Hello!
The first Wiki Academy in PSR Rengaswamy College of engineering for Women,
Sivakasi was conducted on Jan 20th. An impressive total of 68 students,
primarily consisting of 2nd and 3rd year engg students attended this
workshop. The Principal of the college, Dr K Ramaswamy gave a short talk
and welcomed the participants and the speaker.
The session started off with a small introduction on what Wikipedia is and
the core values and philosophies behind Wikipedia, how it is edited by
millions of people across the world and how all the content on the site is
completely free. The 5 pillars of Wikipedia i.e the fundamental principles
by which Wiki operates on were also explained. The students were initially a
little hesitant to interact but soon were asking pertinent and valid
questions about the topic.
Once the basics were covered, a short presentation on approaching Wikipedia
as a reader was held. Editing of wikipedia was explained next followed by a
hands-on session where the students were taught the basics of editing
Wikipedia. The students were very responsive to this session. Small prizes
like Wiki stickers were given out for mini-contests that were held during
this session. A vast majority of the students seemed to quickly understand
the intuitive UI especially considering that they were all familiar with
formatting in MS Word. The students made minor edits to articles as the
session drew to a close.
A google group has been setup for future correspondance. The students along
with the help of the faculty coordinators who were present said they will
work on improving the Sivakasi wiki page.
The feedback forms (i will collate the data from here and post it shortly)
were collected and few photos from the event were taken. I'll post the pics
on the wiki page for the academy soon as i don't have the camera with me
currently. Brochures were handed out to all the participants.
Judging by the feedback received and the response from the students, i'd
say the event was a success. It is important to carry forward this
initiative and bring out an interest in participating in contributing to
Wikipedia and i will make sure that this happens. I'd like to thank Ms
Nitika Tandon, Mr Naveen PF and Mr Arjuna Rao Chavala for their help. This
was my first Wiki Academy and i really profited from their help. Conducting
the academy solo was quite a challenging but rewarding experience.
Also as a footnote i'd like to point that the session was delayed because
the Wiki editor kept crashing IE 6. Sadly, the computers in the lab had no
other browsers apart from IE 6. This wasn't a roadblock i expected and i
think should be added to the list of preparations in this
page<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Nitika.t/Outreach>ch>.
We managed to get an admin password for the computers and hastily installed
Firefox so that the session could complete without any further
hitches...and it did!
Looking forward to conducting more such academies in the future.
Thank you!
-Sohan Maheshwar