CEE/Newsletter/November 2017/Contents/Armenia report
Armenia report
[edit]InterWiki Women Collaboration
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The idea to have an InterWiki Women Collaboration was born during Wikimania 2017 at 100wikidays Meetup in Montreal. Together with Camelia Boban, Wiki Donne from Italy and Andrea Patricia Kleiman from Wikimedia Argentina we decided to start an international collaboration which will help to fill gender gap. Wikipedians from Armenia, Argentina and Italy will have a continuous collaboration during which the participants will write on women topics according to the lists provided by the organizers or they can write on women by their choice. We welcome new countries to join to the collaboration.
- 15 October – 31 October, 2017
21 active Armenian wikipedians took part in the 1-st round of Interwiki Women Collaboration and during 17 days they translated 47 articles about the most prominent Italian and Argentinian women. Those who were more active and created 5 and more articles got small surprises.
3 in 1
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Wikimedia Armenia organized 3 major simultaneous events: Autumn WikiCamp, Teacher’s WikiWeek and Wiki Loves Science edit-a-thon on October 28 - November 5, 2017.
Organizing a WikiCamp at this time of the year was our first experience which was a success. 8 day long WikiCamp began on the 28th October. 66 participants were chosen out of 153 to attend the Wikicamp based on their active participation in Wikimedia projects. The participants came from different corners of Armenia and Artsakh. During editing hours they have created and improved articles, proofread one of the Armenian encyclopedias, prior free licenced with the efforts of Wikimedia Armenia, and created neologisms in Armenian Wiktionary. As a result, Armenian Wikiprojects were enriched with 4.7 million bytes of information. We have introduced a new component to this WikiCamp, a "translation hour" after the workshop, during which children could address their questions to Russian and English language specialists.
As to the fun part of the Camp, the participants were actively engaged in sports games including table tennis, tug of war, basketball, volleyball, football, chess, etc. Apart from this they have participated in intellectual games like brain ring, time management games and more. As a change we have decided to allocate more time for cultural activities in order to boost cultural development. During these 8 days campers learned Armenian national song and dance, staged musicals and have performed ethnic dances from around the world on the last day of the camp. Children had to contribute to the creation of costumes and stage props which they had fun making and painting!
While children were having fun editing Wikiprojects another part of WMAM team was introducing Wiki editing process in another location to a number of teachers who came from different regions of Armenia. It was our 6th Teachers WikiWeek which took place from October 29 to November 3. The total of 86 teachers have applied online to be part of the seminar and only 28 were chosen among which there were also some experienced Wikipedian teachers. Some of those teachers have become wiki assistants by forming groups and helping the newcomers. Our agenda was packed with lots of editing activities. There were also discussions regarding the usage of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in the school curriculum and education process.
The teachers also used the school textbooks and separated those articles (related to their own field of specialisation) that are missing or are incomplete on the Armenian Wikipedia. This list will be used for other project as a recommendation list for creating and editing articles. Teachers have created and improved more than 75 articles.
WMAM team, inspired after the Teachers WikiWeek was ready to host young scientists and students. It was Wiki Loves Science 2-day editathon ran from 3rd till 5th of November. We had 22 participants. During the two days they have enriched the Armenian Wikipedia with their professional articles. A total of 48 articles have been created during the editathon.