This was part of the opening day of a full week workshop for faculty of the University of Guadalajara focused on growing their practices of open education.
I was part of a delivery team on the UDG Mural project coordinated by the Justice Institute of British Columbia (JIBC).
This topic was framed by pre-event responses of UDG professors that indicated a high level distrust of information from WikiPedia, but also, a minimal familiarity of it’s ecosystem. This this day’s purpose:
A simple question indeed. Why open? We will explore this through exploration and activities with perhaps the most successful open endeavor ever- the Wikimedia global movement, which you may know mostly through Wikipedia. There is much more to it than an encyclopedia.
All materials are found on the project web site https://muraludg.org/topics/open-question/, including:
- Open discussion on the Contestar site in response to the question “What is your perception of Wikipedia as an academic tool?”
- A live video conversation with UBC professor Jon Beasley-Murray about his pioneering WikiPedia project “Murder, Madness and Mayhem”
- A comparison of the audio site Listen to Wikipedia that generates musical tones based on activity in the main English Language WikiPedia with the sounds of activity for the Spanish language one
- Hands on Activity 1 Scanning the Wikipedia Landscape
“In this activity we scan Wikipedia for what is there in the content areas we know, what is not there, and showcase a range of ways you might consider contributing to it.” - Hands on Activity 2 Contributing to Wikimedia Commons
“Editing Wikipedia articles is but one way to participate in its mission of creating shared knowledge. In this activity we learn to contribute media to Wikimedia Commons.”
Additional Resources Provided
- Mozfest 17 Wikipedia Games includes a great set of activities to better understand how Wikipedia works (Anne Marie-Scott, Edinburgh University)
- Everything is Connected (Wikimedia Labs) “is a knowledge game, relying on knowledge about the world in order to be solved. You get some pieces and have to figure out how they fit together. How they are connected. But unlike with a normal puzzle, whether or not two pieces fit together does not depend on the shape of the piece – afterall, all pieces are squares but it depends whether or not there is a known connection between them.” The game is based on information in WikiData
- WikiData Basics (University of Edinburgh)
- Powered by Wikidata, Histropedia (English only) includes over 300,000 historical timelines and an index over 1.5 million events that you can use to build new timelines.
- The Wiki Game
- Wikipedia: The Text Adventure (Text adventure style game by Kevan Davis)
- Wiki Loves Monuments (an annual photography contest held in September aimed at collecting images of important cultural heritage)
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