Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/27

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Bekbalaeva, Namasbek kyzy, Tumenbaeva, and Askhatbekova

patriarchal attitudes. e questions of online security were discussed with students during the course to ensure the information used was taken from public and open sources.

Inclusiveness May Require Additional Work

By giving students freedom in choosing the language of the assignment, the team hoped to increase the inclusivity and accessibility of knowledge. At the same time, it created more work for instructors when evaluating the assignments. Some pages were written in languages in which faculty members did not speak. However, the instructors did not want to put extra work on the students with translating the content. For the pages created in languages other than Russian, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and English, which were familiar to the instructors, students were asked to submit their original texts as Word documents, which were then translated with the help of an online translation tool.

Censorship of Wikipedia

The issue of censorship of Wikipedia also came up during the project. A Wikipedia ban has been implemented in several countries, either as a part of more general internet censorship or as a targeted block of the online encyclopedia (Ant, 2017; Vinton, 2015). is had an impact on the work of one of the students who was not able to create a Wikipedia page in Turkish. Wikipedia has been banned in Turkey for over two years, with access being restored in early 2020 (BBC News, 2020). Therefore, the student working on the assignment in the 2019 fall semester had to write a page about a Turkish female activist in English.

Wikipedia for Civic Activism

Like many other online platforms, Wikipedia can be used as a tool to engage students in a discussion of important societal problems. As students progressed in their assignments, they became more aware of issues around gender justice in the region, studying them from various perspectives. Creating Wikipedia pages on feminist activists and female political leaders of the Central Asia region not only allowed students to address the lack of content in the local languages but also became a small, yet important, step in minimizing the impact of