Wikipedia Translation Class Project: Summary

Wikipedia Translation Class Project Kitamura Sae Lecturer, Musashi University The Wikipedia translation class project aims to 1) improve students’ English and information skills, and 2) make a contribution to society by enriching Japanese Wikipedia. In this class, each student is required to translate English articles (two articles over 5,000 bytes, or one article over 15,000 bytes) into Japanese. The teacher (myself) makes a list of possible new articles, and students are advised to choose the articles they want to translate. Students are encouraged to add proper citations and correct errors. Every article translated by a student is checked by the teacher before being uploaded to Japanese Wikipedia. I taught two such classes in the Summer Terms 2015, and now I am teaching the third class in the Winter Semester at the University of Tokyo, for which I have been working as a part-time English lecturer. Basically, this is an English-language teaching class; I came up with the idea for this project because my students were not so enthusiastic when they took ‘reading/translation’ classes. After introducing Wikipedia in my class, the students have been far more motivated because the fruits of their efforts are published online. My students and I have completed over 70 Japanese articles, most of which have been selected as ‘New Articles on the Main Page’. One of them was awarded the ‘Article of the Month’. Project page: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:%E3%81%95 %E3%81%88%E3%81%BC%E3%83%BC/%E8%8B%B1%E6%97%A5%E7%BF%B B%E8%A8%B3%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A3%E3%82%AD%E3%83%9A%E3%83%8 7%E3%82%A3%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3%E9%A4%8A%E6%88%90%E3%82%B B%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8A%E3%83%BC Summer Term 1 New Articles: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:%E3%81%95 %E3%81%88%E3%81%BC%E3%83%BC/2015%E5%B9%B4%E5%A4%8F Summer Term 2 New Articles: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:%E3%81%95 %E3%81%88%E3%81%BC%E3%83%BC/2015%E5%B9%B4%E5%A4%8F2 Winter Semester: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%88%A9%E7%94%A8%E8%80%85:%E3%81%95 %E3%81%88%E3%81%BC%E3%83%BC/2015%E5%B9%B4%E7%A7%8B