MonthlyReport-May2021
May was the last month of the courses in most universities in Turkey, therefore in this month, our team was very busy with the Wikipedia Education Program. We met with students of Library Education Department and Department of Communication in two universities of İstanbul, students of Veterinary Medicine in Ankara, students of a Volunteer Studies course in İzmir. Also we met with those scholarship students of T3 Foundation who have been contributing to Wikipedia during the year as a part of their scholarship program and discussed their experience. We worked hard to assist 150 first year students at Kadir Has University taking a Critical Reading and Writing course for completing their Wikipedia assignments!
May 2021
Except from meeting with students in several universities, one of the most exciting meeting we had was meeting with teachers from different disciplines and different cities of Turkey during "Encounters talk where we were invited by Öğretmen Ağı (Teachers' Network) initiative. We are very happy to find an opportunity to introduce Wikipedia and discuss possible in-class activities teachers from different disciplines could use wikipedia and other wikimedia projects.
In addition, we continued our series of Webinars with Kocaeli volunteers; and had steps taken to initiate similar projects in other cities, namely Niğde and Ankara. We are excited to continue activities with NGOs and local governments in those cities. Lastly, we had an edit-a-thon organized in the framework of the "Elimination of Digital Violence" project of UNFPA Turkey. We are happy to support projects of local UN agencies while reintroducing Wikipedia to Turkey.
Wikipedia Education Program
May 7: Meeting with the head of the Library Education Department at Medeniyet University, İstanbul. We talked about the details of the webinar planned for the students of the department.
May 9 : Webinar for the students of Faculty of Veterinay Medicine of Ankara University. The webinar was made with participation of Turkish Wikipedia volunteers who are contributing mainly to the articles on Veterinary Medicine; and we discussed how the students could contribute to developing those articles.
May 18: We met with volunteer students of T3 Foundation and made a presentation about Wikipedia editing. The students have already started contributing to Wikipedia in 2021 mainly on medicine, artificial intelligence, and aerospace technologies. We discussed their contributions and the difficulties they had. We particularly talked about the principle of "Wikipedia is not a national encyclopedia", how to use Content translation tool properly, categorizing, and writing the lead section. Here is the page about contributions of that student group : Contributions
May 20: We met with the students of İzmir Economy University who are taking Volunteer Studies course (IUE 310). This education program was organized in partnership with fact-checking organisation Teyit.org. Half of the students taking the course are assigned to check the facts they came across on the internet about gender issues whereas the other half are assigned to check facts on the climate crisis, environmental issues and animal's right. The second part of their assignment is contributing to Turkish wikipedia by writing about those subjects and adding checked-facts. The course serve introducing students the concept of voluntarism and we are happy that through their contributions to Wikipedia, students experience digital voluntarism.
May 24: We introduced Wikipedia to students taking Social History of Printing Techniques course (COMM 144) at Galatasaray University. In the course where students try to establish the relationship between technological changes in the field of printing and social life and to question the changes experienced, we presented Wikipedia. The participants were informed about the principles of Wikipedia, the process of contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, talk pages, and reviewing the history of an article.
May 26: We held a webinar at Library Education Department at Medeniyet University. The students were excited about seeing how different databases are connected with each other through ISBN. They are mostly interested in creating biography articles about librarians. They asked questions about adding references and interlinking.
Partnerships
May 1: The fourth webinar organized in cooperation with Kocaeli Municipality for volunteers from Kocaeli. The focus was on uploading media to Commons, categorizing and licensing.
May 2: We held an online introductory meeting and webinar with Nigde city government and invited members of local press organisations. We made a presentation about how knowledge on Nigde could be more visible on wiki projects and how local volunteers could contribute.
May 2: We had 3 hours session with volunteers to introduce Wikipedia editing and curate information to develop Digital violence articles on Turkish Wikipedia by writing about the types and ways to eliminate digital violence. The event was organized in collaboration with Common Knowledge and Communication Association (CKCA) under the framework of Elimination of Digital Violence project with the support of UNFPA.
May 6: The fifth webinar organized in cooperation with Kocaeli Municipality for volunteers from Kocaeli. The participants were mostly photographers. As the fourth one, the focus was on uploading media to Commons and then placing them on Wikipedia.
May 28:We met with teachers from different disciplines and different cities of Turkey such as Denizli, Kütahya, Ankara, Kocaeli at "Encounters Talk of Öğretmen Ağı (Teachers' Network) initiative. We talked about what kind of in-class activities could be made using wikipedia and other wikimedia projects; and discussed how those projects could be useful in teaching critical reading, digital skills, open knowledge culture, digital voluntarism.
May 29:We met with new volunteers from Ankara at "No wikipedia without Ankara" webinar. The participants were representatives of different committees of Ankara City Council. They were particularly interested in contributing about folklore, endemic species, Ankara's art institutions, and art history.
Community meetings
In May we had two online meetings with community members. We discussed the completed edit-a-thons and coming projects in the next month. In the first meeting there were volunteers who were beginners at editing and interested in contributing to Wikipedia on cryptology, mythology, Urdu history subjects. Upon the request of newcomers, we had a training meeting on 15th to answer their questions on editing. We also had a photo uploading to Commons session with participatns of Kocaeli webinar on May 7th. Please find the meeting notes below (in Turkish).
