Education/Newsletter/May 2015/Arab World Education Program at WikiArabia 2015

Walaa AbdelMonem. Program leader, Cairo University.

Reem Alkashif. Program leader, Ain Shams University.

Snippet: Education sessions at WikiArabia 2015 introduce the program to the Arabic Wikipedia community and help new programs learn from their experience.

Representatives of Wikipedia Education Program participated in WikiArabia 2015 in Monastir, Tunisia, the first regional conference for the Arabic Wikipedia community. Contributions ranged from a presentation about the history of Wikipedia Education program since its beginning in the world with suggestions, solutions and potential encouraging activities. That was followed by another presentation of a more specific topic which is Wikipedia Education program in Egypt and how it worked since February 2012 till the sixth edition that ended last March. The session discussed how the program worked and what were the motivations keeping it going. The program helped increasing gender diversity and supported the featured content on Wikipedia. Egypt Wikimedians user group had a prominent role in enhancing the program. Wikipedia Education Program, like any other initiative, has achievements and dark sides, for that reason, the representatives had to locate both of them and how they influence the Arabic community and how the community interact with this phenomenon.

Proceeding from here, another presentation tackled some of the success stories and experiences from non-humanities student editors and applied sciences in enriching the content on Wikipedia alongside with Humanities students. This corrects the common belief that editing Wikipedia is a humanities-student and social studies-student job. The sessions were followed by a panel discussion with Wikipedia Education program volunteers as they gave advice to those interested in launching the program in their countries and universities.