# Combining OERs with Wikipedia - a winning combination


I love when different "open" movements can come together and mutually
enhance each other, whether it's using open source software for the
production of open educational materials, or using CC-licensed music
when creating a CC-licensed documentary. [John
Willinsky](http://ed.stanford.edu/suse/faculty/displayRecord.php?suid=willinsk),
who recently [gave a talk at
OISE](http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/librarynews/?p=20) as part of [OA week
2009](http://openaccessweek.org), has written an article for [First
Monday](http://firstmonday.org) called ["What open access research can
do for
Wikipedia"](http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1624/1539).
In this article, he finds that very few articles currently contain links
to OA articles, and that we should make a real effort to link to these,
since they provide jump-off points for people who want to research a
topic more in-depth, and are more useful than references to closed
articles, or physical books, because they are available to anyone
online. I thought it was a great idea at the time. Whenever I talk about
open educational resources, I also mention OA research as an important
source of information, and I hope that the OER movement and the OA
movement can work even more together in the future.

![Link to open video
lecture](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Screen-shot-2009-10-25-at-11.51.26-PM-300x48.png "Link to open video lecture")

Recently, I came across another very interesting Wikipedia project. The
user [EconoPhysicist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:EconoPhysicist)
writes on his userpage: *"Many of my contributions have been related to
the
[OpenCourseWare](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare "OpenCourseWare")
movement, initiatives by universities to make video and other course
materials freely available on the web."*Starting in January this year,
EconoPhysicist has made more than 350 edits, almost all of them adding
open educational videos from universities to relevant articles. Users
who go to to the articles for the [Euler–Lagrange
equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%E2%80%93Lagrange_equation),
[Flow network](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_network) or [Democracy
in America](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America) can find
at the bottom a link to relevant videolectures from Yale, MIT, Stanford
and other universities that make their lectures available in this way.

![Articles that have gotten open lecture videos
added](http://reganmian.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Screen-shot-2009-10-25-at-11.52.31-PM.png "Articles that have gotten open lecture videos added")
I think this is a brilliant initiative! It's a great way to improve the
"findability" of these resources, and contributes to demolish the idea
that Wikipedia is not suitable to education. The point is of course (and
has always been) that you don't stop at the Wikipedia article, you
**start** from it. During my talk last week, we discussed the problem
with having OCW materials "siloed" off in separate institutional sites,
rather than aggregated, and I pointed out that the open nature of these
materials means that even if MIT or Stanford themselves haven't created
interesting ways to access and aggregate their materials - other users
can. So you can have websites like
[Videolectures.net](http://videolectures.net/), which aggregate lecture
videos and provide Web 2.0 features, you can link resources to
Wikipedia, you can create [open
curricula](http://p2pu.org/Afforestation-Syllabus) that include links to
lecture videos, etc.

It would be really useful if it was easier to link to a specific segment
in a video, or to easily choose a video, trim it, and upload it to
Wikimedia Commons (although most of the videos are non-commercial, which
means that they could not be included in Wikipedia, only linked to). It
might also make sense to make a series of shorter videos, rather than
one long one - it would make reuse much more feasible.

I wish Wikipedia's in other languages would take up the challenge -
there is lot's of great OCW material in [Japan](http://www.jocw.jp/),
[Korea](http://www.kocw.net/home/en/index.do),
[China,](http://openedconference.org/archives/511)
[Mexico](http://ocw.itesm.mx/index.php?lang=us), and [many other
languages](http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html).

Stian