Centre for Internet and Society

Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala

Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2012-10-04T12:18:36Z

Patiala is the home to the famous Punjabi University. A Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Punjabi University's Punjabi Department on August 16, 2012.

When the veteran Punjabi wikipedian G.S. Guglani agreed to come forward to spread the message of Punjabi wikipedia among Punjabi speakers it opened a way to revive and build the Punjabi Wikipedia community. Once Guglani's support was confirmed we looked for suitable places to conduct the introduction workshop for Punjabi Wikipedia. Guglani himself suggested Patiala, Ludhiana, and Amritsar as the probable places to conduct the Punjabi Wikipedia introduction workshops. Prof. Rajinder Brar, Head of the Punjabi Department agreed to provide full support to conduct a workshop at Patiala.

About 30 participants including students and teachers attended the workshop. Guglani played a pivotal role in organizing the workshop. Shiju Alex gave ample support. The workshop began with a welcome message by Prof. Rajinder. Guglani then took the participants through a brief presentation (http://bit.ly/Rnki2r) and explained the history and current status of Punjabi Wikipedia. To our surprise two of the participants, Satdeep Gill and Paramjeet Singh were already aware about the Punjabi Wikipedia and they had created their accounts sometime back even though they didn't do much editing. The presence of Satdeep and Paramjeet and their previous experience with Punjabi helped us during the course of the workshop. Guglani taught one of the participants to create a user account and do the wiki editing. He showed them Punjabi typing and basic wiki editing.

This was followed by a question-answer session where the participants asked about typing, editing, referencing and many other contribution related questions. The workshop ended with a small photo session.

We are happy to share that Satdeep has become quite active after this workshop and as of now is one of the very active users in Punjabi Wikipedia. We are sure his presence will attract more Punjabi people from Patiala to Punjabi Wikipedia.

More pictures of this workshop is available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Punjabi_Wikipedia_Workshop-16Aug2012

Note: Although the workshop was conducted prior to the grant period, the report was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring this.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/punjabi-wikipedia-workshop-at-punjabi-university-patiala

Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad!

noopur — 2013-02-13T11:40:06Z

This post is a report on the series of Wikipedia meets organized in the city of Hyderabad on September 29-30, 2012. These workshops were a a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community.

The city of Hyderabad is not only an IT hub but also home to many English and Indian language Wikipedians. In a recent series of weekend workshops and meet-ups conducted within the city, I had the opportunity to interact with many of them. We conducted a Wikipedia workshop at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, an Odia Wikipedia workshop as well as a general Wikipedia workshop for people interested in contributing to all language Wikipedias. I would like to convey my gratitude to the Computer Science department students at BITS, Hyderabad, Odia Wikipedians Swetapadma and Amaresh and English Wikipedians Tausif and Abhijith for making these events happen despite festivities and protests in the city.

To provide a brief report on the events, the BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad workshop was organized as a general introduction to Wikipedia. The event was organized with the support of the Computer Science department at the college and saw a presence of more than 60 students. It was 2 hour session where 6 students created their Wikipedia user accounts and entered their names on the BITS project page. They were also shown how Wikis work – live and global.

Students were encouraged to make changes to their college article and they discovered how to view recent changes, page views and other functions. It was a particularly informative session because majority of the group did not know that Wikipedia articles are written by common people from all walks of life! The session ended with a proposal to start a Wiki club for their college. The Odia Wikipedia meetup organized on the same day registered 11 participants while the general meetup on the next day had over 20 participants. In all three workshops, the majority of participants were not aware how one could contribute to Wikipedia articles.

Next steps:

It was great to see existing Wikipedians discuss the idea of having a Hyderabad SIG (special interest group) to conduct regular meetings, workshops, photo walks and more! Since the participants have shared their email-IDs, we will stay in touch and inform them about upcoming Telugu and English editing workshops. Students at BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad have also requested a Wikipedia workshop and hackathon for their upcoming techfest this month. A Telugu Wikipedia workshop has been proposed for the second week of October.

For more information on how to conduct a Wikipedia workshop in your city, you could contact noopur@cis-india.org

There was newspaper coverage about this event:

Wiki Meetup, Hindu, September 28, 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-hyderabad-report

Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad

nitika — 2013-01-07T16:30:36Z

The Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet & Society was approached by Gaurav Prashar, Assistant Dean at Inmantec College, Ghaziabad to organize a Wikipedia workshop. Accordingly, a workshop was organized on October 17, 2012.

It was quite overwhelming to see the amount of effort the institution had put in to organize this event. It took place in a large auditorium which was well equipped with all modern facilities like projector, internet, good sound system, each student had a laptop with access to stable internet connection.

Over 120 participants attended the workshop including MCA, BCA, BBA students and faculty members. The workshop included a brief introduction about - what is Wikipedia, who edits Wikipedia, why do they edit Wikipedia, how can one contribute to Wikipedia articles. The presentation was followed by a hands on editing training session where some participants created usernames and tried minor editing.

During the session participants also created a new article, Inmantec, and have taken it as a challenge to edit and improve this article over the period of next one month.

Participants listening to the proceedings at the Wikipedia workshop

The session was highly interactive and students asked a lot of queries regarding other projects supported by Wikimedia Foundation, when and who started Wikipedia, the demographics of existing Wikipedia editors, edit wars, collaborative editing, how they can participate in other activities organized by the A2K team and more.

Towards the end of the session many students showed interest to organize a follow up workshop where they could get to know about Wikipedia Clubs and how they could initiate one at Inmantec college.

Overall, the workshop was a huge success. The A2K team will be in regular touch with the participants through mail and Facebook to provide editing support. The participants will also be sent regular invites about Wikipedia events organised in NCR. The follow up session might be organized sometime in the month of November. Please watch out for more updates.

Presentation being given during Wikipedia workshop held in Ghaziabad

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-workshop-ghaziabad

Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education Program at Guwahati University

nitika — 2013-07-26T11:43:37Z

The Assamese Wikipedia community has shown a rapid growth in the past six months from 20 active editors in January 2012 to 29 active editors in June 2012. The absolute numbers might seem low but in terms of percentages its an overwhelming increment of 45 per cent.

This increment can partly be credited to the photography and article contest, conducting workshops at various educational institutions and organic community growth.

Though Assamese Wikipedia is still a small project with about 1600 articles, the Assamese Wikipedians have the drive, willingness and zest to get more editors and multiply their community. Their enthusiasm and determination has led them to start with an Assamese Wikipedia Education Program. The program was launched on October 14, 2012 with 15 masters students (90 per cent of these are women students) under the guidance of Prof. Dulumoni Goswami, Head of the Department of Education, Guwahati University.

The day before the launch some of the Assamese Wikipedia editors including Jyoti and Durbhajyoti met to design and alter the Wikipedia Education Program for Assamese Wikipedia. It was decided that the entire program will be divided in four different stages which are as follows:

Stage 1: Introduction to Wikipedia + Introduction to Education Program + Assamese typing
Stage 2: Editing Assamese Wikipedia
Stage 3: Advanced editing including adding references, headers, TOC and wiki markups
Stage 4: Concluding the Education Program

In accordance with each of these stages there will be set of deliverables expected out of the students which are as follows:

Deliverable 1: Create Wikipedia user accounts and user pages
Deliverable 2: Submit a two-page typed article in Assamese
Deliverable 3: Students will select one article each and start editing their articles
Deliverable 4: Students will continue enhancing their articles and will start adding references, wiki markups and pictures, if desired.

Assamese Wikipedia Education Program initiated in Guwahati University

On Oct 14, 2012 at 11 a.m., the program was initiated with an introduction about Assamese Wikipedia and Wikipedia Education Program. Students were completely thrilled with the idea of them contributing to Wikipedia articles and created their usernames during the session. Since students were not familiar with Assamese typing a larger part of the session was dedicated to teach students on how to type in Assamese using Rudali. As a deliverable, students will be submitting two-page article typed in Assamese on paper before the first week of November. Thereafter, a second in-class session will be organized where students will be taught editing Assamese Wikipedia.

Students learn Assamese typing using typing tool Rudali.

All the students have willingly enrolled themselves in the program and have not been forced by the faculty members. Indeed, three students were not studying in Guwahati University but still wanted to be a part of the Assamese Education Program. A loud cheer and good wishes to the Assamese Wikipedia community!

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/launch-of-assamese-wikipedia-education-program

Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates

shiju — 2012-11-09T18:18:20Z

Three months back, I wrote a blog post (http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/07/06/wikipedia-education-a-model-from-malayalam-wikipedia/) about the inauguration of the Wikipedia education program in Malayalam Wikipedia. This program is the first of its kind in an Indic language, and Malayalam community is doing the program in collaboration with the IT@School, a project of the Department of General Education, Government of Kerala, setup in 2001, to foster the IT education in schools.

Three months have passed since the last report in English (regular updates in Malayalam) about the program have been shared with the Malayalam wiki community during this period. Here is a brief update about this ongoing program. The July report was mainly about the inauguration of the project in the Government Higher Secondary School, Anchal West, Kollam, and a few details about the plans of the community regarding this project.

The Wikipedia education program was inaugurated by the IT@School director, Abdul Nasar Kaipanchery on July 14, 2012. After two weeks, we conducted a Malayalam Wikipedia introduction workshop for the students and teachers of Anchal West School. Almost 150 participants including students and teachers attended this workshop. After the workshop students were asked to write an article (on paper in Malayalam) about any topic related to Anchal and submit it to the education program coordinator, Sateesh R. Veliyam, a teacher in that school. Satheesh is also a Malayalam wikipedian. Students were given three weeks to submit the article on paper. Nearly 100 students submitted the articles and the project coordinator (with inputs from other Malayalam Wikipedia community members) shortlisted 34 students for the Wikipedia education program. The selection of the students for this program was based on their writing skills in Malayalam, the interest in this voluntary project, and other skills needed for this time bound Wikipedia education project.

A meeting was conducted with the selected students on August 9 in the school computer lab. As Malayalam Wikipedians knew that the major roadblock for students to start wiki editing in Malayalam would be Malayalam typing (in fact this is the case with all Indic languages) we decided to teach Malayalam typing to students on a priority basis. A printout of the Malayalam Inscript layout was given to the students. The Inscript layout was selected because that is part of the syllabus in Kerala. Students were asked to practice Malayalam typing and learn it within the next two months. From that day onwards students were practising Malayalam typing at school and making a steady progress.

Some recent developments are listed below:

September 8

Students are back to school after the Onam vacation. The progress on their Malayalam typing is evaluated. Malayalam Wikipedians, Kannan Shanmugham and Sugeesh visited students and addressed them. They discussed the potential articles that could be created as part of this project. They also helped few students to create their user names in Malayalam Wikipedia. After addressing the students they also visited some famous people in Anchal, other places, and some organizations to collect reference books and other information related to this project. The collection of reference materials from library, personal collections, and from panchayat office is vital for this project as these are the only places from where we can get any reliable information regarding the different topics that students plan to write.

October 1

As Malayalam typing and the collection of information and reference materials were in progress we received an important book authored by Dr. P. Vinayachandran which had a lot of information about Anchal. Students who achieved a minimum level of expertise in Malayalam typing and those who had created user accounts started editing in Wikipedia. On October 1, four new articles were created by the students who had learned Malayalam typing.

October 12

Shiju Alex visited the school students to see the progress of the project, interacted with them, and welcomed them to Malayalam Wikipedia. Since all of them had acquired a minimum level of expertise in Malayalam typing, we decided to create usernames for all of them. So on that day we created accounts and user pages for all the 34 students who were included in the project.

October 13

All the students who were part of the project reached Kollam to participate in a one-day Malayalam Wikipedia editing workshop. The program started at 10 a.m. Malayalam wikipedians Binu, Sugeesh, Kannan Shanmugham, Ajay Balachandran, Akhil, and Shiju Alex participated in this workshop. It was organized to assist students in getting started with Malayalam Wikipedia, introduce them to basic wiki editing and other related stuff. Apart from providing support for all basic needs, students were also introduced to "talk pages" and the basic policies of Wikipedia which would help them to get started with the project. We finished this one-day workshop at 3.30 p.m. by taking a group photo. A detailed report (in Malayalam) regarding this one day workshop can be read from here.

Students doing Malayalam wiki editing

October 14

Malayalam Wikipedians Sateesh, Sugeesh, Shiju, and our new wikipedian Anathu P. Sankar visited the Rehabilitation Plantation Limited [RPL] which is an important institution near Anchal and is one of the article being developed as part of this project. We met a few key people who provided some references about RPL. It was decided that students who were working on the articles related to RPL will visit again to collect more information about the project.

As of today some of the important progress the main progress made on the project are is listed below:

All students have created their accounts.
All students have created their user pages.
Most students created or edited articles that they were planning to contribute.
Students with the help of their teacher, Satheesh continue collecting reference materials on topics they plan to write.
Students continue editing in Malayalam whenever they get access to computer and internet.

Some of the things that need to be kept in mind regarding this project are:

The project is done entirely on a voluntary basis. No separate time is allocated for students to participate in this project.
Thirty-four students are part of this and most of them are from ninth standard.
Out of the 34 students, 7 are girl students.
Out of 34 students only 10 students have got computers at home.

Kerala schools are using free software for computers. They use a customized version of Ubuntu in computer labs. It is easy to configure Malayalam typing in that. Technically all 34 students need to depend on the five computers available (computers with internet facility) in the school computer lab to practice Malayalam typing, wiki editing, and do the other tasks related to the project. And the lack of regular access to computer and internet is affecting the smooth progress of the project.

As separate time is not allocated for this project, students who are part of this project are working on it either during intervals, lunch time, during early hours before the start of the school, or by staying late after the school working hours. Since we have only around five computers with internet in the school lab, students need to divide and share the timing among themselves. Many of them come to the school on Saturdays and Sundays to participate in the project.

Few important links related to this project:

The master project page of this program is available here.

The list of students participating in this program is available here
The list of articles that students started or enhancing as past of this project is available here
The progress report of the project in Malayalam is regularly updated here

We will keep you posted about the updates from this project as and when it happens. Malayalam community is planning to complete this project (student editing) by the third or fourth week of November.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/malayalam-wikipedia-education-program-august-october-update

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

noopur — 2012-10-31T08:17:56Z

This report analyses a series of meetings and workshops held in Rajkot, a city in Gujarat, India during the month of October 2012.

I visited Gujarat for a few Wikipedia activities – including Wikipedia meets in the cities of Ahmedabad and Rajkot, interacted with students and teachers from various colleges as well as to successfully conclude the Gujarati Wikipedia article writing competition.

I visited Rajkot on October 17, 2012 with two Wikipedians – Harsh Kothari and Konarak Ratnakar, both from Ahmedabad. We were scheduled to take up a small introductory lecture on contributing to Wikipedia at Christ College, Rajkot in the afternoon and meet up with other Gujarati Wikipedians from Rajkot and Junagadh later in the day. Fortunately, I was able to connect with Rashmikant Makwana, a teacher at TGS (The Galaxy School) in Rajkot. I had first met up with him during the photo walk – Wiki takes Ahmedabad in January 2012. He had shown a great deal of interest in doing something for his school students. Thanks to Mr. Makwana's prompt response and support, we visited three branches of TGES (The Galaxy Education System) and had the opportunity of interacting with over 100 students from secondary and higher secondary divisions.

Interactions with TGES students

I got to read Mr. Makwana's email only after I reached Rajkot. He wrote that he spoke to a couple of teachers about our visit and their students were very eager to meet us as they had many questions about Wikipedia! I was pleasantly surprised because once we met these students (mostly 11^th standard, English medium students) we realized they had already tried their hand at editing and even creating articles! So, they had far more advanced queries like how to verify information on Wikipedia, what is the authenticity of information there, questions on notability and so on. Next, we were taken to the vadi branch of the education group. These were children from fifth and sixth standards and who also had questions and better ones about stories of vandalism they had committed on Wikipedia! We told them how Wikipedia was one of the best ways of telling people about their culture, identities, city and language. Besides students, we also met teachers who taught Gujarati, History and Geography.

Interactions with Christ College students

Wikipedians giving lecture.

Christ College offers a variety of graduate courses. We were connected with their faculty, Mr. Rushabh, by Umesh Joshi from the Open Page publication in Rajkot.

I am thankful to both of them for their support in gathering their MBA students! Harsh Kothari, a Gujarati Wikipedian presented on how one can contribute to Gujarati Wikipedia while Konarak helped them in a live editing session. One question that everyone asked us was – WHY do people edit Wikipedia?

So, we called upon Jitendrasinh Chauhan, a long-term Gujarati Wikipedian. He came up and spoke to them on how he discovered Gujarati Wikipedia and has not only gained in terms of knowledge but also friendships that he has made with fellow editors across the state and overseas! We also explained the importance of learning correct ways of editing to these students who might pursue public relations as their professions.

Meeting Wikipedians

The trip to Rajkot, apart from meeting a whole bunch of new people, was also about connecting offline with Gujarati Wikipedians. Their warmth and day long support in terms of logistics, context and guidance kept us enthused. I extend my gratitude to Jitendrasinh Chauhan and his friend Harsh, both Wikipedians for their help. They have also helped us establish a dialog with Saurashtra University where we hope to plan a two-day conference centered around Gujarati language and digitization.

Given here is a network visualization infographic highlighting the key points.

Videos

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ college - 1

Gujarati Wikipedia workshop at Christ College - 2

Write about your city on Gujarati Wikipedia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/gujarati-wikipedia-education-program-rajkot

First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!

subha — 2012-11-30T12:44:44Z

The first Pune Odia Wikipedia workshop was organized in Pune on October 27, 2012. Subhashish Panigrahi recollects his experience about the events through this report.

Recently Odia Wikipedia (http://or.wikipedia.org) crossed 3000 articles. After being dormant for 8 long years, Odia Wikipedia emerged as one of the active South Asian wikipedias. I visited Pune on October 27, 2012 to participate in an Odia Wikipedia workshop celebrating this success with the wikipedians and also attend the WikiWomenDay 2012.

Over the last few months Odia Wikipedia has seen many active faces. One of them is Suratha Parhi, a very active Odia wikipedian. Suratha reached out to his friends, colleagues and existing wikipedians staying in Pune to celebrate the success with an Odia Wikipedia workshop. As it was after Durga Puja only a few Odia people in the city were there to attend. We saw a gathering of 10 people at PAI International Learning Center for this workshop. Abhishek Suryavanshi from Wikipedia Club Pune extended his support for organizing the venue for us.

Prior to the workshop I interacted with the participants to understand their interests and efficiency with Odia typing. To my surprise two of the participants were good in typing in phonetic and Inscript. Suratha took the audience through a presentation about Odia Wikipedia explaining the history of Odia language, importance of Wikipedia, how to contribute to Wikipedia, manual of style for writing articles, dos and do nots, rules and regulations and validating articles by adding sources. After the preliminary sessions participants started asking questions about numbers of readers, how to type in Odia, use of Odia Wikipedia and various such questions. Suratha answered their questions with examples and illustrations.

To demonstrate editing on Odia Wikipedia we invited one of the participants. We helped her to create her user account and others also created their user accounts on Odia Wikipedia. Then we invited Sudhir Patel, a type designer and technologist working with CDAC, Pune to introduce Odia typing and how to type easily in Odia. After a small hands-on training for typing, all of the participants were able to start searching for articles they wanted to edit. Some of them created new articles and some edited existing articles. At the end of the session we shared our contacts to stay in touch. We also showed them Chatasabha, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians will be also connected to the facebook group to be updated about events and activities. New Wikipedians have decided to meet once again in November for a Odia Wikipedia meetup. Sudhir and Suratha are also planning to organize a introductory session on Odia Wikipedia during the cultural gathering organized by Odia communities.

Above is a picture of participants from the Orissa Wikipedia workshop held on October 27, 2012

More pictures on WikiCommons.

Press Coverage:
OdishaDiary.com, Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (October 31, 2012)

Videos

Suratha Parhi explaining about Odia Wikipedia

Sudhir Patel explaining about Odia Typing

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized

Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!

subha — 2012-11-10T08:30:09Z

A2K team members Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval participated in the "WikiWomenDay" organized by Wikipedia Club Pune at PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus on October 28, 2012. Subhashish unfolds the happenings of this full day free fun workshop.

Globally participation of women on Wikipedia is less than 10 per cent. Women wikipedians across the world have joined hands to boost women's contribution to Wikipedia. Recently the A2K team was in Pune for the WikiWomenDay 2012. Wikipedia Club Pune, the first Wikipedia club in India, to encourage women's participation on Wikipedia, had organized a full day fun event on October 28, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions.

Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of Wikipedia Club Pune briefed about the agenda of the event. Noopur spoke about the global contribution on Wikipedia in terms of various topics and how male-centered topics were well covered. Few of the male centric articles were taken up for comparison with those of women to make the audience understand the gap of contribution. A good majority of articles which were of interest to men were well written whereas women centric articles were of bad shape due to lack of contribution from women. A visual representation was shown to the participants to explain the statistical information about gender gap on Wikipedia. Apart from article contribution, male editors were found to be more social and discussed more on talk pages which also bring more male editors on Wikipedia.

Participants were introduced to the basics of Wikipedia editing (five pillars, notability, importance of source of references, vandalism) before they were explained about actual editing. Each of the participants were provided with a computer and one of them was invited to create her user account.

Thereafter Abhishek demonstrated searching an article on Wikipedia and how logging in to Wikipedia allows editors to edit articles which are protected from editing by anyone. One of the logged in editors was asked to make a small edit on an article which surprised many of the participants. They realized that even they can make changes to the articles, for the first time in their life. Then there was a buzz about the credibility of the articles as they all saw that anyone can edit the articles. So the Wikipedia article on Pune was vandalized and Pune was made the capital of India for a few minutes! The page was refreshed after a while and reverted. This was clear enough to demonstrate how active the editor community is on Wikipedia.

Abhishek Suryavanshi demonstrates wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012

Most of the errors and typos get corrected quickly as someone or the other notices that there is a mistake and correct it. However, there are many articles, especially articles of Indian context which still have wrong information because the number of Indian editors are less. A series of editing for various favourite articles chosen by new wikipedians opened up the window for them to understand how important their participation could be. Abhishek, Nikita, Noopur and Subhashish helped the editors with editing.

After engaging the editors for quite sometime with editing there was a fun quiz session to brush up what was taught. The participants were asked questions based on the previous session.

Winners of the quiz were awarded with Wikipedia stickers and badges.

A picture of participants learning wiki editing on WikiWomenDay 2012 in Pune

Some of the participants left after the lunch break. Those who came back then gathered for a Indian language Wikipedia session. Out of the whole audience there were Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Odia speakers. They all were showed their respective language wikipedias. A demonstration was given to show the typing tool. As the editors were completely new to the Indian language typing, some of them started typing using default Narayam transliteration tool and some took the help of Microsoft ILIT and Google Transliterate as well. During this session new wikipedians edited many articles on Marathi, Hindi and Bengali Wikiepdia. After the whole day session there was still some time left for acclaim and fun. The participants were awarded with participation and contribution certificate by the Wikipedia Club Pune. All the new wikipedians registered on Wikipedia Club Pune.

There was a special announcement for Wikipedia Summit India, Anniversary Celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune. Club members celebrated with cutting a special Wikipedia cake. Rishi Aacharya and Ketaki Pole from PAI International Learning Solutions extended their support for this event.

Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members

There was a meeting with some of the Wikipedia Club Pune members on October 27, 2012 at PAI International Learning Solutions. It was attended by Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. Abhishek Suryavanshi, founder of the club brought a proposal about the Wikipedia India Summit, anniversary celebration of Wikipedia Club Pune which is planned in the first quarter of 2013. Importance of a India level summit, plans and agenda, logistics and partnership and sponsorship options were discussed during this meeting. There will be public announcement regarding this summit.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wiki-women-day-2012-pune

Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai

noopur — 2012-12-03T06:01:18Z

The Wiki Women Workshop was organized at the Vidyalankar Institute of Technology, Wadala in Mumbai on November 4, 2012. It was attended by over 60 women participants who were taught how to contribute to Wikipedia articles and briefed about the knowledge gaps in Wikipedia — the free encyclopedia. Noopur Raval has prepared a report of the event.

It is a well known fact that over 91 per cent of the contributors on Wikipedia are men. Women contribution comes to around 9 per cent only. As illustrated by this infographic, the articles edited by women also significantly differ from those edited by men or users who do not identify themselves. The major articles are on people, philosophy and arts. The month of November was celebrated by wikipedians across the globe to promote women editors and do women related outreach in different parts of the world. I was part of a similar initiative organized by the Wikipedia community of Mumbai in India on November 4, 2012.

The workshop was planned on e-mail more than a month in advance with inputs from various volunteers of the community as well as members of the Wikimedia India chapter. Once the logistics were taken care of, it was also suggested that the workshop be kept exclusively for women to provide them an uninhibited space to express themselves and learn editing. Although the initial response was huge (over a hundred registrations), eventually about 65 women turned up for the event.

Agenda of the workshop

The community members conducted this workshop differently to how it is usually done — they started with hands-on editing straightaway instead of giving an introduction to the Wikimedia movement and Wikipedia policies. After an hour of teaching the basics of wiki editing the participants were shown a presentation on making user accounts and start contributing articles of their choice. I helped a participant create an article on her village: Vempadu.

In the post-lunch session, participants were asked about the problems they faced and were shown how to contribute images to Commons — the free repository. The winners of the Indian leg of Wiki Loves Monuments were also announced at the workshop. The workshop ended with feedback, Wikipedia quiz and group photographs with the participants.

Feedback

For me, the feedback was particularly interesting because not many women-centric workshops have been conducted in the past. It was good to know that most of the women participants were not feeling left out or grappling with the Wiki interface. There was a diverse age range — from young school girls to retired professionals. Wireless internet access was irregular and not all could connect, which caused a lot of time to be wasted. We (community members and A2K team) would be keeping the participants updated on more events and hope they become an active part of the Wikipedia community as well. This workshop has also opened up avenues for more outreach events in other institutions.

A special thanks and acknowledgement to Vidyalankar Institute (VIT), Wadala for hosting us and to Bishakha Dutta, Moksh Juneja, Aditi Vashisht, Pranav, Krutika, Rohini, Netra, Pradeep, Samir, Netha, Nikita, and everyone else who put this event together.

Here is the blog post written by community members who attended the workshop: http://bit.ly/S78z93

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-womens-workshop-in-mumbai

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Yuvi Panda — 2012-12-03T06:37:11Z

BITS Hyderabad had a tech fest from October 25 to 27, 2012, and wanted to conduct a technical wiki hackathon. We decided to do it on October 26 — all night.

We had a Google form that people filled up with a few simple questions — and picked out 12 from the 70 that signed up. This was important since I was the only one conducting it — and I wanted to keep it to a manageable number. It was an all night event that started at 7 p.m. in the evening and was supposed to go on till 6 a.m. next morning.

Hackathon

The hackathon started as scheduled around 7.00 p.m. As people trickled in I talked to them individually and mentally sorted them into two groups — 'people who are already programmatically competent enough to contribute code' and people who were not. A lot of people who were not selected but applied also showed up — since we had not sent rejection emails. I got them started on learning either Javascript or Python — and helped push them along. However, a good amount of time was spent with people who already had prior coding experience.

Most people worked on Gadgets, and a few on Python — exploring the API. We started off with basics of how to customize your Wikipedia experience with JS and CSS, building a very basic user script that changed colours / added new links. Some of the participants spent the entire night building this and others finished this in a few minutes and were on to the next project. Everyone worked at their own pace — and since there were smaller number of people I was able to (mostly) provide individual attention.

As people started working on stuff past hello world, I introduced them to IRC (#wikipedia-en and #mediawiki) and had them say 'hi' to editors. I also introduced them to a bunch of local hacker channels on IRC — and quite a few of them stayed on.

A fair amount of people left at around midnight — but a 'core' group seemed to have formed that stayed on. We hacked on to the wee hours of the morning, and even took small naps. We wound up at around 6 a.m., and staggered back to the hostels (and then proceeded to have long conversations about Linux, history of programming, and graphical raytracing).

Outcomes

We had some students who contributed substantially including Thomas Matthew, Vishwajit Kolathur, Aravind Peddapudi and Varun Chappidi. Most of them have been introduced to the local hacker community via IRC, and I see reports of continuing participation — after accounting for their ongoing exams. They all are technically very competent and have expressed interest in doing Google Summer of Code this year. Among the projects did at the hackathon are:

'Reading mode' gadget
'Reading mode' Chrome Extension that is wikipedia specific
Major work on a '3 hours later' type extension (a tool to produce graphs like (http://xkcd.com/214)

The fact that these people went from having no experience with Wiki related programming to being able to build code for it in a few hours time makes me very happy.

Learnings

Make sure people know that 'Hack'athon has nothing to do with cracking wifi passwords or breaking into Facebook accounts. We had a 'lot' of people apply thinking that was this despite a clear description. I was told that some of the people evangelizing the event also thought the same — so clearer messaging around this was needed.
Send rejection emails. We missed this, and sent only acceptance emails. A lot of people who weren't accepted turned up and we had to figure a way to engage them.
More organized followups. Currently all I can do is introduce them to the local hacker community and hope they 'stick'. GSoC is a good spot, but is too infrequent — and too high stakes.
Find more things for them to do. We had to actually stretch a bit to find them things to do — they were all raring to go, but we found it hard to find 'easy' bugs for them to fix that were actually useful to editors. Clearly editors have a lot of things in their mind that would make their lives better — but they are not listed anywhere public. Having a publicly available list of such things would be helpful. (There is a Gadget requests page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests), but it hasn't been updated in ages).

Finally, I would like to thank the Centre for Internet & Society for supporting my travel for the event, Thomas from BITS for organizing most of the logistics and Ravi Chandra from the Tor community for helping provide technical mentorship.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-hackathon-hyderabad

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

Yuvraj Pandian — 2012-12-04T07:31:21Z

Wikipedian Yuvaraj Pandian visited the CIS office in Delhi and helped the Access to Knowledge team conduct a super-ad-hoc mini-hackathon with two other volunteers, Sheel from Delhi and Harsh from Ahmedabad. The aim was to get them a kickstart in developing userscripts/gadgets, and get them to a point where the prior existing documentation makes sense to them.

The ad-hoc plan had three parts:

The execution environment (Concept of userscripts vs gadgets, ResourceLoader)
The API concepts (Special:ApiSandbox, concept of 'actions' in the API)
Accessing the API from JS (mediawiki.api module, concept of AJAX)

Here is the account of what they did, written by Yuvi:

"We covered all parts of them slowly, with both Harsh and Sheel working at things until they fully understood what they were doing and why whatever they were doing was working.

I introduced them to the environment first by having them execute code in Chrome's JS Console, and then in their own common.js. Once they understood the context in which the code was getting executed, the 'ResourceLoader default modules'[1]documentation started making sense to them, and they could pick up other modules from there.

We then explored the API via the API Sandbox[2], which is a relatively new (and not very well known) way of letting people play around with the API. It is a massive improvement over the older, non-interactive docs[3], and both Harsh and Sheel were very excited about being able to discover all the things they could do with the API. A fair amount of time was spent messing around with it on different wikipedias (en, hi and gu) and reading bits of the API Documentation[4] to understand the concepts behind the actions - and for filling in the gaps.

Finally we had them use the API from a userscript to make calls. I went through the entire process line by line, explaining how AJAX works and how asynchronous programming works. We traced the flow of code together to understand how the seamingly nonlinear asynchronous programming model works. Then we dug into a bit of how to use the mw.loader module to make dependencies work, and why the same code that was working in the chrome js console was not working in their common.js.

It ended with them trying to port HotCat to their native language wikipedias. Harsh started to explore more about getting started with MediaWiki dev itself (rather than just gadgets), but the clone took a looooong time and we had run out of time by then. I directed him to a WMF tech open chat happening today, and hopefully that could help!

[1].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Default_modules
[2].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox
[3].https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php
[4].https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/mini-hackathon-delhi

First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out

subha — 2012-12-14T12:17:04Z

Odia Wikipedians gathered at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal on November 8, 2012 to start the first Odia Wikipedia Education Program. This program aims to bring students edit articles on Odia Wikipedia through a series of assessments by professors. The local community members from Nalconagar would be supporting the four month program.

Since March 2011, Odia Wikipedia has started growing in terms of readers, editors and content. Last few months have seen many new faces added to the community who are willing to take part in both offline and online outreach. Though many of the community members are staying out of state, there are community clusters in three different places: Cuttack, Nalconagar and Bhubaneswar. We approached many institutions from these three places and some of them showed interest for an Odia Wikipedia workshop to assess and evaluate students for the education program. We conducted workshops in some of those institutions in the initial level. After successive workshops and meeting with the faculty members, some of the potential institutions were chosen for the education program. One of those colleges was the IIMC in Dhenkanal. We had a meeting with the professor of this organization along with teaching associates and a visiting professor and a full day workshop on editing wikipedia. Odia wikipedians, Mrutyunjaya Kar, Manoranjan Mallick, Srikant Kedia and Kamalakanta Nayak supported for organizing the event.

IIMC, Dhenkanal is one of the six IIMCs of India and a pioneer in the field of Mass Communication. We met Professor Mrinal Chaterjee along with teaching associates, Sucharita and Bhagaban Sahu, retired professor of Revenshaw University and visiting professor of IIMC. The college is home to 83 students across India. Students enroll for a one year diploma program for Journalism and Mass communication in Odia and English.

The full day session was made to two separate sessions: an introductory session and one hands-on training on editing. Prof. Chaterjee introduced the agenda of the session and why it is needed for the students from a student's point of view. I continued the discussion and presented the key points of wikipedia editing and details of the education program, why and how we are going to start it focussing on the key roles of students and the institution and how it will help them. We announced about the hands on training session post lunch for the interested students. Twenty one students gathered for the second session. Interestingly all of the Odia department students were present and there was one student from English department. Students were briefed about editing. During the workshop we found that majority of them knew a typing layout called "Modular layout" which is used by non-unicode ISCII/ASCII typing softwares like Leap office, I-Lipi, Shreelipi, etc. As this layout is yet to be enabled for Odia we continued explaining about typing using the default typing scheme.

"The Reporter", a bilingual daily published by students on college notice board	Odia education program proposal IIMC on Slideshare

"The Reporter", a bilingual daily published by students on college notice board

Odia education program proposal IIMC on Slideshare

After the end of the workshop we had another meeting with the professor and other faculty members to assess and discuss about the further steps. IIMC has a very close student-teacher relation which we observed from the beginning of the workshop. Students were really keen and patient to learn and all of the students who attended the hands-on training session stayed back till the end of the session. Apart from their regular assignments and projects, students also publish a daily bilingual newspaper, "The Reporter".

"Writing is a part of their their study and we emphasize much on getting the most of their short program. If Wikipedia could give them a global platform to and larger audience for their work to be read, reviewed and enhanced then why not adding it to their task list?", expresses Prof. Chatterjee. The only hurdle which students are going to face in the initial phase is typing in Odia. So, modular layout needs to be added in "Narayam", the typing tool integrated in Odia Wikipedia. To begin with this program an Odia Wikipedia club was formed at Nalconagar which would primarily support this program at the ground level.

Video

Read a detailed four month work plan for this program on Odia Wikipedia: Read in English | Read in Odia

Presentation for Odia Education Program: On Commons | Source file

Commons picture gallery: See here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar

subha — 2012-12-07T22:40:32Z

The Centre for Internet and Society along with Odia Wikipedians in Bhubaneswar organized an Odia Wikipedia workshop on November 18, 2012. It was held in KMBB College of Engineering. Odia Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia in Odia language which everyone can edit.

Odia Wikipedians gathered in the temple city of Bhubaneswar on November 18, 2012 to organize the third Odia Wikipedia workshop in KMBB College of Engineering. KMBB College of Engineering is a BPUT affiliated engineering college supported by Ama Odisha, an organization working for media, communication and development of Odia language. Dr. Dhanada Mishra, Director-Academics, KMBB and a veteran educationalist and open source source enthusiast supported this event. Forty-five students from KMBB attended this workshop. The agenda for the two-and-a-half hour session was to educate students about open source movement, journey of Wikipedia and how to contribute to Odia Wikipedia and how it would help them. Nine active Odia Wikipedians joined to support this event.

Dr. Mishra began the session by introducing Odia Wikipedians to the students. He spoke about Open source movement, how the community supports various open source projects, how Wikipedia was started and how it is essential for students to take part in such activities. Subhashish Panigrahi briefly spoke about the history of Odia wikipedia, how it grew up in the recent years to its present state. Odia Wikipedian Manoranjan Behera discussed about how everyone can contribute to the Wikipedia.

To explain the easiness of typing in Odia, some of the students were invited to write text on a board and test the typing tool on Odia Wikipedia. A new article about the college was created and one of the students wrote few sentences. Wikipedians explained the importance of creating user accounts and demonstrated how to search an article, how to create an article and the basics of editing an article. A Question and Answer session was held for students to put their queries. At the end of the session, contact details were shared with the students and the Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki) of Odia Wikipedia was shown so that students could continue editing and remain in touch with fellow wikipedians.

Odia daily “The Sambad” covered this event.

Presentation: Copy of Introduction to Wikipedia! on Prezi
Video:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/odia-wikipedia-workshop-organized-in-kmbb-college-bhubaneswar

Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants

nitika — 2013-10-30T09:17:31Z

A Wikipedia introductory session was organised at Bharati Vidyapeeth Engineering College in Delhi early this year and a follow up session was organised by CIS on November 19, 2012. About 12 to 15 participants attended the follow up session. Although most of the participants had attended the introductory session there were a few who were coming over for the first time.

Many participants had already tried some wiki editing (such as correcting grammar, spellings, punctuations, etc.) after the introductory session but had several queries with respect to advance editing such as wiki markup, adding references, adding wiki interlinks and so on.

The main aim to conduct a follow up session was to clear these editing doubts, provide editing support and more importantly make these new editors feel a part of the wider Wikipedia community. This session gave us a brilliant opportunity to inform and encourage the participants to be part of Wikipedia mailing lists, talk page discussions, Facebook pages, current Wikipedia projects and Wiki meet ups. Participants were taught difference between article and user talk pages, leaving messages on various talk pages, how to add wiki markups, add references, add inter wiki links, send private mails to other users, page view stats, etc. The good part of organizing a session with second time participants was that they were already familiar with the workings of Wikipedia from the introductory session. They had more intelligent queries especially around editing. In addition, another big advantage was the surety that only those participants will return who are genuinely interested in wiki editing and are not just attracted towards Wikipedia brand or swags.

Albeit being a short two-hour session, the workshop provided a good platform for getting in touch with participants, helping them to gain confidence and edit Wikipedia articles, informing them of different ways in which they could be more involved.

Hopefully, next year we could revisit each of the institutions where we'd organised an introductory Wikipedia session in 2012. Though the number of participants for a follow up session might be small but it definitely guarantees more interested and more involved participants.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/follow-up-to-wikipedia-introductory-session-at-bharati-vidyapeeth

A Wikipedia Workshop at SRM University, Chennai

noopur — 2012-12-27T05:57:34Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Delhi in association with Metawings Institute organized a one-day workshop on contributing to Wikipedia at SRM University on December 17, 2012. About 40 students from different engineering colleges in Chennai participated in the workshop. Metawings coordinated for the logistics and for spreading the word among the students.

The three-hour workshop was mostly interactive. Since most students had a fair idea of what Wikipedia is and who writes articles on Wikipedia, they had many queries on who the 'editors' were, who selects them, how one can become an editor, how to determine reliability and authenticity of Wikipedia articles and so on. This was a pattern that I observed in many workshops that we conduct where people who have a level of ease and familiarity with using Wikipedia to get information, have often wondered if the information they are using is reliable or not. This also gives us a chance to explain how their contributions can make the encyclopedia more inclusive, informative and reliable.

One student was called upon to create a user account and instead of answering his query on patrolling edits, I encouraged him to vandalize a popular article just to see how quickly it is reverted and the correct version is restored. Some students were also interested in knowing about Indian language Wikipedias. So, I invited a student to create his account in Tamil Wikipedia and create his user page subsequently.

After the workshop the students wanted to stay in touch and receive more information on Wikipedia projects they could contribute to and filled up contact forms.

Special thanks to Metawings for helping us out with the logistics and to the student coordinators at SRM University for their cooperation!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-workshop-at-srm-chennai

Centre for Internet and Society

Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala

Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad!

Next steps:

Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad

Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education Program at Guwahati University

Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates

September 8

October 1

October 12

October 13

October 14

Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot

Interactions with TGES students

Interactions with Christ College students

Meeting Wikipedians

Videos

First Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!

Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success!

Meeting with Wikipedia Club Pune members

Wikipedia Women's Workshop in Mumbai

Agenda of the workshop

Feedback

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Hackathon

Outcomes

Learnings

A Wikipedia Mini-hackathon in Delhi

First Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out

Video

An Odia Wikipedia Workshop at KMBB College, Bhubaneswar

Presentation:

Video:

Follow up to Wikipedia Introductory Session at Bharati Vidyapeeth — More Interested and More Involved Participants

A Wikipedia Workshop at SRM University, Chennai