Wikimedia Taiwan collaborated with National Cheng-Chi University to improve the Chinese Wikipedia’s coverage of ethnology. Photo by Lord Koxinga, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Students in Taiwan are making the Chinese Wikipedia more ethnologically diverse though a collaborative program with Wikimedia Taiwan, an affiliate organization of the Wikimedia movement, and National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei.
Professor Ji-ping Huang of NCCU has worked with this program since February. For her course “Global Ethnography”, she created a list of topics related to ethnic minorities that either did not have an article in the Chinese Wikipedia or had a very short article. Her students were assigned to work on one each, choosing their assignment by drawing lots.
The students learned how to edit through a lecture by Tze-wen Wang, the secretariat of Wikimedia Taiwan, at the beginning of the course. Students edited the ethnological content on their own sandboxes and had oral presentations to outline their articles and share their progress. Students were allowed to use translated information from the English Wikipedia but had to improve it to meet academic standards.
The course ended on June 23, and the final results—after many revisions—came just last month. About 40 articles were judged as good enough to become proper articles on the Chinese Wikipedia; leaving out students who dropped the course, only two failed to attain this hurdle.
In short, readers of the Chinese Wikipedia now have 40 new articles on ethnic minorities to learn from, ranging from the Flemish (en), Mongo (en), and Bemba (en) peoples.
You can read more about this project.
Reke Wang, Wikimedia Taiwan
Liang-chih Shang Kuan, Wikimedia Taiwan
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