The 32nd Bangalore Wikimedia Meetup was organized on 2011April10 at 3 PM in CIS, Bangalore. This meetup was headed by Subhashish Panigrahi [[User:Psubhashish]] and attended by 7 Wikipedians. The speakers of this meetup were Arjun Rao C, Achal Prabhala and Anirudh Bhati.
1st Talk: Arjun Rao C/ Experience in Berlin Wikimedia Conference, 2010
Arjun Rao talked about his participation in the Wikimedia conference held in Berlin. He discussed about the new plans and ventures for Wikimedia projects which will be the current focus for the chapters of several countries. He also briefed the audience about the plans for the proposed projects under Wikimedia India such as: Knowledge kiosks in public libraries, Academies, Projects for improvements in Indic language tools, Indic Wiki CD/DVD, improve participation of women in Wiki communities, Wikimania for Indian Wikipedians, etc. Arjun showed pictures of speakers from several countries who he befriended and shared ideal structures of the the Wiki projects in those all countries.
2nd Talk: Achal Prabhala/ “Open Citation” & its perpectives
Achal introduced the audience about his ongoing project on “Oral Citation”, its purpose, authenticity, possible issues and their solutions. He explained the problems Malayalam Wikipedians faced when they have created well constructed articles on several games played in villages, but there was no proper citations as none ever tried to make literature based documentations for them. Even he also stated the similar experiences he has with the “Sapheri” speaking South African tribe where many traditional games were never put under the modern documented rules and regulations but they are great resources for the anthropologists. Many such important heritage related articles could be cited using oral citation which is easier to create, transform, share and cite. He also explained how credibility and authenticity were created by interviewing the people about the dance form/game/any such intended aspect. Most of the verbal conversation could be translated and added to the audio file itself and later can be translated to any other language. The source and copyright info can also be explained in the audio file itself which would make this a very simplistic approach, but potentially more accessible. Audio files would be more self explanatory, easy to share in the form of podcasts and an elaborated audience could be targeted.
3rd Talk: Anirudh Bhati/ “Outreach Campaign in North-East”
Wikimedia India member Anirudh Bhati has organized has visited to NREST (North-Eastern Regional Institute), Arunanchal Pradesh in the festive season of “Mopin”, a regional festival and “Srishti 2011”, NREST's institutional function. Anirudh along with Wikipedian Nikhil Sheth introduced Wikipedia and other WMF projects to almost 110 students and lecturers in CREST. They demonstrated them “Editing in Wikipedia” and students themselves created articles based on the demonstration over there. Surya Vaigunth, a final year student and a computer enthusiast personally took initiative to teach to masses and bring out a set of persistent contributors. Though most of them were interested to see the opportunities of Indic Wikipedias, majority of the critical mass was more interested for English article speculated more about Arunanchal Pradesh and even uploading more picture than content development. He also has demonstrated how to use Indic Wikipedias and editing them. Srikanth added a note to uploading pictures and geotagging them using external maps which would be useful for online searches. As a part of the outreach program Anirudh also explained about the Offline package developed by taking selected Wikipedia articles for school students as a part of SOS Children's Village where Ashwin helped for creating list of important articles. 2 major software programs OpenZIM and Kiwix are used for compilation and running of the offline package respectively where the total package (2.75 GB) could be burnt in a DVD. The team also had a video chat with Portugese Wikipedian Beria Lima who had a talk about “Mirandese language and Gender Gap”, Mirandese, being one of the dying languages needs collaborative efforts and Wikipedia could be one solution to protect it. She also discussed abput the low contribution of women because of several reasons like Lack of Confidence, Lack of detailed knowledge, Male oriented social set up , etc. Even she also connected thr same problem in the Indian context.
Nikhil introduced Wikipedia to Kendriya Vidyalaya students. Saibal Chatterjee, visiting prof and Chief- Coordinator of Srishti 2011 also supported the event.
It was fun-filled and successful event with less audience but fruitful with new ideas shared.
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