Hello,

Is there a specific reason why your students are supposed to translate
from the native language to English, and not the other way round?
Writing for English Wikipedia is very difficult even to English
speaking students. If the text quality of the contributions is (too)
low, you might receive hostile reactions from English Wikipedians.
Also, it is important not to regard Wikipedia as a place where to
"dump" loads of texts. A text must be curated afterwards. At least for
a couple of days, the students should be online and accept feedback in
order to improve the texts. This time must be planned in your
schedule. Again, if Wikipedians get the impression that "their
Wikipedia" is "abused" as a "data dump place", leaving the work to
improve and wikify the texts to them, the Wikipedia volunteers, it is
possible that the reactions are hostile and that "articles" will be
deleted.
I hope this does not sound too pessimistic. :-) Also, I would advise
to consider to let students something else do that "writing an
article". I think that that is something a beginner should not start
with.

Happy to hear about your proceedings, on this list.

If someone is interested, I could report about experiences with regard
to German students translating from English.

Kind regards
Ziko

2015-05-21 18:10 GMT+02:00 Leigh Thelmadatter <osamadre@hotmail.com>:
> Ive worked for some time here in Mexico with Wikipedia, doing everything
> from writing articles in English, to translation, to photography and
> subtitling projects in Commons.
>
> I very much do recommend you contact the Czech education people, who are a
> great bunch and can give you invaluable hands-on support.
>
> In my experience, I have found having students write new text in their
> non-native language to be extremely challenging, and you have to be sure
> that students are up for it.  Translation gives the basic structure (a +)
> but it also has problems with L1 interference in L2. (and vice versa but
> particularly problematic for L1--> L2)
>
> If you are not sure if students are up for this (or you have the time), I
> have a couple of suggestions for experimenting...
>
> 1) Have students review articles in English on Czech topics for inaccuracies
> and/or out-of-date information and/or missing details or citations. The
> Visual Editor tool has made article improvement a bit easier, especially the
> addition of references.
>
> 2) Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) has videos in English that need
> subtitles. One teacher at my school Karen Mazanec, had students create
> English subtitles for English video as intensive listening practice.
> https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/April_2015/New_to_Wikipedia:_A_personal_perspective
>
>
> Interesting to to get your mail today as I had a meeting where they are
> talking more about modualizing (not a word, I know)  courses. If you could
> send me a link about your course at Masaryk, I would appreciate it greatly.
>
> Leigh
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: dnk@mail.muni.cz
> Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 17:40:12 +0200
> To: education@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] confirm
> 69ccb875820d9c89580605f70c3db83e8a426db7
>
>
> Hello,
>
> I am a teaching assistant in ONLINE_A, e-learning English course at Masaryk
> University, Czech Republic. This course is structured around students
> completing various English practice tasks and in that way gaining points
> towards credit. I came up with the idea to make writing a Wikipedia article
> one of those tasks. The course is relatively large, but since this is going
> to be one of the more difficult tasks available and only the more advanced
> students can actually do it, I assume there would be only about 6 to 12
> students every semester doing this task. I would not be able to coach more
> of them anyways. The students are unlikely to have previous editor
> experience on WIkipedia. To accommodate for that, I plan to have them
> translate an article from Czech to English Wikipedia and instruct them to
> refer to an existing similar article on English Wikipedia to get a feel for
> what they need to create.
>
> Example: Translate https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Tu%C4%8Dn%C3%BD as
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Tu%C4%8Dn%C3%BD referring to
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Rogers as a source of inspiration.
>
> I am looking for an existing Wikimedia Education initiative under which this
> initiative of my could be put into practice. I found "Studenti píší
> Wikipedii" at
> https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Countries/Czech_Republic. Is
> it the correct bunch of people to turn to, given that I target WIkipedia in
> English, not the Czech one?
>
>
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>
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