2019:Poster session/Challenges of growing communities : Make Wikipedia trustworthy to the educators
 | This is an Accepted submission for the Poster space at Wikimania 2019. |
Description
Bangla Wikipedia started its journey in 2006. Since then, we have 951 active Wikipedians[1] who are dedicated to enriching the content in Bangla to reach the educators and students. Bangla Wikipedia is ranked 127th by speakers per article which is 3063 [2]; again the contents of these articles are still not good enough to satisfy the educators. With a small survey and few in-depth interviews, we wanted to grab the opinion of teachers and students about Bangla Wikipedia regarding education purpose. The objective of the study is to find out “in what extent the educators are using Bangla Wikipedia and if it is trustworthy to educators”. The result showed, some of them did not know about Bangla Wikipedia, some said they follow English Wikipedia as the content is not good enough in Bangla; again, most of the teacher did not use Bangla Wikipedia as education material as they found limited/wrong information and hence felt not trustworthy.
Clearly the study findings are giving us another picture to think deeper and show some challenges of uses of Wikipedia in education; we will also have a way forward discussion with the audience. So that, we are sure the study findings and way forwards discussion will be guiding the communities who are having same challenges.
The strategy makers and contributors of growing Wikipedia communities are the intended audience for our poster presentation. We hope the policy makers will see the challenges of growing communities to make Wikipedia reliable to educators.
The survey questionnaire is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfWZRdqGI5WsOnAB4j2O2iGUXb-4YES90rwwfF9j6e3S9_kZg/viewform
Author(s)
- Ibrahim Husain Meraj, Bangla Wikipedia
- Afifa Afrin, Wikimedia Bangladesh