Thursday, June 29, 2017

#Wikimedia - Funding #Wikieducation is problematic

How can you not love WikiEducation.. It has a great reputation bringing the editing of Wikipedia to curricula. When you check out their Twitter account, their blog, their results they do an awesome job.

You can once you realise it is instrumental in maintaining the existing bias that favours English and English Wikipedia. Realistically you cannot even blame them for it because they define their operations as limited to the USA and Canada.

Still there are problems.
* People assume that the example of using university students to write articles is to be followed. For most of the Wikipedias there is too little content. The type of articles is not what is needed, more basic articles are needed.
* The Wikimedia Foundation has a huge bias for the English Wikipedia and consequently the 70% of the word population who do not speak English are underserved and less than 50% of the traffic of the WMF is English Wikipedia.

The solution is not to defund Wiki Education. A solution will only come once the WMF acknowledges that they have a diversity problem, a problem they do not acknowledge.
Thanks,
      GerardM

PS Does Wiki Education support French?

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