User:Thisismyusername1994

My user page
Article I'm interested in editing the article literacy. I plan on expanding on the Africa, and South America. Any suggestions would be appreciated.Thanks Thisismyusername1994 (talk) 01:36, 6 September 2014 (UTC) In our attempt to eliminate some of the systemic bias in Wikipedia by finding an article and improving it or creating a new article to increase the amount of information about the Global South and minorities I chose literacy. Literacy is the foundation to achieving a better education. Without the ability to read or write modern society would not be possible. Unfortunately though the Wikipedia page on literacy was full of systemic bias.

The article in the beginning was full of information until you reach the Global South portion of it. The article gives a list of countries from around the world, both Global North and South, but the Global North countries have at least a paragraph of information with some pictures. Most of the Global South countries however only a sentence and no pictures. That sentence worth of information is usually country x has a literacy rate of y%. Some of the more influential countries have some other bits of information. Most of the information is based in Africa despite subcategories for South America and Asia. The article also lacked any information on literacy in Latin America, outside of Mexico.

These grossly underrepresented countries deserve more than just a statistic. I plan on searching for data on programs these countries have used, are using, or planning on using to improve the literacy rate. And to also add some more countries to the South America and Asia sub categories, to add a Latin America sub category, and to also include what a country considers literate. The best place to look for such information would be the U.N. and government and searches for scholars in the areas who have wrote about this subject. Thisismyusername1994

Current Sources
These are my current sources. Note these are not final. Thisismyusername1994 (talk) 23:49, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Update to sources Thisismyusername1994 (talk) 01:05, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Possible sources
These are some potential sources I have yet to review.

Rough Draft
I added a few short paragraphs about Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Afghanistan to the literacy article in my sandbox. Please check out these edits. Thanks. Thisismyusername1994 (talk) 23:17, 17 October 2014 (UTC)

Peer reviews
First of all thanks to Macmaclee for reviewing my article and all your feedback its much appreciated. From your feedback I got that the article needs more general information about the literacy in countries covered, e.g. what literacy education, effects of illiteracy, etc, differences between literacy in Global North and South, and a links between poverty and literacy. It was suggested that Afghanistan be placed in a separate category called Middle East, most maps don't show it as part of the Middle East (google Middle East maps to find examples), but I will ask Prof.Vandegrift for her opinion. Thisismyusername1994 (talk) 19:44, 14 November 2014 (UTC)