Education/Newsletter/September 2016/Egyptian Wikimedians celebrate eighth WEP conference
By Walaa Abdel Manaem (Wikipedia Education Program Egypt) & (Egypt Wikimedians User Group)
Snippet: Egyptian students celebrated the end of their 8th term on Wikipedia at Cairo University.
In July, Egyptian Wikimedians gathered in Cairo University to celebrate the end of the 8th term of the WIkipedia Education Program (WEP) in Cairo, at Ain Shams and El Azhar Universities. The eighth celebration conference was held in the conference hall at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University and was hosted by Walaa Abdel Manaem.
In this term, students achieved great success during spring 2016 and added significant contributions to Wikipedia since 2012 when the program began there. The Egyptian Wikipedia Education Program continues its efforts to increase gender diversity on Wikipedia by encouraging more female students to join. Last term, the majority of participants students were female.
Over eight consecutive terms, Egyptian students have added massive amounts of content to Wikipedia that now accounts for 3% of the whole Arabic encyclopedia. This content also increases article quality with a growing number of featured and good articles that represent approximately 12.31% of the featured articles, 8.57% of good articles, 3% of featured portals, and 3.44% of featured lists of the Arabic Wikipedia. See all statistics of the WEP in Egypt here. Volunteers run and develop the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt and successfully guide new contributors.
In the same conference, we celebrated the achievements added by the participants with the Wikimedia Egypt Prize from 10 December 2015 to 10 March 2016. Simple prizes helped raise the competitive spirit between new users who did their best during the contest time to develop article content and to see their names in first place. The winners of this competition are Eman El-Emam in 1st place, Essam Ahmed in 2nd place, and Soher Nadi in 3rd place.
Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt here.