English subtitles for clip: File:The Impact of Wikipedia Dumisani Ndubane.webm

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I started looking for online means of getting myself educated in electrical engineering,

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and I found Wikiversity.

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And I thought, Hmm? A free university is quite an interesting concept.

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But, to my disappointment when I got into the school of electrical engineering pages, there was not much in there to talk about.

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My name is Dumisani Ndubane.

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I'm from South Africa. 

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I always had this nagging thing in my mind. You didn't find anything but they did say it's a free-to-edit university.

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So, why don't you put something there?

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Even if it's one course, someone might get interested in that.

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So, in my second year with UNISA I was doing circuit analysis, and I thought, 

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Why not put this stuff online that I'm learning, and see who else is doing the same thing?

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I started transcribing my notes that I was taking for my studies.

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and putting those online to create a Circuit Analysis page at Wikiversity,

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and that started with a few edits which were wrong, 

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which did not look OK to me.

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But when I came back the edits were fixed.

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My first reaction was - did I do something wrong?

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[laughs]

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Did I mess up? Did I do something wrong, you know?

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And then I thought about it, and I thought, 

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wait a minute! There's a word for it; it's called collaboration.

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And I thought, he actually did not delete what I did. 

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He edited it, and he made it better.

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It started growing. We have about eight lessons in a space of six months,

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fully developed, with questions, corrected, and so on.

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I've had at least 80 to 90 unique users who have Emailed me, and asked me questions about the articles that were written.

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Some of them have asked me to work on new articles, or newer courses, 

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and that has been quite motivating, to understand and notice that 

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these are not people from my country.

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These are people from all over the world.

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I've had Australians, Germans, Pakistanis. and so on, going through the course.

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And being asked to do something like that for a separate course only says that I've done something right. 

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So, the fact that information is free meant that everybody could use.

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Someone who comes from a poor background, like I did, can get that information, access to that information.

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I graduated with UNISA two months ago, finally,

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after spending at least five years working on my career.

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Most of the work I did on that I've put online with Wikiversity 

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which was my study companion for the five years I spent there.

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So, yes, I am professional now,

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and Wikiversity had a lot to do with that.