I attended Wikimania 2014 in London, Wikipedia’s annual conference. I was inspired by some of the genuinely amazing people doing some ground breaking work, and decided to see how that could help Egypt’s educational system.

What did I do?

1) Uploaded a scanned copy of the school text books in wiki-commons, which is a part of Wikiepdia for media files and documents. 2) Created a wiki-source “digital library” page which allows the user to edit each page and see the scanned copy side by side., allowing the quality of the material improve over time. 3) A page that details the course and foster a discussion around it. 4) The page can be downloaded as a PDF/EPUB file format meaning it could be read on almost all devices and e-readers while maintaining an up-to-date version of textbook.

This video might help explain:

You may not know this but Egypt’s Ministry of Education (MOE), has all the school books up on a public Microsoft “Drop Box” found here:

I then uploaded the first year secondary school text books to wiki-commons