Education/News/June 2022/Wikiclubs in Albania

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Wikiclubs in Albania

Author: Vyolltsa
Summary: At the beginning of the academic school year 2021-2022, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group created 3 wikiclubs with different schools in Elbasan, Albania.
Social Media channels or hashtags: Telegram channel, Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube Channel.

At the beginning of the academic school year 2021-2022, WoALUG created 3 wiki clubs with different schools in Elbasan, Albania. At first, several school representatives reached out to Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group to have us teach and train their students how to write, improve and translate articles since all the students use the Wikipedia articles for their school assignments.

Each school allowed us to set up a Wikiclub. We started with a general presentation on why it is important to contribute to Wikipedia and what benefits they get from it.

In addition, all the students and teachers utilized the Wikipedia projects to promote the use of Wikipedia within the school setting. In the meantime, they learned: about writing and editing articles, plagiarism, citation, and other Wikimedia projects.

Vasil Kamami Wikiclub

Soon after we celebrated Wikipedia's birthday with the Vasil Kamami High School on October 14, 2021, we followed up with an online Zoom meeting to train them on the basics of editing articles on Wikipedia. Students and the biology teacher, Marsela Allushi, worked on the biology and zoo animal articles. Here are the statistics from their work.

Mahmud and Ali Cungu Wikiclub

The Mahmud and Ali Cungu Wikiclub is the second one we set up with this Foreign Language High School in Elbasan, Albania. Students from this wikiclub faced some challenges where they lacked computers at school and at home. They managed to work on articles mostly on their smartphones, but we managed to have our edit-a-thons on an internet cafe and translated and improved articles from the CEE Spring Campaign that was being run in the meantime. Here are the statistics from their work.

Arianiti Non-Public School Wikiclub

As a result of Arianiti Non-Public school students' participation in our events, students wanted to continue working on contributing to Wikipedia. Therefore, we proposed that the school principal and teachers have another wiki club with the school. Since then, we tried to have a couple of meetings with them and catch up with time before the end of the academic school year 2022. See here their contributions to Wikipedia so far.