The UOC is the first European university to have a Wikipedian in residence

The Wikipedia will thus improve its quality with resources backed up by university experts and faculty and the UOC will gain greater visibility for its materials beyond the original context of academia.


The UOC's Wikipedian in residence

Twenty-eight-year-old Pep Adrian is a graduate in Industrial Engineering and holds a master's degree in Automata and Robotics from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and he works as a technology consultant. He has edited Viquipèdia, the Catalan version of Wikipedia, since July 2007 in a number of fields and has made 18,000 contributions and written 443 articles, ten of which are featured articles.


What is a Wikipedian in residence?

They are a Wikipedia editor who accepts the post from an institution to act as a link between the university and the Wikipedia community. Until recently, this role was exclusively found in cultural institutions (libraries, archives and museums), but it has now extended into the university sector. Some of the many institutions that have or that have had a Wikipedian in residence are the British Museum, the British Library, the Palace of Versailles, the MNAC, the Picasso Museum and the Smithsonian Institution.


Cooperation and mutual enrichment

"The success of these initiatives and the research that is being done on Wikipedia in our University enables us to take a step forward and make a commitment to open communication and to disseminating the knowledge generated by our researchers and faculty thanks to collaboration with the greater Wikipedia family," explains Teresa Fèrriz, the UOC's head of New Projects. "Although we work in different ways, cooperation and mutual enrichment will, without a doubt, benefit everyone (all of us) searching for quality information on the internet, and especially in Catalan."


Over 5,300 UOC documents are already openly available

The UOC adopted policies to promote open educational resources some time ago. As a result, 5,388 documents are open access, under a Creative Commons licence, and can be found on the O2 institutional repository. Of these, 3,740 documents are teaching materials, basically learning resources, final degree projects and learning guides, and 976 documents are research materials, primarily scholarly articles. In all, they have been downloaded 2,870,721 times.


What use do university faculty make of the Wikipedia?

Eduard Aibar is leading a research project entitled Wiki for Higher Education into the perception held by university faculty of the Wikipedia. The study concludes that although it is a tool that is well regarded and widely used for consultation, many faculty are still reluctant to use it actively as a teaching tool or to contribute new content to it. This stance is partly explained by the need to have points of reference within academia that show how Wikipedia can be used and what its advantages as a teaching tool are, and overcome the related technical and methodological doubts.

Amical Wikimedia, National Prize for Culture 2014

In April, the Amical Wikimedia association was awarded the National Prize for Culture 2014 by the Catalan National Council for Culture and the Arts. The work carried out by this non-profit organization focuses on promoting Viquipèdia, the Catalan version of the Wikipedia, which has 15 million visits a month and has become people's first port of call for knowledge online.

According to Fèrriz, "we are also very aware of the contribution of Amical Wikimedia to Catalan language and culture, and we at the UOC want to collaborate with all the institutions that are committed to our Catalonia and to improving the quality and educational value of the web in Catalan."