[Foundation-l] MENA Education Program?

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 1:39 AM, Barry Newstead <bnewstead at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Hi Katie,
> Just to build on Moushira's response to tackle your questions a bit
> further.
>
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 5:26 AM, aude <aude.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Erik, Sue, Frank, et al,
> >
> > Can you please say more about the plans for a Middle East education
> > program? (yes I have read notes from the recent trip on outreach wiki)
> >
> > What is the timeframe? Who is going to run it? Will you establish a
> > "trust" there? Where will the office be?
> >
>
> We are planning a pilot in Cairo, but have not yet firmed up the details.
> Frank, Annie and Moushira will spend a week in Cairo in December to
> investigate the opportunity further and see when it would make sense to run
> a small pilot.  We are hoping for February, but want to make sure the
> conditions are right for success.
>
> >
> > If the program is to be duplicated, I certainly hope there are not the
> > same issues with quality, as has happened in Pune.  What lessons have
> > you learned and what will you do differently?
> >
>
> We do not plan on duplicating the Pune experience. For one, we want to do a
> much smaller pilot. We also want to dig into questions regarding copyright
> and student writing ability in Arabic before we start the pilot.  Nitika
> has captured a series of lessons on the pilot [1] and we are doing further
> detailed evaluation work to ensure we mine the pilot fully.
>
> >
> > Knowing that there is quite a backlog, last time I checked, with
> > pending changes on Arabic Wikipedia, I am very concerned for the
> > ability of volunteers there to handle a massive influx of new content.
> >
>
> This is a concern we share...and we discussed this with the community
> members in Doha as Moushira mentioned.  No easy solutions here and we'll
> need to innovate.


Forgive me if I've missed something, I don't have time in the day to follow
all the links I'm provided in emails.

Why exactly are we focusing on the Arabic Wikipedia and not localized
dialects and languages?

Relying on a group to tutor as well as maintain a website doesn't work very
well when we branch from an internet forum to an encyclopedia.  The Public
Policy Initiative team did an amazing job in setting up standards for
education programs and has expanded well in North America and the UK and
will continue to grow.  Growth means learning, and I think that we learned
from the India project on the English Wikipedia that international projects
need a bit more time and structure before we dive into creating content.

The west has a nasty habit of considering every Middle East country as just
speaking Arabic with little regard to Semetic languages.  I believe there
is a reason that the Arabic Wikipedia is vastly underused, staffed, and
content: people like writing in their native language.  The Indian project
is a different matter- I'd say the exception to the rule.  I can understand
Egypt and a couple other countries being interested in the Arabic project,
but in my amateur opinion such an undertaking by the WMF's education
program should hold off for a bit until there's a solid community to help.
 We can't use wikis and Wikimedia projects as educational tools without
guidance from a solid community.

Again, just my opinion as someone keenly following the use of Wikimedia for
education.  I hope the best for the MENA project.  Annie, Frank, Moushira,
any others involved I'm more than happy to help if needed.

>


-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan