In real life I am Ayla Arslan, molecular biologist and neuroscientist. Born in Istanbul, I studied and worked as university professor in different cities in Turkiye, Germany, USA, Bosnia and Russia. I am interested in the use of Wikipedia as a tool for service learning in higher education. I designed the Wikipedia editing assignment in my courses first time in 2015 in Bosnia and Herzegovina when I was teaching "Chemistry of Life" at the International University of Sarajevo. Although I taught my classes in English, none of my students were native speakers of English, and it was the language diversity (Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Portuguese ) of my international students, which inspired me to assign Wikipedia editing task. The task was simple and involved the digitization of a topic in their mother tongue from paper based sources, found in the library.
Later in 2021-2022 academic year, I again used Wikipedia editing assignment for twenty-two Russian and two international students (Indonesian) during my "Science and Technology" and "Cell Biology" classes in the School of Advanced Studies, Siberia, Russia. This implementation in Russia had been investigated to explore Wikipedia editing as a tool for service learning in higher education. Our results are recently published and can be found/read here: Arslan, A. and Turk, M. Wikipedia as an academic service-learning tool in science and technology: higher education case from Siberia. J Community Genet (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12687-023-00692-6