Wikipedia Primary School

Wikipedia Primary School: Providing on Wikipedia the information necessary to complete the cycle of primary education in the languages used by the different education systems is a project allowing students, families and teachers to find on Wikipedia the documentation necessary to obtain the primary school qualification in their country, in their language.

Wikipedia is meant to be an educational tool and it is currently available online, via mobile phones and offline. Experiences have shown that, once accessible, Wikipedia does not provide information that responds directly to curriculum-based questions. The project relies on Wikipedia as an existing and growing resource, it solves the need for an encyclopaedia capable of responding to curriculum-based questions, and it fosters Wikipedia content, quality and outreach.

The project aims at:

1. Bridging Wikipedia and primary education. This objective implies moving the Wikipedia community towards a focus on primary education, and at the same time strengthening the capacity of the education ecosystem to contribute to Wikipedia, and in general to open collaborative knowledge.
2. Enriching Wikipedia with new content relevant to primary education. This objective implies an assessment of the articles produced.
3. Fostering the development of translations and new content in different Wikipedia linguistic editions. This objective implies the release of existing educational resources (OER in cc by or cc by-sa), the production of datasets and the involvement of the Wikimedia movement.
4. Verifying and evaluating the use of Wikipedia as a source of information for primary education. This objective implies the involvement of stakeholders and data analysis.

Wikipedia Primary School contributes to universal primary education and to the Millennium Development Goals (MDG2: Achieve Universal Primary Education). Even if it is scalable and international, the project is conceived primarily to address African countries and languages.

• Wikipedia Scientific Journal
• WikiAfrica Primary School Feasibility Study, 2012. Developed within the frame of WikiAfrica.
• Wikipedia Primary School SSAJRP programme, 2014-2017.

• Menichinelli, Massimo, Giovanni Profeta, Serena Cangiano. Visualising open communities. Guidelines from three case studies, Communicating Complexity 2017 International design conference, 2017.