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Wikipedia:Offline Internet Resources for Latin America/Dominican Republic

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This is the project page page for a January - April 2017 Wikipedia outreach project. A team of 4 graduate students in public health from Columbia University propose to partner with physicians at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to provide health information on Wikipedia to clinics in the Dominican Republic (DR) in the local languages. This project is based in New York City, which has a sizeable community of people from the DR. The schools and instructors involved have established relationships with health care providers and educators in the DR. Everyone involved speaks the local languages.

This project has tie-ins with multiple other stakeholder groups. Briefly, this project is of interest to Wikimedia communities in New York City, Caribbean islands, Spanish speakers, Creole speakers, WikiProject Medicine, offline or limited Internet Wikipedia outreach, and Wikipedia's mobile development and app teams.


Rough details

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  • Between January - April 2017 6 students from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs will participate in the Wikipedia:Education program in a class presented by Anne Nelson and with Wikipedia support from Lane Rasberry.
  • By the end of January each student will have done enough development of Wikipedia content to be quite experienced with Wikipedia. Students will edit with oversight from physicians and instructors at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who will advise on the accuracy of medical content.
  • By the end of January there will be a plan for the students to include a site visit in the Dominican Republic in the project. Kendall Stewart and Mariela Machado Fantacchiotti will administer an appropriate project. The project will include the following:
    • Students visiting health clinics in the DR in March 2017
    • At the health clinics, students present their Wikipedia work
    • students provide an explanation of Wikipedia
    • Students present offline copies of Wikipedia through the Internet-in-a-box device
    • Students attempt to establish regular communication between the sites in the DR and the Wikipedia community in NYC, as mediated by Anne Nelson's regular class
    • Students do an introductory survey on Internet access for health care professionals in the DR at the sites visited
  • Students return to NYC after the site visit and do project wrap up, including responding to Wikipedia requests of people at the site and documenting their experience of attempting to provide online support and start regular communication between a site and the larger Wikipedia community

Getting started

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Students who join the project in January 2017 may start with these steps -

  1. Anticipate getting in-person and online Wikipedia support from Lane Rasberry at Consumer Reports.
  2. Create a Wikipedia account
  3. While logged into your Wikipedia account, visit the course dashboard to enroll in the course. This permits identification of your Wikipedia edits. You will be asked for your name - this is so that your instructor can associate your name with your Wikipedia account, and will not be public information.
  4. Choose your topic
  5. Find a scholarly source of information on that topic
  6. For your topic, read your scholarly source and find a Wikipedia article which covers that concept or related information. Deep familiarity of the information is not required, especially for the Wikipedia article.
  7. Expect that during an early training, participants will take information from the academic article and add it to the Wikipedia article while citing the original source. This is how Wikipedia publishing is done!

Schedule

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"Editing Wikipedia articles on medicine", a classroom handout
  1. January 2017
    1. Students join class
    2. Schedule in-person Wikipedia training workshop as soon as possible
    3. Start editing Wikipedia immediately
    4. Get content in Wikipedia and reviewed by end of January
    5. Students plan to apply for grants as needed. Relevant documentation is at meta:Grants:Start
    6. Students who are planning on producing a video in partnership with the Columbia University Tech team should script their video now and begin consulting with Mt. Sinai advisers about needs.
  2. February 2017
    1. Time to apply for grants. Hopefully before this time, there has been a conversation between the Wikimedia Foundation grants team and the organizer.
    2. Deep conversation should happen between the student Wikipedia editors and the Mt. Sinai advisers.
    3. Late February - join the video production day in a recording studio. Be prepared for audio voiceovers in at least two languages.
  3. March 2017
    1. Plan for trip
    2. Have advance conversations with site hosts
    3. Late march - report outcomes

Goals

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  • Student participants learn to edit Wikipedia's health articles
  • Information from multiple institutions, including Columbia and Mt. Sinai, is reflected in Wikipedia through the students and with approval of advisers
  • There is metrics tracking of what all participants did on-wiki and some notes for what review happened of-wiki
  • Some health explainer videos are produced
  • Wikipedia is presented to health clinics in the DR
  • Offline copies of Wikipedia are made available in the DR through devices provided by the students for this purpose

Tools and support

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