Welcome to the Wikipedia Education Update — a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation that is distributed the first and third Tuesday of each month. Someone from our staff has talked with you about our Wikipedia Education Program to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms around the world, and we wanted to keep you in the loop on all of our exciting activities. If you would prefer not to receive these messages, simply reply to the email and ask for your address to be removed. Learn more about subscribing or read the archives.

Physics professor featured on WMF blog
Professor Rafael Pezzi, a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, was featured on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. In the post, he explains his views on why using Wikipedia as a teaching tool is important: "Wikipedia makes it explicit how knowledge is built: a never-ending dynamic process with conflicting opinions in a lively discussion. Although this process is fundamental, it is ignored in the standard textbook-based class where knowledge is just given, considered as an absolute truth." Read more in the profile.

Busy term wraps up for Mexico program
Ambassador and professor Leigh Thelmadatter has been working hard at incorporating Wikipedia into her students' work in Mexico. Leigh authored a post for the Wikimedia blog about all the activities she's been running at ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México over the last term, including translation efforts of two medical English classes, an International Baccalaureate program, and photo donations and contests. Read more about the incredible breadth of activities happening around education in Mexico.

US student contributes two articles as part of minor
Nadhika Ramachandran is pursuing a minor in Poverty, Justice, and Human Capabilities at Rice University, and she — like other students pursuing the minor — has two required classes. Both classes included an assignment to contribute to Wikipedia on a course-related topic. For Nadhika's first project, she chose to expand the article on peacebuilding; the next term, she created an article on women in the Arab Spring. She's been particularly excited to add content to Wikipedia as part of her coursework. Read more about Nadhika's story.

Swedish program offers progress update
Sophie Österberg, the education manager for Wikimedia Sverige, offered an extensive update on all of the educational efforts going on in Sweden right now. The program has been in operation for the last seven months, and they have been busy attending events, supporting collaborations, and creating online trainings to support their efforts. Read more about the program in Sweden.

Brazil program featured in local media
The Wikipedia Education Program in Brazil was featured in several news articles in Brazil last month. Oona Castro, the leader of the Wikimedia program in Brazil, gave a talk at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, where she encouraged professors to join the program. Oona's talk was covered widely. Read one article (in Portuguese).

English Wikipedia program seeks Ambassadors
If you're a Wikipedia Ambassador who is available to support student editors and professors in the Wikipedia Education Program on English Wikipedia next term, please make sure to create your Ambassador profile on the Education Extension. If you don't yet have the appropriate user right, please log in to your Wikipedia account and request the user right. The user right will allow you to create a profile as a Campus Ambassador or an Online Ambassador. Don't forget to include an image from Wikimedia Commons, any universities where you can support classes, and the disciplines that interest you most! Request your user right today.

The Linguist covers Wikipedia as language tool
The April/May issue of the Linguist, a journal with information about languages, included an extensive article on the ways using Wikipedia assignments in classrooms can be an exceptional tool for language learning and documenting minority languages. The article extensively quotes Leigh Thelmadatter of Mexico, who has been a pioneer in her use of Wikipedia in her language classroom. Read the article.