@masterraalkivictorieux Master Ra’al Ki Victorieux
Leigh Thelmadatter discusses her impactful work with students in translating Wikipedia articles and documenting artists. 🌍✨ Curious about how you can contribute to such initiatives? #WikiAmbassador #Education #Volunteering
We present the transcription of a video interview I conducted in 2012, featuring Leigh Thelmadatter, a Wiki-Ambassador in Mexico. In this interview, Thelmadatter shares insights into her volunteer work with students, who engage in translating and writing Wikipedia articles in both English and Spanish, as well as her initiatives involving documentation of artists associated with the “Salón de la Plástica Mexicana.” This work is part of the digitalization of the Atma Unum arcave.
Interview with Thelmadatter, Wiki-Ambassador in México
Victorieux: So here we are with Leight Thelmadatter. She is the ambassador of Wikimedia in Mexico. Thank you Leight. Could you explain us what’s a regional ambassador for Wikimedia?
Thelmadatter: Okay, the regional ambassador is part of the Wiki Education Program. The Wikipedia Education Program is an outreach effort by the Wikimedia Foundation, that’s the organization behind Wikipedia, to
involve educational institutions, mostly universities, to participate in the improvement of Wikipedia. One major reason why we want and need the participation of educational institutions is that, for example, most people understand pop culture topics and are able to write about it. So we have lots of articles about Pokemon and video games and movies. But it’s much harder to write about topics that are more intellectual, for example, particle physics or Mexican art, or the language of Swahili.
So we need to find people that have the specialized knowledge who can help with working with Wikipedia. Because working with Wikipedia isn’t adapted for professors who need to publish and get original credit for original work, Wikipedia does not do that. It’s an encyclopedia and
you don’t get obvious credit.
The idea came up in 2006 or 2007 to involve students in these fields. So psychology students have been writing articles on psychology. Medical students have been writing articles on medicine. And here at Tech de Monterey, we have students that have been writing about various topics in various capacities. For example, the first project was done at Campus Toluca in 2007 with me. We actually based an entire class on working with Wikipedia. This was for an advanced English class. And the idea was to have students write articles in English about Mexico because most of the articles about Mexico in English are not very good
because that’s sometimes the only information about the topic. For example, a municipality in Oaxaca is only available in Spanish and most people who edit English Wikipedia cannot read Spanish. So the idea was to use students’ knowledge of their hometown to write about them in English.
The project went pretty well. The content that was created was okay. There were some problems. The interesting thing about the project though is that even though these students hadn’t done a TOEFL practice, that’s a standard test for English ability, they hadn’t done any practice for TOEFL for the entire semester, the average student raised their TOEFL score by about 30 to 40 points. Why? Because they were thinking in the language. These are advanced students that need to do that. Here at Campus Ciudad de Mexico, we started out doing something similar. I had four students that actually came to me and asked me to, they needed something more challenging than the typical advanced English class. So I said, well, if you want to do project work, I can set that up for you. We set it up with the department. And these four students, we started out doing translation work. We started doing the writing of articles in both English and Spanish. One of the things I learned from my first experience was to set up projects, to have them say, “-okay, write about whatever you want.” It didn’t work out very well.
They wanted more direction.
I had come up with the idea of writing articles about the Festival Internacional Cervantino last year. And we got a list of all the artists that were participating last year. And we started working on their articles, as well as the article on the festival. And not only were
we working on their articles, we were contacting the artists to ask them to donate photographs for their Wikipedia article, which was great for my students because this is a very authentic use of English. They were contacting, we successfully contacted artists in Canada, United States, England, and Israel that we actually got donations of photos for, successfully, with the interaction online.
That’s great.
Yeah, it worked out very nicely. The last two semesters, the past semester and this semester, we have started a program now with the International Baccalaureate Program. This is a high school program that’s very demanding with very smart, bright kids, yes?, -Say yes. (She talks to her students), who need to do a type of community service called CAS, which is Community Action and Service, 80 hours. And one of the options we decided to do was to give them the option to work with Wikipedia. And our project, our main project for the semester, is to work with the Salon de la Plástica Mexicana to document their 400 members, many of whom have absolutely nothing in Wikipedia, in either English or Spanish, as well as to work with the artists to get their images and better information about them.
400, that’s a lot of work.
That’s a lot of work. We won’t get it all done in one semester.
Okay, I wish you the best luck. Everybody can read Wikimedia, it’s a free service. I understand you, you’re working with the Creative Commons figure.
So the Creative Commons has more to do with the images. The idea, one of the main, well, there’s two main things that the Salon is working on with us. Number one is to provide us with information on many of the artists, because many of the artists don’t have websites, and many, much of the information about them isn’t online, either on the internet or in the electronic databases that we have access to.
The idea is to contact the artists, and since most artists keep the scrapbooks of their articles written about themselves, we want to use that as our references. For example, newspaper articles and things like that that we can’t find online, but they do exist. We can use that in Wikipedia as long as we cite it.
The second thing that they’re helping us with is to contact the artists, which are alive, homely, and then those foundations for those who have passed on, to try to get at least photographs of the artists. The tricky part about that is that photographs in Wikipedia must be under a free license. Creative Commons is one type of free license, meaning that these photographs can be not only used by Wikipedia, but anybody in the world.
That’s a harder sell for artists, obviously, because the idea, especially for their artwork. The idea of, “-well, anyone can use my artwork, well, then I lost it.” Well, that’s not exactly the case. What we recommend is a fairly restrictive free license that requires attribution. Anybody who uses it can’t claim ownership of it, and we also tell them to put it into what we call
a low resolution, about 400 pixels wide is sufficient. That’s good for most uses in Wikipedia and for diffusion purposes, but it’s not good for a lot of major commercial uses, for example, to making a poster or t-shirts or things like that. So even the commercial uses that it would allow is good for the artist, because then more people are going to see what their work looks like.
Yes, that’s great. This is the second time you work with a special database, first one, or TSM (Service Manager wiki), I understand, first was about Mexican towns or cities, second was the Cervantino Festival, and now this is the artist from the Salón de la Plástica. Is it?
It’s something along those lines, yes. The towns and cities was a fairly easy one. This was back in 2007 when there was almost nothing on towns and cities in Mexico in English Wikipedia. So many of my students in the Estado de Mexico weren’t from Toluca proper, so they were doing their little towns outside in the Estado de Mexico.
How are you going to work with them? What do you need them to do in order to facilitate your work with the documentation process?
Well, we’re doing a couple of things. The first one is we’re going to have what’s called an edit-a-thon, marathon and edit, the idea being that we’re going to have a group of students and other Wikipedians, people who are enthusiasts for Wikipedia, come to the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana to at least begin articles, hopefully with the artists in attendance, also to visit as many of the artists as possible and to help them put them together. For example, this weekend I will be at the home of Helen Bickman to help her go through her boxes. She has lots of boxes of articles and to pick out. “-Okay, these are the type of articles that will help us to put your Wikipedia article together.” And if we have to go to every single one of these artists individually, that’s fine too because that’s also a very good experience for both me and for the students. -You want to go visit an artist? (She asks her students)
-Sure! (answers one of the young students).
So for all the people who are enthusiastic about working with Wikimedia, which one could be one of the attractions of doing this documentational and encyclopedic work?
The main attraction for me and for many of the students that do join the project is that Wikipedia is not just the encyclopedia you see in your computer. There is a huge network of museums, governments, educational institutions, this includes the Smithsonian, this includes the British Museum, this includes the National Archives of Germany, the United States, and Australia, and many more who work with Wikipedia now to improve its content. That means that people who get involved in this, like myself, have contact with people all over the world.
For example, in last July, we had Wikimania, that’s our annual conference, which I spoke at about our project here at Tech of Monterey. That had 1400 people from 87 different countries, so over about a week’s time, I don’t know how many people I met, but it was a lot of them. I also occasionally get a chance to travel. They pay for me to go to Wikimania in Washington, D.C., but I’m leaving next month. I’m going to England to talk about our project at the University of Leicester, and I just got a grant to go and speak to the Conference of Museums for New Mexico in November. So there’s lots of opportunities, not just for teachers, but also for students to travel because there are many different types of collaborative efforts and activities that do require a little bit of travel, and yes, they actually have a little bit of money to allow people to go.
That’s great, congratulations.
Thank you.
Yes, it’s very interesting. All these international relations give more sense to the work of regional ambassador or international ambassador to Wikimedia.
For Students, international baccalaureate, they have extremely good English. They have an international perspective because this program is international. It’s the same whether you’re in Mexico, the United States, Germany, India, or wherever, and also these students are taught to think globally. So this is a perfect type of project for them because it allows them to take a lot of what they’re learning in class and apply it.
That’s great. I’m talking about education projects. You also published some days ago on your Facebook, your email, so if people are interested about receiving some educational bulletins, they can write to you so you can add them to your list.
I’m very easy to Google. If you can spell my last name, which I think should be spelled, you can find me. Yes, I’m in Google under Leigh Thelmadatter. I’m in Twitter under Thelmadatter. My email is Thelmadatter at hotmail.com. There’s a pattern here going. If you can spell Thelmadatter, you can find me.
That’s great. And so you can ask the people who write to your email for an educational bulletin. What are the opportunities for educational projects?
We just started an online wiki bulletin. This is for all of the projects that are going on all over the world to allow to easily share with each other the different innovations that they’re doing. For example, we were the first ones to start working with translations in the classroom. We didn’t have a newsletter quite yet, but eventually Egypt found out what we were doing, and said, hey, that’s a great idea, and do it. Well, we decided, well, we really need an easier way to share these ideas. So we started a bulletin. I’m one of the editors. And this month has quite a few. And we talk about the IV program here, but there’s also an article on an interesting project in Germany called Silveredition, which means silver knowledge. It’s actually in Germany, people who are a third age. That’s not how we say it in English, but I’ll say it anyway. A third age can have educational opportunities. So Wikipedia thought, wait, “-why don’t we take advantage of these older people who have more time and lots of knowledge and have them write for Wikipedia?”
Yes. Wonderful. They are not only entertained, but learning and sharing that knowledge.
Exactly. And if you have a background knowledge in the topic you’re writing about, it helps immensely.
Wonderful. So also, people with that kind of range in Mexico could help in the community?
Of course. We have been focusing mostly on universities. Texas is the first to get systematically involved. However, UNAM and UAM, Izpapalapa, also have student groups that work with it. However, anyone with any project that is interested in working with it, just contact me. Give me your ideas. And the nice thing about Wikipedia is you don’t have to ask permission. You got a great idea. Their answer is, go try it.
That’s wonderful. I like that. Well, Leight, thanks for the interview.
All right.
Wish you the best. Have a lot of success. And we’ll be in touch.
All right. Thank you.
Ciao.
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