Wikimedia UK and the Education Program Extension

The Education Program Extension involves User-rights on Wikipedia and other Media-Wiki sites which enables users to manage collaborative projects. While this has been designed for the Wiki Education Program it is being used in a widening range of different contexts.

Meeting our Goals

• Strategic goal G2a.3: Our volunteers, particularly accredited trainers, will gain more experience of running editathons and training in other scenarios which will provide them with increased skills
• Strategic goals G2b.1, G2b.2, & G2b.3:
  • G2b.1: This extension will provide a more effective means resource management when delivering training.
  • G2b.2: This extension will allow us to develop our training programme in an open and transparent fashion
  • G2b.3: This extension offers a tried and tested high quality system to measure the impact of our training activities.
• Strategic goal G4.2: This extension provides an effective toolset which is readily available to support our own training programmes and to enable us to effectively record the impact which they have.
• Strategic goal G5: Adopting this extension in our training activties will mean we are working with other Wikimedia communities and organisations in an open way and hence facilitating shared learning across the entire movement.

Purpose

The purpose behind using the Education Program Extension is that it enables the people running an event, such as an editathon, or a series of such events, to efficiently gather information about what the participants have achieved and so gain a better understanding of the effect of their activities.

Situation in January 2015

Towards the end of 2014 there was a discussion about the use of the extension outside the WEF: Future of education extension userrights

Wikipedians in Residence

• Cochrane Collaboration: Has used it once and would use regularly if it was redesigned to be used for better use with groups that were not classrooms situation with students and instructors. I would like to use it for Wikipedia Editing Clubs or Groups, training sessions for not-for profit organizations or government agencies, mentoring small groups of users from an organizations, and edit-a-thons. So it would be awesome to have the flexiblity to select different types of groups and different names for roles people have from a drop down menu with the option of easily renaming if non were appropriate.

Other chapters

Czech Republic

Wikimedia Czech Republic have successfully used the Education Program Extension for their senior citizen outreach programme:

"By designing a course curriculum with approximately 10-12 hours divided into several weekly lessons, we ensured that our participants had enough time to first understand Wikipedia, then learn to discuss and work in a sandbox — and finally edit and write articles. Inevitably, this was time-consuming for the instructor (and program leader) but it led to superior results." Vojtěch Dostál]

See also Training senior citizens, one of the Learning patterns on Meta

Pros and Cons

Pros

"The female contributors to Wikipedia do like two things: having in person meetings to socialize with other editors, and second they need more social software. The education extension is a primitive form of what is needed. We need an extension where users easily can form groups (namespace Groups: or something, used by an extension), where they easily can see the recent changes of edits of group members only, to be able to actively interact with other group members and having a long term participation in Wikipedia. Having software where users, interest groups or a group of editors from an external organisation can work together." Romaine, Tue Feb 3, Wikimedia-l list