Education/Newsletter/December 2014/Egyptian students wrap up their 5th term on Wikipedia with great success

By Samir Elsharbaty (WMF)

 

Snippet: Students in Egypt celebrated the end of their 5th term on Wikipedia which witnessed their highest contributions ever!

In November, students and Wikimedians in Egypt gathered in Cairo University to celebrate their achievements in Wikipedia Education Program during spring and summer 2014. In this term, students added their highest contributions ever to Wikipedia since 2012 when the program had its first inception there. More than 12 million bytes were added and 836 new articles were created by students of 13 classes in 2 universities.

The Egyptian Program continues its efforts to increase gender diversity on Wikipedia by encouraging more female students to join. 88% of the students who participated last term were female and 28% of the content added came from the women research courses. Program volunteers introduced to the Arab World community the first courses specializing in women-related topics and the first writing contest about women which resulted in massive amounts of high quality content added to the Arabic Wikipedia about women. Simple prizes helped raising the competition spirit between new users who did their best during the contest time to develop the article content and to see their names in the first places.

Successful program leaders, the new user group supporting Wikimedia projects in Egypt and the new WikiWomen competition are some of many factors helped the program recruit new volunteers, retain existing ones and expand to new courses and universities.

Read the post on the Wikimedia Blog here.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.