2025-08-07 –, MERU (🗣️ ar, es, fr, sw)
Language: English
Often, the Wikimedia environment is associated primarily with Wikipedia. In addition, there are several minor projects that serve as useful open educational resources. When a teacher is looking for inspiration, Wikipedia seems to be the only source. Indeed, there are minor projects such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wikivoyage, which are very effective resources for organizing lessons.
In this talk, we will show how to use these minor projects not only for creating lessons but also for implementing peer-education methodologies. In this lecture, we summarize several didactic experiences, starting with Wikiversity, followed by collaborative writing projects with Wikibooks.
In brief, this lecture will show how minor Wikimedia projects can be useful in the educational environment and discuss some best practices in which these projects have a greater impact than Wikipedia.
In particular, we will start with a description and comparison of the most useful Wikimedia projects in the educational environment as Open Educational Resources (OER), such as Wikiversity, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, and Wikisource (also considering Vikidia, an external project to Wikimedia that aims for the same purpose).
Many teachers do not know the Wikimedia projects very well and think that Wikimedia and Wikipedia are the same, without being aware of other Wikimedia resources.
This lecture summarizes the many edit-a-thons conducted by primary and secondary pupils (with pupils aged 6 to 21) who wrote lessons, books, and improvement articles following their teachers’ projects useful in their municipality and in their research.
In these activities, pupils worked on several platforms: first of all Wikiversity and Vikidia, two environments designed for education; in a second time Wikibooks, which requires more structured projects; other projects involve also Wikivoyage and OpenStreetMap, where pupils improve the maps with data known only by those who live in the area, such as the locations of defibrillators.
Obviously, Wikimedia Commons is present in all these projects. In contrast, Wikidata is primarily used by teachers.
The lecture shows the following projects: “Adopt a chemical symbol” for pupils aged 14, several lessons about electronics and automation written by pupils aged 16, two experiences with foreign pupils aged 14 to 19 (in this context, we have used Vikidia, a Junior Wikipedia for pupils aged 8 to 13, which is very useful for non-native speakers), and four Wikibooks about educational robotics aimed at pupils aged 6 to 19. Some of these projects were partially funded by Wikimedia Italia, including two school projects and one microgrant.
All these projects are part of “seidiciannovesimi”, which refers to the mathematical fraction 6/19 and means “from ages 6 to 19”. It is a STEM and educational robotics project that started in 2016, was abruptly interrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and resumed in the 2022/2023 school year. My pupils work with me on this project, as well as on Wikimedia projects, and they are the true tutors of the younger pupils.
- How does your session relate to the event theme: Wikimania@20: Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
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The lecture is inclusive because it describes how to disseminate the Wikimedia topics, open source software, and hardware, working with pupils of every age. The impact is easy to see in the projects that pupils have made in these years. Indeed, one example is “Adopt a chemical symbol”, where pupils in the first year of secondary school have written an article for each chemical symbol in a language that their peers can understand. Moreover, sustainability is easy to find because for many projects we use recycled (or, at least, reused) materials to show how it is possible to make amazing activities without significant funding.
- Should your session be selected for the program, do you agree to release your session and supporting materials on-wiki and on the eventyay platform under CC BY-SA 4.0?
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I agree
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
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Everyone can participate in this session
- What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
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Events, Collaboration, Edit-a-thons
- How do you plan to deliver this session? You will be asked to confirm this closer to the date in case of changes to the format.
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Dialing in from a remote location
I have been a Wikimedia volunteer for over 20 years. In the last years my work has been around Wikiversity, Wikibooks and (why not?) Vikidia which I am deputy chair. Since three year I am Marche regional coordinator of Wikimedia Italy.
I have taught telecommunication before and now I teach robotics and IT.
When I can (every day) I use Wikimedia as OER in my classes. I ask pupils of mine to write lessons and chapters of cooperative books in peer-education methodology.