Welcome to the Wikipedia Education Update — a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation that is distributed the first and third Tuesday of each month. Someone from our staff has talked with you about our Wikipedia Education Program to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms around the world, and we wanted to keep you in the loop on all of our exciting activities. If you would prefer not to receive these messages, simply reply to the email and ask for your address to be removed. Learn more about subscribing or read the archives.

Beta testers for new MediaWiki extension needed
The Wikipedia Education Program needs your help in testing a new MediaWiki extension that will replace the current course page and Ambassadors system! Beginning in fall 2012, professors, Ambassadors, and students will associate themselves with courses through a MediaWiki database, meaning it will be much easier to create course pages and generate dynamic lists of courses. The new extension will help us all be more transparent about the work being done in the Education Program. We're looking for a handful of professors and Ambassadors who are willing to create fake course pages to make sure the system works smoothly before we deploy it on the English Wikipedia. Learn more about how to join the beta test group today.

Czech Republic students edit articles for class
Thirty students at Charles University in Prague edited the Czech Wikipedia for class last term through an education program led by volunteers from the Czech WikiProject Protected Areas. Wikipedians served as Ambassadors for the class, helping students learn how to contribute to Wikipedia. Students took photographs and wrote articles about protected areas in the Czech Republic, then presented their articles to the class. User:Chmee2, one of the Ambassadors leading the project, wrote about their experiences on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Read the post.

Classes start editing in Cairo Pilot
Students at Ain Shams University and Cairo University have begun to edit the Arabic Wikipedia for class as part of the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program. Mathematics students are going to be writing articles on famous mathematicians, while French students will be translating articles from the French Wikipedia to the English Wikipedia. Want to find out what the first article the students chose to translate was? Read this blog post about the program.

Welcome, Faris El-Gwely!
Faris has joined the Wikipedia Education Program team half-time as the Education Program Coordinator, Cairo. In this position, Faris will help coordinate and monitor on-the-ground and on-wiki activities in the Cairo Pilot. A long-term Arabic Wikipedian, Faris lives in Sadat City near Cairo. He graduated in 2011 from Menoufia University where his specialty was Engineer of Survey and Maps, although he now approaches geography as a hobby rather than as a professional pursuit. Faris is very happy about his position as the Education Program Coordinator, Cairo, and sees it as a continuation of his involvement in the Wikimedia movement. Leave Faris a welcome message on his user page.