 Good afternoon, everyone. I would like to welcome you to our session about Seniors Citizens' Writing Wikipedia. My name is Jan Beranek and currently I work with Wikimedia Czech Republic as coordinator of programs for editors and also I'm one of the trainers in the Seniors' Writing Wikipedia project. So Wikimedia Czech Republic started a project in 2014 and I've been involved since year 2019 as one of the trainers. I added Wikipedia since year 2018. Since that we found out what works, what doesn't work, but we are still trying to find some new ways to improve, how to engage seniors more and we would like to share these ways. We figured out how to keep the seniors involved in the long run after we teach them how to edit Wikipedia. So the whole project started in year 2014. It was initiated by Jan Sokol who was a university professor. He was president of the candidate and very recognized authority in the Czech Republic. He was also very passionate about editing Wikipedia. He made 30,000 edits during his life, created 2,000 articles. This is a very quite famous quote from him that we used to promote the project and I think it's true. About the numbers, we're doing this from 2014. We had over 600 editors going through our programs and we've made our courses in more than 17 towns. So what is the key to our project? Well, the first important thing is our user guide. We have it printed. We found out the seniors, they like the paper version, but we also have it online for the people joining online. But we found out that they usually print it at home. We have framework for both courses. We have two, one basic and one advanced. Each of them is six following lessons, six following weeks, and each lesson takes two hours. I was talking about this to someone and they told me two hours, that's too long. But it's not just two hours of of a lecture of me talking. It's two hours of activities. We let them edit for 15 minutes, then talk for a bit. So it's two hours, it's past like 10 minutes. We try to cooperate with libraries, NGOs, partners, and University of Third Age. And we train also librarians to become new trainers and trying to get more people from our community to start training seniors. We do our sessions both online and offline. It's pretty much based on the seniors' preference, where do they live? For some of them, it's not really possible to come outside. But we found out they're really good with using Meet or Zoom or stuff like this. We have this feature on Chick Wikipedia called mentorship. And what we do, we assign the trainers, the lecturers as mentors for for the seniors at Wikipedia as well. And we have a really nice coordinator communicating with the seniors on a daily basis. So they have one contact person they can reach to always. Here are some pictures. You have one of the online courses and offline. Both of them are taught by a trainer who is senior herself. And he took our course. She liked it so much, she became a trainer after that. So what else do we do for our seniors? We have alumni club. We have extension courses for them. So we teach them how to do commons, how to do wiki data. We have this thing called wiki school that's to our lesson activity each month. And we try to cover specific topics. So we had wiki school about uploading other people's work to commons or a session about info boxes, how to edit them, how to create a new one. We have an event called annual senior wiki town. The picture is from the wiki town a few years ago. And we gather all the people that participated in in past, usually quite a few of them come. And we spent a weekend with them, edit Wikipedia about that town we are at, take pictures, do fun stuff, meetings. They really love it. And then we do photo workshops, expeditions with them, usually trying to teach them all the skills. But it's not just about education, it's about social contact as well. So we do Christmas and New Year's party. We try to meet them as much as possible. This is from my from our alumni club. You can see it's really nice meet up in a in a cafe, just talking, chatting, sharing stuff. They really love it. We know that recognition and validation is very important for each wiki pita editor. And all wiki pita is done to barn stars, right? So we created three tiers, you could say. We have first one for the basic up so went and currently we gave it to 267 people. That doesn't necessarily mean we had 267 people up solving the curse. It's just the number of people that were given the barn star. And after that, the trainer of the curse may give anyone after one year and activity and 200 edits. We currently have 14 orders of that and the highest year, two years of activity, 500 edits, 50 articles. We have just five holders up to now. So we have four main challenges each year round. And we've been trying to get our seniors to participate in those events. These are pictures from the editor tones from women's month on wiki pita or human rights month. And we're really showing them they are welcome because sometimes we told them, OK, this is the projects for community event. And they are like, well, I just was in one course. I don't think I belong in the community. So we really make them feel they do belong. And I think they feel like they do belong and it really creates this this intergenerational connection in between. So what are the results? We have. We have three lectures that were raised from the people who attended the basic course. There are three, two of them are women. And some of the absolvents actually joined our Wikimedia Czech Republic chapter. And the libraries really recognize us. So when we come to them and say we would like to host senior citizens right wiki pita course at your library, they usually know and they are OK and fine with them. And here are some numbers about last year. So 14 courses to advanced and we had 262 expanded sites. I think that's quite a lot. So we are still in love with the program. We still love it. We've been doing it for years. And I think they're still the same energy that was there at the beginning. For me personally, it's seeing the seniors like how happy they are to learn new stuff. They come to the lessons and they are exciting about us showing them something new they didn't know about. And right now I would like to show you our video we had for fundraising campaign last year. And there are two of our absolvents talking about their experience. I got an e-mail with an invitation to a senior wiki pita course and that's how I was very happy to be invited. I was most excited about it, if it wasn't for me. But then I was very happy about it. I wrote something for 270 members. The wiki pita is a magical horse. I feel like I'm participating in a big meaningful project. I'm writing about Czech wiki pita. I'm getting excited about this horse. I wrote about the first member of my group, Prastríci, who was a Nazi in 1942. He was very imperfect in terms of formality, partly in terms of formality. But he was very shy, a colleague of wiki pita. He started to fill it up. There was a photo of a drawing of a matric, just like the birth of that wiki pita. They filled it up with photos. And it reminded me of a little child, who at the same time looks at how they develop beautifully and grow into beauty. I have to admit that wiki pita is something for me like a drug. From the very beginning, what I started writing about the first member. Thanks to wiki pita I met a lot of interesting people and I have a very good feeling about the members I wrote. The lecturer was a very nice young man. He was very patient and sweet with us. And I think that he was very proud of the fact that I didn't give up at the beginning. It's often said that we don't have critical thoughts or we don't get critical thoughts. We send fake emails and so on. And I think that writing about wiki pita is really a development, a critical thought, because we have to believe in everything that is good, good and so on. Thanks to the fact that I wrote about wiki pita, I survived the last lockdown without nervousness. I didn't even think about the lockdown. This summer we learned how to write about wiki pita with a scenario. We want them to come to their place in the digital world thanks to wiki pita, we have found 150. To achieve this, we need about 30 correct answers. Are you coming with us? If you are a fan, become a patron of the wiki pita project and send us as many as you can, no matter how many you will miss. Thank you for all the scenarios and scenarios that become a part of wiki community and get a new horse. Wiki Zdar. Support the wiki pita with a scenario. This is a great meaningful project. So here's a page of resources. When you go back to our presentation, you can go through it, click through it and see what you've been up to. And this is pretty much enough for my presentation and now I would like to ask you for any questions or maybe we can open a discussion how is it going with seniors in your country? Hello, hi. Thank you so much for this. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you talked about intergenerational element for this? Can you tell us a little bit more of how you brought the different generations together? Yes. Well, for me it was basically joining wiki media at the Republic trying to figure out all the different stuff I can do and then I was shown this project, this amazing project with seniors. And I think that's been the way for other young members of our community as well. Yeah, I think they're also looking for the different ways to participate and this is such a natural way to get old people and young people together. So yeah. I'm Obi from Nigeria. I want to thank you for this lovely presentation. In my country I organized a group of senior citizens as well and I can say I've picked one or two things from what you have just shared today. To help you answer our question, bringing the young and the older generation together, in my own experience I asked for help from the younger generations because they understand digital literacy. The seniors had to find it difficult using the digital tools. So some came, I made it open, some came with their grandchildren. So the grandchildren helped me to train them with digital tools first before we started editing Wikipedia. Secondly, the challenge we had, another challenge we had was editing English Wikipedia. It was kind of difficult for them. Some of them their articles were deleted because they are not conversant with the policies and guidelines. So we had to change strategy. We adopted editing wiki data and commons which is very, very easier for them. We taught them how to use their phones to take photographs and now how to upload them in wiki commons with the help of the younger generation as well. Thank you. I think also with the younger generation most of us during COVID went through online learning so we are quite used to doing stuff online and we can quite naturally pass it to the old people. What would... I'm trying to think my question. What are the biggest challenges of working with seniors and with the wiki media projects? Is there something in particular that you had to talk with the team or you had to contact other partners to address to this public? Well, in the past it's been the digital literacy of seniors but last couple of years basically for the whole time I'm in the programme we don't really see as big difference between old people between how they can use IT. They're usually kind of OK at it already because from what I've heard at the start of the programme when they came to our events they didn't know how to do anything on a computer so usually we have them pretty much OK at that but our courses our lessons for seniors they are obviously more slow-paced than the evidence we do for students so it's choosing the right pace also I think it's the printed materials what's important for seniors because when they attend lessons from home through Zoom I've heard from some of them they like to print the guidebook themselves at home and we have it in printed form when they go to our events in person we give it to them so you can actually take a look at it afterwards also for them to get more comfortable using Zoom and other digital tools we offer a zero orientation lesson when we can go through the virtual platform with them show them how to connect how to share screen and do stuff like this Do all of the seniors have a computer or laptop on their own at home? Well, personally I only hosted online sessions with them for that it's needed but when we have some lessons at some library pretty much always we try to get a room with computers so they don't have to bring their laptops they don't have to, but I'm not sure I'm not sure about this Sorry, let me ask when you organise programmes is it a particular kind of exercise do you introduce different types of exercises that they can do? Because I know some don't like editing in my own case some like telling stories they will tell you stories then you write So our basic lessons they are really focused on editing and the output of that is usually writing own article but we try to show them all the different ways to participate the basic lessons they also include lesson on taking picture and uploading to commons so we show them these two main ways and then we have the wiki school for them which are monthly meetups on some more advanced projects Last time we had session about wiki voyage about the travel guide on wiki to show them different projects and how to participate Thank you so much Jant, I think it's time for break now