmy Wales co-founder of Wikipedia shared with the web inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the first Knowledge Award in Dubai, UAE. In the first Knowledge conference, Wales shared how the encyclopedia started as a simple idea. The idea changed and developed with time until it became the biggest encyclopedia in world history with more than 32 million articles in 287 different languages. Khaleej Times, a local newspaper in UAE covered the ceremony. Read the full article here.

Piotr Konieczny wins best pedagogies essay

Piotr Konieczny's essay "Rethinking Wikipedia for the Classroom" was named by Contexts Magazine as one of its best contributions on pedagogies, winning one of the 2014 Claude Awards. The Claudes Award aims at recognizing the best contributions to the magazine during the last three-year editorship. Piotr is one of the outstanding professors in Wikipedia Education Program in Korea, participating since 2006. Piotr is also one of the most acive users on Wikipedia; he has been editing since 2003, and he has developed 22 featured articles, 52 good articles and many others of high quality contributions. Read Piotr's essay here and see a list of the winning works here.

Medical Students Learn to Treat Ailing Wikipedia Entries

Voice of America discusses how medical students participating in WikiProject Medicine use their knowledge of medicine and trusted medical sources to develop the medical content on the encyclopedia. Dr. Amin Azzam at California University encourages his students to join the course he leads in the project. He explains the importance of medical student participation in Wikipedia. People refer to Wikipedia whenever they need medical information and thus, having high quality and well-cited information will help them. The article includes examples of different professors and students participating in the project. Read the full article here.

Wikipedia's Gender Problem Gets a Closer Look

Livescience investigates the reasons behind the gender gap on Wikipedia, the male oriented community on the internet in general, and the efforts made by the Wikimedia Foundation and individual volunteers to help increase gender diversity on Wikipedia. The article displays examples of these efforts, such as women-related edit-a-thons and the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt with its high percentage of female students participating .The article also features researchers around the world who are interested in studying this issue on Wikipedia. Read the full article here.

The Lives They Lived

The New York Times pays a tribute to the most influential people who passed away in 2014, including Wikipedian Adrianne Wadewitz. Adrianne was a scholar of 18th century British literature and one of the most prolific editors of Wikipedia, who worked hard to promote the use of Wikipedia in classrooms, recruit new editors and increase gender diversity by encouraging more female users to join the movement. She died on April 8, 2014 from head injuries sustained a week earlier in a rock climbing fall at Joshua Tree National Park. Read the full article here.

'Wikibombs' redressing gender imbalance of online encyclopedia

An article in the Citizen, a publication of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, features the local efforts done in Australia and the role Australian universities play to increase gender diversity on Wikipedia by hosting editathons, or "Wikibombs" to edit articles on women-related topics. Three Wikibombs were held recently in Australia to support women presence on Wikipedia; Women of science editathon in the Australian Academy of Sciences, University of Sydney editathon, and Women of neuroscience editathon at Florey institute. The three events were attended by 190 people and resulted in creating 191 new articles on Wikipedia. Read the full article here.

Royal Society of Chemistry grants journal access to Wikipedia Editors

In this article the Royal Society of Chemistry announces granting 100 RSC Gold accounts to Wikipedia editors who develop articles about chemistry. The project aims at enriching the science-related content on Wikipedia, which is an important source of information for the new learning generations, according to the article. The Royal Society believes that helping Wikipedia editors find reliable sources of information is an investment in a future generation of well-educated scientists. The Wikipedia Library will be the coordinator between RSC and Wikipedia editors and will distribute the accounts to the most highly-contributing users in the science field. Read the full article here.