Two-Day Long National Wikipedia Education Program Review Meeting To Be Held At Christ University Bengaluru

The programme began in 2013 with a goal of piloting Wikipedia as a pedagogic tool for the undergraduate students. Both the educators of the WEP and of the university were new to one such approach. But inside an institution that sees over 20K new faces every year, educating students on creating Wikipedia articles and enhancing the same was very exciting. Students of five Indian languages--Hindi, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu--were chosen as these languages were taught as second languages for many students. During the first and second year, almost all the students created new Wikipedia articles where majority of the articles were below accepted standard. The difficulty in making students learn about input tools in their languages, Wikipedia basics and wiki markup pushed for creating "how-to" video tutorials in Hindi and Kannada. Working with Urdu was discontinued after the second year because of program staff exit. Slowly, the program was reoriented in a manner that new students learned native language input and markup for the first two semesters by digitizing books on Wikisource and later by editing Wikipedia articles during the next two semesters. This helped better the output by increasing the quality of articles by nearly 30%. During 2015 the program was further improved by helping students get more hands-on training of input, wiki markup by intensive typing during the first semester, a few advanced options like interacting with each other on user talk page during the second semester, moving to Wikipedia editing and developing articles on Wikipedia sandbox during third semester, and finally moving the articles by peer-review from fellow batchmates, faculty and the larger Wikipedia community. The faculty is involved in the development and on-wiki review process ensuring quality.

The program so far has gone to the level of producing about 20% very good quality articles where nearly 0.6% of the articles are of really poor quality. The female to male ratio is surprisingly equal and at times, there are more female students as compared to the male ones. However, there is little concern in integrating the student-Wikimedians to the larger Wikimedia community.