Learning patterns/How to improve the knowledge of your local culture in other Wikipedias

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How to improve the knowledge of your local culture in other Wikipedias

problemWikipedia face the challenge of including articles that refer as much cultures as possible, properly.

solutionEditing contests in Wikipedia to improve the edition of your culture in other languages as a way to spread you local culture.

creator• Anna Torres (WMAR)

created on--Anna Torres (WMAR) (talk) 17:27, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

What problem does this solve?

Wikipedia currently exists in more than 280 different languages. While the English Wikipedia is the largest in content, each Wikipedia contains different topics according to their contexts .
It is not about the importance of the topics, rather it happens because there are some subjects that are unknown among different Wikipedias, mainly local culture topics. Through concrete proposals of editing articles regarding any local culture of any country or a region we can not only put in value our culture but to improve the content of other Wikipedias.

What is the solution?

Organize editing contests in other Wikipedias to improve the reach of your local culture as well as the content in Wikipedia.

Step by step of organizing a new editing contest

Wikimedia Argentina along with the Iberocoop network launched in June 2016, the fist editing contest in the English Wikipedia to improve other Wikipedias with new articles of our local culture. 11 countries from Ibero-America participated by proposing a maximum of 10 articles to translate into other languages. The main objetive was to encourage editors to translate key articles from our culture to other Wikipedias. The process of organizing this new contest was done as follows:

1. Engage the partner you might need. In our case, Wikimedia Argentina felt that would be interesting to launch the proposal along with our Iberocoop partners.
2. Choose the articles you want the editors to translate. In our case, we wanted to spread and put in value our local culture.
   

Choose those articles that can be translated into as many languages as possible, always starting from your reference in English.

1. You can work through a closed list of articles or through an open list allowing editors to propose new articles.
2. Approach the new audience of your contest. To do it you can use a banner in Wikipedia, position the proposal in the community portal of different Wikipedias or invite editors in each of the Wikipedias.
3. The list of articles can be defined taking into account the gender perspective. The proposal of Wikimedia Argentina, was 50% articles of women.
4. Make sure you share with the participants how you are going to score.
5. Make sure you share the prizes with the participants.
6. Once is over, organize a local or international jury to submit the results on the following weeks after the ending.

Thanks to this contest, 425 new articles where created in 27 different languages during the contest (1 month)

Things to consider

You can find the page of Translating Ibero-America's contest here

When to use

When you want to improve Wikipedia's content with articles coming from your local culture.
When you want to reach new audiences in Wikipedia

See also

• Wiki Education Foundation guide to finding and Writing about Women's Studies topics