Submissions/Wikipedia Translation and Transnational Scholarship

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This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no. 164

Title of the submission: Wikipedia Translation and Transnational Scholarship

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Panel

Author of the submission: Kelsey Brannan

E-mail address: kmb256@georgetown.edu

Username: Kels.bran

Country of origin: United States

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Georgetown University

Personal homepage or blog: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/kmb256/

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Scholars in the digital humanities have written about the communal consequences of male-dominant authorship on Wikipedia (Davidson, 2009), about the lack of contributions to humanities-based articles compared to science Wikipedia articles (Kill, 2008), and about the fear that Wikipedia editing practices will replace academic work (Messer-Kruse, 2012), however, authors continue to neglect the power of transnational scholarship emerging from students participating in the Wikipedia Global Education program. At Georgetown University, Professor Adel Iskandar's graduate course, Media & Communications in the Arab World is participating in the Wikipedia Global Education Program a course that is collaborating with students participating in the Wikipedia Arabic program. Wikipedia Arabic is currently a very small community as there are few speakers of the language. The Global Education program is focused on trying to improve and increase the total content in the Arabic language. The students in the Georgetown class, some of whom are in the Communication, Culture & Technology program and in the Arab studies program at Georgetown with varying degrees of familiarity with the language, will work alongside students in the Arab world, specifically those in Egypt, to create and translate corresponding Arabic articles. The goal of the Wikipedia component of the course is to make Arab issues more visible to the English Wikipedia and help improve the size of Wikipedia Arabic. One of the significant challenges, however, is finding "Verifiable" content in the English language that confirms events that occur in the Arab world. The collaborative efforts put forth in this class can be a useful model for other courses that plan to research, update, and translate media information from around the world using Wikipedia. Furthermore, Wikipedia article creation can augment the development of research papers/topics outside of Wikipedia. For example, the "back-end" and "talk-pages" of Wikipedia can be used to track how, why, by whom, and where information and knowledge is produced. This emerging form of transnational collaboration and co-creation, within the Wikipedia Global Education program suggests that scholarship in the 21st century must reflect on the way meaning is mediated, translated, and circulated around the world. This panel will include the following speakers: Wiki Campus Ambassador (Kelsey Brannan), two students (TBD), and Professor Iskandar. The panel will present the final articles from the course and their personal experience translating and collaborating with Wikipedia Arabic, including both negative and positive experiences. We also hope to (if possible) beam in a Wikipedian and scholar from Cairo, Egypt during the presentation.

Track: * WikiCulture and Community; Research, Analysis, and Education

Length of presentation/talk: 45 minutes (including questions)

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

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Minotaurlives (talk) 15:48, 17 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
Ycl4 (talk) 14:53, 20 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Pongr (talk) 04:40, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Pfancher (talk) 13:23, 6 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Dmitri Lytov (talk) 16:50, 6 June 2012 (UTC) will most likely miss it, but I'd appreciate if I can receive an electronic summary[reply]
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