Education/News/April 2023/Wikipedia at the University of Łódź Information Management Conference
Wikipedia at the University of Łódź Information Management Conference
On April 26, at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Łódź, the "Information Management in Theory and Practice" conference was held, organized by the Department of Information Science. The program included papers on research and practical projects in the field of information management, including an introduction to the guiding principles of Wikipedia.
The topics included: Polish fact-checking projects, preventing disinformation in the light of the "Report a Troll" project, wayfinding analyses, Project-Based Learning, new generations of media users, e-books in the environment of applications and mobile devices, and the functioning and community of Wikipedia in the context of access to verifiable and up-to-date information. The conference was attended by representatives of Wikimedia Polska - Klara Sielicka-Baryłka and Marta Malina Moraczewska, who presented a talk "Improve it! Work on the content of Wikipedia as a starting point for research and collaboration”.
The participants of the conference included students of the University of Lodz, students of two high schools, and remotely also students of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Maria Skłodowska-Curie University in Lublin, and the University of Wrocław.
Since 2022, students of Information Science, as well as Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lodz, have been participating in the "Wiki at the University of Lodz" project, in which, under academic supervision and with the technical assistance of experienced Wikipedians, they develop new Wikipedia entries. The academic supervisors are Dr. Monika Wachowicz, Dr. Zbigniew Gruszka, and Prof. Grażyna Ewa Karpinska. New content already available in the Polish-language Wikipedia concerns ethnology, information management, everyday life, and popular culture. The cooperation between the Faculty of Philology and the Wikimedia Polska Association has been ongoing for 5 years - the first student project, implemented in cooperation with the Goethe Institute, was "European Stories" (2018, under the supervision of Dr. Agata Handley).
We would like to thank Professor Mariola Antczak for inviting Wikimedia to the Conference, and we are happy to be able to introduce the principles and goals of the Wikipedia community to such a large group of young listeners.