Wikipedia Education Program/News/4 February 2014

Welcome to the Wikipedia Education Program Update -- a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation about efforts to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms. The newsletter is released on the first and third Tuesday of each month. To be notified of the latest issue, add this page to your watchlist or email LiAnna Davis (ldaviswikimedia.org), the Wikipedia Education Program Communications Manager, to be added to the distribution list.

Interactive elements added to editing tutorials

This term, we've started enhancing the Wikipedia training for students with interactive editing tutorials. Using the "guided tours" framework that was introduced to help newcomers find productive ways to get started, student editors can practice formatting text, creating links, and adding citations, with step-by-step instructions from [edit] to [Save page]. So far, feedback from the student editors has been very positive; many note the interactive tutorials as their favorite part of the training. Log into your Wikipedia account, then click here to try the first interactive tutorial.

US, Canada students fill 1/3 Encyclopedia Britannica

Quantitative success numbers are in for the fall 2013 term of the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada. In the fall term, 1,347 students added 11.6 million bytes to Wikipedia, including creating 251 new articles. In the seven terms of the program, students have added enough words to the English Wikipedia to fill 1/3 of Encyclopedia Britannica. And qualitative research projects have found students in the United States and Canada program have added high-quality content to Wikipedia. Learn more about last term's student work.

Online screencast of workshop helps Arab students

The academic term in the Arab world has come to an end, and students at Ain Shams University in Cairo are finishing up their Wikipedia assignments. Over the course of the semester, Campus Ambassadors help each group get familiar with Wikipedia and editing on-wiki. One ambassador for students the Korean Faculty made a screencast walking new students through the basics — from creating a username to editing in a sandbox and in the article namespace. Especially given the disruptions in classes due to the political situation in Egypt, video screencasts are an important learning tool for students who may not be able to attend in-person workshops. Watch the Arabic screencast here.

New features for course pages released

Several much-requested features have been added to Wikipedia's course page system: instructors and course volunteers can now add batches of students to a course all at once, assign articles to students, and send a message to everyone in the class at once by posting to the course Talk page. You'll also be able to identify students and see which courses they are in whenever you look up their contribution history. To keep up with the latest improvements to course pages, you can sign up for periodic technical updates, delivered straight to your Talk page.