Women in STEM became another topic of interest for students. One of the pages was dedicated to the First Satellite Launch in Kyrgyzstan project, the very first girls-only space program (BBC News, 2018). The page included information about the project goals, the training of the team, and the engineering process.
Students in the courses used various methods to collect information for their projects. Supporting students in the search for and ethical use of information was important in this project. Students collected information from openly available resources, such as public websites, news sites, social media, personal blogs, or official web pages. Some students even conducted interviews with the founders of women initiatives. After completing preliminary research, students received guidance from librarians on how to write, edit, and format pages on Wikipedia.
Students were given freedom in selecting the language of their pages, and the majority preferred their native languages, which included Kazakh, Turkish, Dari, and Russian. is helped contribute to the development of Wikipedia content in languages other than English. It is recognized that English is the dominant language of today’s online knowledge (“Top Ten Languages Used in the Web,” 2020). The development of Wikipedia pages in local languages helps to deliver information to non-English-speaking communities. This also aligns with the idea of making knowledge more accessible, which supports the concept of openness, and which had at first inspired the team to start the OER collaboration.
What Did We Learn?
The Online Environment Necessitates Responsibility
While working on Wikipedia assignments, several issues came to light including online privacy and safety. Concerns remain about online violence toward different groups of people. Women and people with nonheterosexual gender identities are more at risk of online harassment and bullying (UN Women, 2015). Cases of discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity are known in Central al Asia, as conservative norms prevail in the region (Suyarkulova, 2020b). The safety of the individuals and organizations selected by students for the Wikipedia assignment raised some concerns because of
