Education/News/October 2023/3 Generations at Wikipedia Education Program in Türkiye
3 Generations at Wikipedia Education Program in Türkiye
There were three panelists from different age groups meet at the stage on the main hall of the conference venue on the last day of the Turkic Wikimedia Conference held in Istanbul. The panelists were Dr. Korhan Erturaç, a quaternary geologist at Gebze University; Mr. (Msc) Cem Oğuz Büke, a former graduate student of Dr. Erturaç who is now a PhD candidate and also working as a geography teacher at Darüşşafaka School, Istanbul and Muhammet Ali Yusufoğlu, a student of Mr. Büke at Darüşşafaka School. Each panelist told their interwoven stories about how they started to edit Wikipedia, shared their thoughts on Wikipedia assignments and use of Wikipedia at education based on their own experience
Dr. Erturaç told that when he was a young academician who had 21 hours teaching assignment a week and due to the metric system of the university had to give and evaluate tons of students assignments;. The process was brutal. A complete waste of time and resources (ink and paper) for identical type of assignments which looked perfectly in terms of their format but empty in terms of content. Then he searched for a way of making student assignment a more meaningful exercise for both students and the instructors; and came up with the idea of asking students to create articles for Turkish Wikipedia.
He told us that most articles created by students were deleted shortly and students had to face the fact that the quality of their writing was poor. Those students who created articles that could stand on Wikipedia without getting deleted during a week were able to pass the class! Dr. Erturaç gave Wikipedia assignments many times after that first experience; some years ago he was contacted by the members of the Wikimedia User group in Türkiye and started to invite experienced wikipedians in his class to teach students how to edit Wikipedia. Now, he proudly told us how Turkish wikipedia articles on physical geography were improved by his students each year. Keeping track was not possible but he estimates that over 200 new Wikipedia pages were introduced during this process.
Cem Oğuz Büke was one of his students. He remembers he first created the Kırgıbayır (Badlands) article at Turkish Wikipedia. He says that from time to time he visits the article to see the contributions to the page. Looking at the first articles he created takes him to his university years. He says he had made tons of assignments when he was a student but he doesn't remember any of them except the Wikipedia assignment. Now he teaches at a high school and he wanted to give an assignment that would excite his students. Therefore, he asked them to contribute Wikipedia articles about some geography topics.
As did happen years ago when he was a student, a wikipedian (actually, the same wikipedian: User:Zafer) reached out to students asking if they were graduate students and who their instructor was. Students did not answer the message coming from a stranger but told their teacher that someone sent them a message. Mr. Büke said that "my students were very proud that someone read their work and thought those articles were created by a university student!" Some of those articles were deleted because they were not meeting draft article criteria. But Mr. Büke is glad that students experienced this, and learned that they can not write everything in any way they wished on every platform as they do on social media. He told us that later, he invited wikipedians to the school and made 4 workshops. The students showed an unexpected interest in the workshops.
Muhammet Ali is one of the students of Cem Büke. He had previous experience of editing a Wikipedia article; therefore he helped his class-mates in this assignment. He says when his friends learned that he has already been contributing to Wikipedia, they found it very cool. He finds his teacher very innovative for giving such assignment. He is in favor of using ai more as an assistant for the readers and editors. He finds many articles too long to read for his age group, he would like to be able to summarize them with the help of ai by pushing a button at WP. As an editor, he also would like to create a draft article and then he would like to work on it to fix errors or improve.