Education/Newsletter/November 2014/A student in Mexico makes the best of her study to edit Wikipedia

By Samir Elsharbaty (WMF)

 
María Fernanda López Narváez

Snippet: María is a student from Mexico who used her knowledge of education history to edit related articles on Wikipedia.

María Fernanda López Narváez is a student of History in The National Autonomous University of Mexico. She was doing her research on female education in New Spain when her professor Dr. Adriana Álvarez Sánchez encouraged her to join her course to edit Wikipedia. Dr. Sánchez suggested several articles to her students to edit when Maria was influenced by an article about history of education in Mexico. The article was full of mistakes in terms of language, citation, format, and style. At this moment, Maria decided to work on the article that needs more work. It was an eye-opening experience for Maria as she made friends in the Wikipedia community when they worked together exchanging ideas about the article. In order to develop the article and tackle all its issues, Maria used a lot of references that helped her not only with the article but with her studies too.

Although her course has ended in the Program, Maria is still editing Wikipedia, participating in discussions with the Wiki community to develop its content and encouraging others to join the project. Maria wrote a blog post on Wikimedia Mexico website about her experience with Wikipedia telling us a lot about it.

Read Maria's blog post (in Spanish).

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Mexico here.