Education/Newsletter/May 2014/Participation of "Servicio Social" students in Wikipedia grows at Tec de Monterrey

Participation of "Servicio Social" students in Wikipedia grows at Tec de Monterrey

By Thelmadatter


During the Spring 2013 semester, Tec de Monterrey began a pilot to offer working with Wikipedia/Wikimedia as an option for earning the community service hours that undergraduate students in Mexico are legally require to complete to get their diploma. During this semester, only one student was involved and most of her efforts were in working out how this would work. The Fall 2013 semester had five participants, with only three completing hours. This past semester began with 23 participants with twelve students making very significant contributions, mostly in translation and photography (over 2000 photo), but also with the contribution of tourist maps of various Mexico City boroughs. Translation was done English-to-Spanish and resulted in creation or improvement of 62 articles, many of which are academic such as Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Music of Norway, History of Petroleum in the United States, New Zealand Native team of 1888-1889 and U.S. China Relations (the longest article by far).

These efforts, along with classroom assignments in English and communications classes help get Wikipedia accepted into the Tec Modelo 21, a system-wide effort to promote innovative projects in education. A blog post on this is forthcoming.

A full list of completed projects can be seen at the Wiki Borrego Spring 2014 page at Wiki Borregos Spring Semester 2014. Some of the more interesting images are below: