Education/Newsletter/May 2015/Maria enjoys editing Wikipedia as her community service
Summary by Leigh Thelmadatter (Wiki Learning)
Snippet: Maria writes about her social service that turned into a pleasant editing experience.
By law, Mexican university students are required to complete a certain number of community service hours before they can graduate. This requirement is called servicio social, and its purpose is to give students the opportunity to take the skills and knowledge from their classes and give back to the community. Since 2014, one of the options to complete servicio social hours is creating content on Wikimedia projects (Wikipedia and its sister websites) through the Wikimedia affiliate Wiki Learning at Mexico’s private institution the Tecnológico de Monterrey.
María José Felgueres Planells is a biotechnology student at this university. She contributed to Wikipedia for two semesters with much enthusiasm. One reason is that she shares the ideals of the free and open knowledge movement, as she considers education a public utility that should be accessible to everyone. Mexico is not a rich country and quality education is scarce. This makes online, freely available information extremely important. Most of Maria's work has been translating biology and medical articles from English to Spanish, so that those who do not have my English reading ability can also access the information. This also correlates to the objective of servicio social, which is to create a link between students and their social environment, which today is as much global as it is national.
Read the full post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program at Tec de Monterrey here.