Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Wikipedia Education Program encourages female leadership in the wiki movement

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Wikipedia Women in Education
Wikipedia Women in Education around the world
Wikipedia Education Program encourages female leadership in the wiki movement.

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The Wikipedia Education Program is a great example of an effective program that focuses not only on increasing quality content to Wikipedia and the sister projects, but also helps increase gender diversity. It does so by incorporating female leaders in the program, and by targeting female students, who together encourage a variety of voices to be represented on Wikipedia. The program has grown since its beginning in 2010 and expanded to more than 70 countries today.

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A group of female participants in Wikipedia Education Program Uruguay in their last conference.
Photo by Fernando da Rosa, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The idea behind integrating Wikipedia in education was not only to get some more editors to Wikipedia from educational institutions. Since its beginning in 2010 with the Public Policy Initiative in the United States, the Wikipedia Education Program aims to raise the quality of content by editing Wikipedia in an academic setting. Four years later, bearing the same message, the program has grown enormously and expanded to more than 70 countries in the world. It has been successful in attracting female participants who were able to increase gender diversity to unexpected limits, and introduced successful female leadership examples to the Wikimedia movement. One of the important aspects of quality on a worldwide encyclopedia is diversity of editors. A United Nations University survey conducted in 2010 found that less than 10% of Wikipedia editors are female. The Wikipedia Education Program is working hard at changing those dynamics, and ensuring everybody's voice will be represented in the encyclopedia.

The very early courses that introduced Wikipedia as a teaching tool in classrooms were in the United States and Canada. In a few months, the US and Canada program was able to take several steps to increase gender diversity with the Campus Ambassador program and the high female participation between students. The plan worked and the program continued to assign thousands of female students in hundreds of courses until early 2014 when the Wiki Education Foundation started to take care of the US and Canada program which continued its war to raise gender diversity.

One of the active communities that joined the Wikipedia Education Program early was the Arabic Wikipedia community. The program started in the Arab World in Egypt in spring 2012 with a Cairo pilot, with a small number of students in two universities. This pilot edition of the program witnessed a significant female presence. One of the great factors that helped the program in Egypt attract more female students was targeting the program to humanities students, who are often female. Last year nearly 90% of students who joined the program were female alongside with 100% female volunteer leadership for the program in Egypt. The program brought to the community the first active female administrator on Arabic Wikipedia. Besides her role in the Arabic Wikipedia community, Walaa Abdel-Monem is now leading the program in Cairo University. Together with Walaa, May Hachem and Reem AlKashif are leading the program in Ain Shams University in Cairo. The program started with close support from the Wikimedia Foundation, but was able to pass leadership to female leaders who voluntarily run the program supported by WMF just a few years later. The Egyptian program was not the only one in the Arab region exerting efforts to help increase gender diversity. In Jordan too, the program volunteers are doing great work to support female contributors on Wikipedia. In two years, 50-70% of students who joined the program there were female.

Not all the education programs around the world track the percentage of participants coming from each gender. A practice that we encourage every program leader and event organizer to start doing, as it helps raise awareness for this issue.

Wikimedia Argentina looks at the gender diversity from a different perspective. The Argentinian chapter works on collaboration with IIEP Unesco Buenos Aires and the ITC educational research area, on research activities to better understand the educational system in Latin America and the digital gap, especially on Wikipedia. The results of these studies are used to help with educational policy planning and what could be better implemented in education with the current social, political and cultural changes. The research also helps identify the challenges in the educational system and how to replace them with good practices for students, such as editing Wikipedia.

Last month, the Argentinian chapter with their education program held different events to celebrate the WikiWomen history month and the International Women Day. The goal was not merely to celebrate theses events, it was rather to plan and implement effective events and projects to support gender diversity. Educators, leaders and politicians from different regions in Argentina met on breakfast to discuss the results of the recent research on the use of technology and its effect on women and young girls, including their decisions concerning careers after finishing school. The other event held in March was an editathon attended mostly by women of different ages. The participants of these editathons were both experienced users and new ones, so that newbies could learn from the more experienced editors. New events are planned in the same series to be organized soon. Until now, 1,000 new participants have registered to attend the next editathon which made the organizers think of holding it online instead. An online webinar will be held to support the newbies too. Melina Masnatta, the education manager of Wikimedia Argentina was also present at the launch of girls in tech in Argentina. Melina has attended as she is a board member in the movement. She spoke to the event attendees about Wikipedia Education Program's role in empowering women to express their voice by editing Wikipedia.

Wikimedia chapters play a role in empowering female leadership of educational projects too. The four chapters with an employee to work on the education program, have all picked female program managers. Melina Masnatta, Shai Katz, Sara Mortsell and Milica Žarković are the education managers of Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Israel, Wikimedia Sverige, and Wikimedia Serbia respectively. It is great to see that the Chapters mirror the leadership role women have in education in many parts of the world.

In the US, Egypt, Mexico, Jordan, Argentina and many other countries, involving Wikipedia editing in educational curricula helped the Wikimedia movement attract more female editors to join the volunteer efforts to expand the free encyclopedia and its sister projects, where those students found an encouraging space and support that helped them to grow and take bigger leadership roles online and on the ground.

Samir Elsharbaty, Communications Intern, Wikipedia Education Program, Wikimedia Foundation

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Wikipedia Education Program introduces female leadership examples to support the movement online and offline.
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In four years, Wikipedia Education Program has been able to bring to the Wikipedia community efficient examples of female editors who quickly competed on leadership roles to support the movement onwiki and live on the ground. Read this some snippets of their story.

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