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Newcomer Training Formats

Sometimes newcomers need more than a short training or support environment (like an editathon). In the last 5 years, most affiliates have begun offering some form of extended training for different target audiences. These kinds of extended trainings can be described in the following formats:

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Targeted facilitated events One of the first events run in the Wikimedia movement around Climate Change was the <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/African_Climate_Change_edit-a-thon" target="[object Object]">African Climate Change Editathon</a>. Instead of treating the event like an “invite anyone who is motivated” kind of event, the African Climate Change workshop was more of a professional development event for academics interested in climate communication.  A similar editing event was hosted at the <a href="https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2591/NOAA-scientist-to-serve-as-expert-in-Wikipedia-edit-a-thon" target="[object Object]">American Academy of Science in 2020</a>. By focusing on experts learning about and giving feedback on the content of the pages over several days, the event was less of a traditional editathon and workshop, but rather a workshop helping refining some key pages related to reports recently published by the Academy.

Deep trainings While multi-day or targeted events sometimes work, most audiences need more training than can happen in a few hours. Many affiliates, are shifting their model towards multi-week trainings, where an audience learns how to participate in the Wikimedia community using different skills that might be important to contributing on wiki. Some recent examples  include the training for <a href="https://web.aflia.net/wikipedia-in-african-libraries-course-cohort-1-registration-opens/" target="[object Object]">librarians supported by AFLIA</a>, and a recent <a href="https://wikimedistas.uy/curso-online-como-informar-sobre-ambiente-y-cambio-climatico-en-wikipedia/" target="[object Object]">Climate Change focused training, run by Wikimedistas de Uruguay. </a> Similarly, WikiEdu has targeted science communicators and experts with <a href="https://wikiedu.org/learn/" target="[object Object]">trainings focused on targeted parts of the Wikimedia ecosystem (such as Wikidata) or specific fields of science</a>.

Education Programs  Education programs focused on training student editors to write content related to the to fill strategic content gaps. For example, WikiEdu has documented that many of their students have contributed to important parts of the material related to <a href="https://wikiedu.org/blog/2021/11/12/improving-wikipedias-coverage-of-the-climate-crisis/" target="[object Object]">Climate Change and other environmental issues on Wikimedia projects</a>.  Classroom assignments for college students have several advantages: the primary being that students can be focused on knowledge gaps important for readers, but which an expert doesn’t have enough time to contribute.