Education/Newsletter/February 2015/Wikimedia Armenia run WikiCamps with great success
Snippet: Wikimedia Armenia's new educational project, WikiCamps, engage young students to edit Wikipedia.
Last year, for the first time, Wikimedia Armenia thought of holding extensive training sessions for young students aged 14-20 to train them on editing Wikipedia and make use of their free time and energy in a positive way. That project was WikiCamps. The idea was to work on the younger generation so that they grow a passion for free knowledge.
Campers edited Wikipedia for only 4 hours every day. The rest of their time was spent in doing sports, singing and dancing, etc. Participants wanted to spend more time editing, but the organizers refused. They wanted to keep the young people always active and loving to edit by giving them enough time to rest and to have fun. Another way of supporting and encouraging the young campers was holding a contest for the highest contributor every day and other competitions for fun and leisure activities.
The Armenian chapter spent months preparing for the first event so that mistakes could be avoided. The project exceeded all expectations with stunning results. The first two camps last summer were attended by 135 students who added more than 22 million bytes of content to the Armenian Wikipedia and created 5,425 new articles. 73 students attended the fall camp and the winter camp, adding 997 new articles and more 3 million bytes to Armenian Wikipedia and improving 576 other articles on the Armenian Wiktionary.
Read the post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog here.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Armenia here.